Stella Snead; Artist And Photographer
Bill Schenley
Countries Worldwide
Her work:
http://www.archipelago.org/vol3-1/images/begonia.jpg
http://www.archipelago.org/vol3-1/images/SneadEcstaticCows.jpg
http://www.archipelago.org/vol3-1/images/SneadSulkyLion.jpg
http://www.archipelago.org/vol3-1/images/SneadAdvancingMonuments.jpg
http://www.archipelago.org/vol3-4/images/2-round%20medallion2.jpg
(Photograph)
Stella Snead, artist and photographer, born April 2 1910; died March
18 2006
FROM: The Guardian ~
By Christopher Hawtree
Photo: http://www.archipelago.org/vol3-1/images/stellaportrait.JPG
The English-born surrealist Stella Snead, who has died aged 95, lived
long enough to have her work rediscovered in the past decade. Chance
had led her to take up painting in the mid-1930s after prolonged
depression: this illness led her to abandon it 15 years later. In the
intervening years, she used a variety of landscapes as the background
for a parade of wittily chilling characters. Attuned to cultures
worldwide, she was also inspired by the galaxies, against which she
depicted strange figures - human, animal and otherwise. Happily, she
returned to these at the end of the 1980s, after 40 years as a
photographer with a particular interest in eastern ruins.
She was born in London, the only child of Ethel (of wealthy Spanish
and French parents) and Clarence Snead, who abandoned his legal
training thanks to his wife's money. One of Clarence's sisters was
mentally ill, another later committed suicide, and Clarence was
consumed by black moods so severe that he ragingly and irrationally
insisted his daughter be called Magdalene, not Stella, as his wife
preferred. His silences were terrifying: knives and baby were kept
from him for fear of murder.
When, in summer 1915, he entered a nursing home for a respite, Ethel
and daughter left the house, keeping their destination secret.
Clarence discharged himself the next day and searched for them in
every south coast resort. They had avoided favourite holiday spots and
fled to Leicester. Stella - as she was now safely called - went to
village schools, and then spent three years at the progressive
theosophical school, St Christopher's, Letchworth. After a joyful year
studying French in Paris, she returned to her mother's new home in
Sutton in 1928 and took a secretarial course. Neither saw Clarence
again.
Stella could not work because of a genetic depressive tendency, and
was supported by her mother until 1936 when, on holiday in Tenerife,
she was transfixed by a friend's painting. Inspired, she returned to
Sutton and, secluded in her bedroom, worked at her easel. This led to
three years at the Academy of Fine Art in London, run by Amédée
Ozenfant, a friend of Léger and Le Corbusier; another student was
Leonora Carrington. Despair at the collapse of European civilisation
meant a move in 1939 to New York. There, she met Carrington again and
moved in the emigré surrealist circles to which she had been drawn as
her own work evolved. Always independent minded, she hitched around
the US on mail trucks, met Native Americans and traders in remote
places; in California, astronomers allowed her to look through
telescopes. "I had never felt space so completely," she recalled. She
travelled between the west coast, Mexico and New York, then returned
at the war's end to London, although she was gone from there before
her own exhibition opened - on her way to Taos, New Mexico.
She had three prolific years inspired by the landscape and her small
adobe house. In 1949, after a relationship broke up, she travelled
through the Caribbean, then endured two years' depression in London.
Eased away from psychiatry, but still unable to paint, she toured
India by train and so loved the country that, after a return to New
York and intensive reading, she went back to India and stayed there
from 1956 to 1971. Photography preoccupied her since she was still
unable to paint. Her surreal eye brought a new dimension to ancient
sculptures and monuments: some pictures are gathered in such books as
Ruins in Jungles (1962), Animals in Four Worlds (1989) and the hefty
Shiva's Pigeons (1972) whose text by the Godden sisters, Jon and
Rumer, notes that this "conglomeration of glimpses" showed someone
who, even when photographing sand ripples, had "a concept of the
whole" country: "little human points of view wax or dwindle as the
cycles turn". She had been introduced to the sisters by a London
publisher, and their text grew from the photographs. Back in New York
in 1971, in an apartment near the Lincoln Centre, she adapted the
photographs as collages.
In 1987, she found that she could resume painting. Her peripatetic
life meant that many pictures had vanished, but she had photographed
some as a record, and from these she made new versions which she
called "variations" of her 1940s oils. Across the decades, her old and
new work is of a piece.
Her nocturnal landscapes loom larger than the confines of a small
canvas. For a while, she was preoccupied by animals; perhaps best
known is Ecstatic Cow (1943), a bovine leap amid a motley menagerie.
The New Mexico plains pervade work whose figures sometimes become
abstract, such as the cowled shapes of Advancing Monuments (1946).
Such sinister humour resurfaced in her late work. In Snake Tongue Pier
(1989), a great red tongue could be a fish eaten by the creature-like
shoreline. Ladies from Afar (1993) recreated a 1949 work in which the
well-dressed are elegantly indecent, as if a Vogue cover had merged
with Astounding Tales.
She never dared tell her long-lived, much-loved, vegetarian mother, "I
now eat everything."