POINT OF BEGINNING

by Emma Riva
Cover image Maasif Dreams by Linda Price-Sneddon

Linda Price-Sneddon loves paint. There are certain artists whose love for their materials comes through in their work, in the care they take in each gestural brushstroke and the dots of globular acrylic. Price-Sneddon describes herself as an “intuitive painter,” and that sense of intuition comes through in the works on display in Point of Beginning at Zynka Gallery. In this catalogue, Price-Sneddon achieves what many artists hope to—a feeling of effortlessness in the smooth, sweeping composition of her paintings, despite the paintings themselves being the result of months of effort.

Point of Beginning draws from geologic time and natural scenes, while not falling into the triteness that landscapes or nature-based paintings sometimes suffer from. Perhaps this originates from the scale Price-Sneddon is working from in her inspiration from geologic time, something so vast and unfathomable that it has to take an abstracted form.  The paintings lack any sort of figuration, though sometimes rocks or trees or oceans appear, they’re abstractions of their shapes, as if you were seeing them in a dream. The color palette is saturated magentas, teals, and chartreuses that swirl and coalesce with the changing textures.

“I listen to this station out of San Francisco called Groove Salad that has electronic beats and no words while I create a palette, and I can spend an hour on the palette alone,” she explained. “Working on the palette on the colors and relationships gets me into a zone.”  From there, she develops the composition, “and the mission becomes bringing it to resolution through these dynamic conversations and color relationships.”

Though her paintings have a warmth to them, Price-Sneddon grew up in a transport refrigeration trucking business family in McKeesport. Her childhood around the rich colorscape of the minerals in the mines of the Monongahela Valley—which she describes as a “crazy psychedelic orange– informed her interest in painting. She depicts nature, but not the Thomas Kinkade or Hudson School nature, rather a more symbiotic meditation on how humanity and nature are inextricable from each other. Some strikingly beautiful things in the world around us are the result of human interactions with natural materials—the iridescent glimmer of gas slick on concrete, the flashes of sable on a limestone quarry sanded down for a highway to cut through it.

“I’m fascinated by how energy is a part of nature, and I think about battle forces of energy, things broken down and things being built down,” Price-Sneddon reflected during our walkthrough of Point of Beginning. “I like pulling from the extremes, crazy sunsets in Pittsburgh, pink lake in Australia, the uncanny green of water in quarries.” She breaks down forms like the moon and the ocean into their shapes and energies. Deep Channel (2022) manages to evoke water without using the traditional shade of blue nearly at all, instead a salmon-like pink and a soft green.

Atmospheric Conditions (2022), a smaller piece in the catalogue, introduces hard lines in small squares of dark green. The composition brings to mind Gustav Klimt’s Orchard, on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art, a stylistic departure from the glitzy figuration. The larger Maaaaa (2023), the final painting Price-Sneddon put into the show’s lineup, read as Hilma af Klint to me with the golden orb at its center and the balance of precision and fluidity in its lines—when I asked her about it, she said that she had been looking at af Klint’s working and her influence appeared in Point of Beginning at the last minute. Maaaaa has sharper linework than the rest of the show, and could represent a new direction for Price-Sneddon in future work. While the sizes of the show’s catalogue vary, some as large 36×48 and some as small as 12×12, there’s almost no white space in any of them.

A quirk of Zynka Gallery is the smaller, more intimate wall space on the accessibility ramp, which Price-Sneddon dedicated to the smaller sized works, those mostly 12×12 and more affordably priced to encourage collection. Prior to her studio practice in Pittsburgh, Price-Sneddon studied at the Museum School in Boston and witnessed the ebbs and flows of the gallery scene in New England.

“What is so important today is to create a culture where people will support galleries, because galleries give artists a venue for artists to really show their vision,” she said. “Part of me working with Jeff [Jarzynka] is that I want a range of sizes for people to have a small budget – sometimes people say ‘if you still have this piece after the show, let’s work out a deal.’ I always say let’s work out a deal that includes the gallerist. They took a risk on me and took 6 weeks out of their schedule for the show.” Price-Sneddon’s affinity for synergy isn’t just in her paintings, it was also apparent to me that she really understood the relationship between artists, writers, and gallerists in order to create the quote-unquote scene of a city’s arts community.

While Price-Sneddon does love paint, it might be more accurate to say that she’s interested in material, whether that’s words, music, or the natural materials that make up the surrounding world. Her titles evoke her interest in language, from Thrum (2022) to Vortices (2023) and Drench (2023).A unique facet of Point of Beginning its accompaniment by ekphrastic poetry by jazz musician and writer Erin Burkett, who found inspiration in Price-Sneddon’s paintings. Burkett poetry appears on the walls around its accompanying pieces.

While Price-Sneddon has a background in video and sound installation, the works in Point of Beginning are the mark of a rich, layered painting practice that gave me an almost physical sensation of the brushstrokes when I looked at them. The word “gestural” is an oft-thrown around piece of art jargon, but at its core, to me it means when I feel the movement of the brushstrokes in a deep, visceral place inside of me when I look at them. These paintings can be challenging because of how much looking they require, but once they fully subsume you, they offer a real sense of internal peace and contemplation. Price-Sneddon’s work, like geologic time, washes over you slowly, glacially. Allow it to.

Point of Beginning is open through April 14 at Zynka Gallery (904 Main Street). Price-Sneddon will be giving an artist talk on 3/21 6PM-7:30PM.