Octopus Moon | Arryn Snowball by Jan Manton Gallery

9 - 27 July 2024

OctopusMoon Arryn Snowball

Standing in a foreign desert under a vast night sky, the stars seem foreign too. When the moon rises, it is upside down. Why does consciousness insist on the consistency of being? Astronomers tell us the earth and the moon and the sun are all spinning through space at incredible speeds. Yet the evening is still and crisp. I look outwards from this little fixed point somewhere just behind my eyes, as if the self is the only stationary point in the universe. Of course it is not the moon that is upside down, it is me. I sometimes wonder whether painting is a window or a mirror: is it a practice of witnessing the world, or merely expressing my own incomprehension?

My practice focuses on movement and light, pattern and rhythm, change and transformation. As an abstract painter, I love the basics: triangles and circles, the tension of a curve. I try to keep things simple, but complexity naturally builds up. This exhibition contains paintings of words and spiderwebs, moon and stars, mountains and highways, galaxies and octopus, a wild fox and a Takhi foal.

I’ve been on the road a lot over the last few years, helping my partner Monica with her fieldwork, interviewing scientists working to save endangered species and visiting reintroduction projects in remote places in Romania, Mongolia, New Zealand and Canada. I feel very privileged to participate in these journeys, I’m finding a larger appreciation for the scale of the world.

The little watercolours were mostly made during these travels. Small attempts to capture the atmosphere of a landscape, the colour of an animal, or a transition of light. Watercolour is easy to travel with and I like to work with colour in the morning, almost like a meditation.

The paintings on canvas were made in my studio in Berlin. I tried to keep the process as simple as possible to allow the themes to emerge from one painting to the next, as if on their own accord. I reduced my palette to a matte handmade black on a cream-white gesso ground. When I’m painting in this way, there is no undoing a mark. Sometimes it feels like a cascade of irreversible mistakes, but this pulls you into the moment. While I start by adding black to the white, at some point a threshold is crossed, and painting no longer feels like addition, but rather like a subtraction of the remaining white; at this point the image becomes nocturnal.

- Arryn Snowball 2024