Moon Spill | Arryn Snowball

Moon Spill | Arryn Snowball

7 - 25 September, 2022

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to present Arryn Snowball's latest exhibition Moon Spill showing between the 7 to 25 September, 2022. While firmly committed to abstract painting, Snowball seeks an open practice, where process is fluid and visible, embodied and reciprocal. Exploring line, colour, shape, and how they create rhythm, the artist uses simple formal structures that open onto complexity, intimacy and vulnerability.

“I’m interested in movement and light, structure and change, uncertainty and ambiguity. I’m into the basics: triangles, circles, lines, colour. I try to keep things simple, yet complexity naturally builds up. I don’t want to disguise any aspect of the process. I prefer a hand painted edge. If a line is awkward, it is my awkwardness. If a line is wobbly, it is more alive." — Arryn Snowball

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i have had the privilege of seeing dawn and dusk bite through daylight hours | Arryn Snowball

I have had the Privilege of seeing dawn and dusk bite through daylight hours

| Arryn Snowball

12 May - 30 May 2021

Jan Manton Gallery is pleased to debut Arryn Snowball in his latest exhibition i have had the privilege of seeing dawn and dusk bite through daylight hours on show from May 12 - 30 2021. Driven by a constant ‘open process’, his new works are injected with effervescent colour. Each piece is drenched in the ambiguity of both shared and personal nostalgia, of the fluidity of light and water and the elasticity of form and text. 

This suite of paintings is an extension of his Slack Water series which began in 2017. The project emerged as a response to an abstract and visceral body of poems by Australian writer Nathan Shepherdson who reimagined pages found in the book Grant’s Guide to Fishes by Ern Grant. 

Snowball paints with an open process, like a loose grid reminiscent of his net-like structures and elements which weave throughout the exhibition. The paintings are washed over in colours reflective of the ocean which produce undetermined images. For Snowball, they become an entanglement of memories reminiscent from his time spent as a kid fishing on the coast, on beaches and headlands. 

“I paint simply, layering line over colour, colour over line, colour over colour. At some point, the painting becomes its own thing, able to hold itself up, something more than lines and colour,” writes Snowball. “When it starts to breathe, I stop. The finished paintings are rarely what I expect. It’s an open process, and can change at any point. If I get stuck, I look for more clues in the poem.” 

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Opening event photography: Cian Sanders.