‘The pictures in his new show are meditations on the process of painting. Snape refers to this more pragmatically as “managing the process.” But this downplays the role of intuition and the sheer force of feeling and emotion driving the emergence of these paintings.
I say “emergence” quite deliberately because these paintings are not prescribed in any way: they emerge from initially intuitive gestures informed by a response (in most cases) to the landscape. The landscape in question is Snape’s property at Wamboin, north of Canberra in rural New South Wales. This is his second home, where he has a studio and where he is developing a sculpture park to also provide his sculptures with a second home.
Here the word epistemology is again useful. The term refers to how we know and understand the world. In this case it is Snape’s world at Wamboin. Suffice it to say that we know the world through our five senses, and vision is said to account for seventy percent of our perception of the world around us. As far as the landscape is concerned, we see it either by looking out across it or by looking down on it. But our actual perception is a combination of both (think Fred Williams), further shaped by visual habit, emotion, past experience, and prevailing biases.
The challenge Michael Snape has set for himself with these paintings is to represent how we inhabit the landscape’. – excerpt from the essay ‘Inhabiting the Landscape’ by Paul McGillick, 2022
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