Smart Art: Part Two

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced the 2007 recipients of its "genius grants" this week. Included among the scientists, doctors, and writers are two artists: Whitfield Lovell and Joan Snyder.

Earlier, I checked in with Lovell. Today, Snyder.

Joan Snyder is an abstract painter whose early work, characterized by strokes of paint set against grids penciled on to the canvas, has evolved to include elements of collage, including text, silk, burlap, juniper seeds, rusty nails, and Chinese herbs. These give her paintings texture, and Snyder says they evoke feeling much in the same way that the repeated and layered notes in the composer Philip Glass' music do.

Snyder's work basically requires oils, acrylics, and the sundry items she incorporates into her paintings — it's not like she's a biologist who needs an expensive piece of equipment to continue research, she said.

But she could imagine building a new studio — one without mice and bats and with plumbing — traveling, and sharing her MacArthur windfall with other people or causes.

"It's probably one of the more exciting things that's happened in my life," she said. "I had a baby, and then there were 28 years in between, and then I got the MacArthur."

Joan Snyder, Lines and Strokes, Photo Credit: The Artist

Joan Snyder, Perpetuo, Photo Credit: The Artist

Joan Snyder, Green Flowers with Kaddish, Photo Credit: The Artist