Studio

Looking at Pat Snow’s art is a little like being hit unexpectedly. It’s not so much the medium, it’s the message. You see, Pat Snow is a storyteller, and somehow he bridges the supposed gaps between words and language to make large scale hybrids of the two.
Art has always been a part of Snow’s life. “My aunt had a ceramics shop where you could make pieces with slip cast molds,” he recounts, “and we would visit her and paint on plates.”
Later, he visited regularly with the folk artist Howard Finster. “I actually met a lot of Alabama folk and outsider artists in my early years going to the Kentuck Arts Festival,” he explains, “and I was always interested in their approaches to representation.”
Snow trained with the artist Robert Colescott, who was known for his sense of humor and his capacity for satire. “We talked about humor a lot,” Snow says with a laugh, “how to use it, and why to use it. I realized that it was more acceptable to explore or express certain issues in this context, and how you can use humor to exaggerate or manipulate.”
His works are predominantly drawings. “I use mainly ink, watercolors and gouache,” Snow notes, “which are very traditional media. This seems to create a context that people understand.”
After earning his MFA, he began teaching university students. But after a series of unexpected events, he found himself rethinking his entire arts practice. “In 2001 I basically lost everything, and as part of starting over I realized I wanted to start over artistically. I wanted to work more simply.” He began making small drawings, working to create a new foundation. “I realized that the more specific I made my work, the more universal it seemed to become.”
This led to a massive undertaking. Snow created a work with a thousand small drawings, entitled “Six Pack Days and Bourbon Nights.” It was here that his understanding of the focus for his new works became clear. “I understood that everyone basically shares the same experiences, love, life and death, and so I started to talk about my experiences.” At the same time, he began to work on a much larger scale. “I realized that I could create images on a human scale that would really engage viewers, get them in and grab them,” Snow muses.
Obviously, this focus paid off. In June, Snow was awarded a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. In September, an exhibition of six large scale drawings opens at Birmingham’s Space One Eleven. For Snow, the exhibition marks what he terms “a culmination of my artistic development so far.” He explains, “It’s not a survey show. Instead, it will create an opportunity for people to look at the different types of narrative I’ve been producing.”
The challenge for viewers will be to separate truth from fiction, if such a separation is possible at all. “Since my works have both text and image, I leave it up to the viewer to figure out what’s true. Some stories are made up, some are true, and some mix fact and fiction.”
Snow understands his works don’t seem to follow the traditional rules of art. “There’s no room for first person narrative in the gallery context,” he laughs, “but we’re really used to it in folk art and graphic design.”
For now, Pat Snow is part fine artist, part gag artist, and part storyteller. “In my works, and in the stories they tell, you have to find the twist, and the turn, and the punch,” he smiles, “but remember to never trust the narrator.”