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Chris Snow was born in New York City. His first local exhibition
was at The Clothesline Art Show at Guild Hall in East Hampton in 1970. He has always straddled two worlds bouncing back & forth between
the arts - both visual and musical. His intervening music career led him to build a recording studio on
West 57th Street where he worked with Keith Richards, Doctor John, Stevie Winwood and a slew of other
well known musicians. It also included a collaborative venture with the one and only Dion for a
songwriting project.
Chris was exposed to a wealth of art and some of the world's most renown artists throughout his life. Enmeshed in the art world and surrounded by great painters, drawing and painting was always a big part of his life. Chris got back into the visual arts in 1989 as a self taught artist studying anatomy and copying masterworks in graphite. Inspired by the work of surrealist Joseph Cornell he started making boxed constructions, "microcosms of imagination" as he refers to them and when several private collectors started buying them he was encouraged to go on. He left New York for Virginia and started working in pastel which he immediately responded to - loving the ease of finding colors and working on paper instead of canvas. He taught himself how to make the pastels by hand, a complicated process of combining pigment, precipitate of chalk and different solutions of water and gum tragacanth in varying ratios depending on the particular color you are trying to achieve....he found their fresh color so alluring that he was compelled to do an entire series of still lifes with the handmade pastels themselves as both the subjects and the tools with which the paintings were made. Having mastered his new medium he started selling out of the local galleries in Virginia - mainly The Blue Peach gallery in The Plains, Virginia. Buyers included Robert Duvall and the Governor of Virginia's family. He still works out of his studio on an old estate in northern Virginia, doing commissions, showing in galleries here as well as abroad. A few years ago Chris started working with collage which is similar to the work he does with the boxes using such diverse materials as gold leaf, marble papers, lottery tickets, netted produce bags - anything that strikes his fancy - it's the alchemy of taking ordinary objects and combining them to make something to marvel at and make people scratch their heads a little that sparks his genius. Recently Chris participated in the group show ArtPosition 08 in Switzerland and he just did a two man show in Frankfurt at Gallerie Greulich December 09 to January 2010. He now has an upcoming show at ArtPosition in Switzerland this August and by the end of this month his newest work will also be hanging in a bookstore gallery in Tours, France for June and July 2010. Locally he did a group show to benefit the Hayground School in Bridgehampton where the one pastel landscape up for auction ended up being the object of contention in a bidding war between two infamous guests. Chris has also done some commissioned work - almost solely for private persons with the exception of a series of pastels that are now hanging in a new wing of the Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York. Chris has enjoyed a consistent measure of success throughout his illustrious career and he continues to show both stateside and abroad. Please contact him if you are interested in commissioning or investing in a piece of his work or would like more information on his upcoming shows. |
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