ARTIST PROFILE: George Snyder
A dozen cylinders by artist George Snyder take their place over the staircase at the Capitol Conference Center on Lee Street.
Reprinted from the March 28, 2008 Charleston Gazette
By Bob Schwarz
For the Gazette
When George Snyder graduated from South Charleston High and enrolled at Marshall University, he thought he might become a lawyer. He took a few art classes and changed his mind.
Now 56, Snyder has supported himself as a full-time artist for nearly 30 years. A dozen galleries from Boston to Los Angeles and from Cleveland to San Antonio sell his work.
He lives in Florida with the former Jennifer Walker, a Charleston native and his wife of 25 years. Jennifer is a working artist in her own right and also her husband’s business manager.
After graduating from Marshall, Snyder worked as a janitor at Boll Furniture’s old West Side store. During that year, he sent out applications to graduate school.
Snyder won a fellowship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned a master’s degree in fine arts and imagined a life - and steady income - as an art teacher. Making art would be important, but he wouldn’t have to rely on sales to support himself.
As graduation approached, Snyder approached Charlie Boll, who was preparing to move the family furniture business into a six-story building on Virginia Street East across from the South Side Bridge. Boll gave him a job doing advertising and arranging floor displays.
Boll offered Snyder the top floor in the new building, half to use as his own art studio, half to develop a commercial art gallery they named the Appalachian Center for Contemporary Art.
Snyder had a good head for business and a great sense of color, Boll recalled. On weekends, Snyder roamed about, taking photos of helicopters and earth-moving machinery, then making paintings of the big machines in bold colorations.
During his stay at Boll, Sunrise Museum, using Daywood Foundation money, bought one of Snyder’s paintings. Sunrise, then in South Hills and now part of the Clay Center, was young and its leaders were working at building the collection, seeking gifts of art and money to buy art.
Snyder can’t remember how much the museum paid, but imagines it had to have been in the hundreds, not thousands, of dollars. Art didn’t command such high prices then. Besides, Snyder was just starting out.
A while later, Snyder asked opthamologist Richard Rashid to sponsor an artist’s show, which Rashid agreed to do. When Rashid took his family to the opening, his young son came out and said, “The best stuff is back here.”
Rashid looked and agreed. Rashid owned the gallery Arts Focus, which represented Paula Clendenin and Charly Jupiter Hamilton. “What would it take for you to do this full time,” Rashid recalls asking Snyder. “He quit his job and went to work for us.”
Snyder soon moved south but continued to send his work to Rashid, who remembers a young Snyder as quiet, competent and confident. “He was very intense about his work.”
George Snyder in his studio. Courtesy photo
Snyder said he considers himself a painter, even though much of his work is three-dimensional. “At one point, I started cutting up my paintings and wrapping them on cylinders,” Snyder said.
“Those cylinders originated at Boll Furniture,” Boll recalled. “He painted the cardboard cylinders that carpet was wound on. That’s where it started. They were designed to be leaned up in corners or hung from ceilings.”
The big machines he painted at Boll all had cylinders, Snyder said. “A lot of what I do is industrial.”
By the time he left Boll in 1979, he knew he wanted to make his way in the world as an artist. “I was fortunate that some well-known people bought my work. I decided I should stick my neck out and give it a try.”
Snyder grew up on Massey Circle and attended nearby Montrose Elementary School, where even in first grade, he recalled, he could draw better than the other kids.
His father worked as a lab technician at Union Carbide’s Tech Center. His mother sold clothing at Coyle & Richardson and later at Schwabe-May.
Both parents drew and painted, he recalled. “They were talented. They encouraged me. This was back in the ’60s. Parents encouraged their kids then in the arts and humanities. Now parents tell their kids to make money.”
Since the early 1990s, one of the cylinder groupings hung at CAMC General Division, first on a wall, then later suspended from the lobby’s ceiling, but they came down about a year ago, according to hospital spokesman Dale Witte. “We had problems holding them up because they were made from paper tubing. About a year ago, they were removed and placed in storage.”
Most of his work is acrylic on canvas that is then wrapped around plastic PVC pipe. Outdoor pieces are automotive paints airbrushed onto a heavier PVC pipe.
The piece at CAMC was probably wrapped around plastic pipe, but it was a wall piece never meant to be suspended, Snyder said.
The curious can stop by the Capitol Conference Center- on Lee Street beside Chesapeake Bagel - where a grouping of a dozen Snyder cylinders hangs on the wall over a staircase.
Some years Snyder makes 50 works of art, some years a dozen. A big commission - for instance, a large-scale installation priced at as much as $40,000 - can consume two months.
“As I get older, I can’t work as fast. Art is a very physical activity, especially when you do larger pieces.You do all this work and you don’t want to ruin it before it gets where you want it to go.”
It’s hard to earn a living as an artist, he said. “Very few people collect art, especially contemporary art. A lot of people decorate with art.”
What’s next? “I want to continue to do exactly what I’m doing. This is what I like to do. I’m content.”
To contact staff writer Bob Schwarz, use e-mail or call 348-1249.
