WHILE today his home studio is mostly filled with
framed works in a similar likeness, a piece-in-progress
of a non-conspicuous surfer riding a wave
rests on the easel.
“I’m totally inspired by the landscape here in
Wrightsville Beach, I have so many pictures of Wrightsville Beach it’s
ridiculous,” he says. “If I can’t make it to the beach, I’m taking screen-shots
of the surf cam.”
Snyman has also taken an interest in ways to give back to the com-munity.
“I did a surf painting of local surfer and skateboarder Jacob Venditti
and donated it to him for the Live Fearlessly Foundation, a local non-profit
that raises awareness and funds for cystic fibrosis,” he says.
Snyman also donated a painting to The Harrelson Center for its Day
in the Country fundraiser.
When Snyman isn’t surfing or including literary quotes alongside his
paintings, he’s listening to music. So You Think You Can Tell, derived from
Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, takes an abstract focus wherein water
acts like a memory — imaginative in the foreground yet dark and unwav-ering
as it inches closer to the edge of the canvas — or in a philosophical
sense, the present.
Music can be a source of recollection. Snyman’s paintings resemble
this with their own rhythm and feel, yet ambiguous atmospheres still
land on a place of familiarity.
“When I listen to something while I work, in a way that influences the
painting or the way I feel about the painting,” he says. “The ocean has
such a soft peacefulness. I try to catch that moment. In nature, every-thing
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is fleeting, and I want to capture that beauty before it’s gone.”
In The Sea, the narrator describes memories of his late wife in terms
of “fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf.” Snyman’s visits home
awaken distant memories that live on in his current work, be it child-hood
or venturing from West to East Coast and embracing new scenery
with the common thread of sky and water.
Even if he later takes a more abstract route, it’s safe to say each
work will continue to possess the quiet, internal exhale one feels when
resting beside the ocean. To quote Banville, “Although it was autumn
and not summer the dark-gold sunlight and the inky shadows, long and
slender in the shape of felled cypresses, were the same, and there was
the same sense of everything drenched and jewelled and the same
ultramarine glitter on the sea. I felt inexplicably lightened; it was as if
the evening, in all the drench and drip of its fallacious pathos, had tem-porarily
taken over from me the burden of grieving.”
I Saw It in the Sky, 30 x 40 inches, acrylic on canvas.