William Snyder |
"Minnie resting" |
oil on canvas |
34" x 56" |
| William Snyder |
| Known regionally for popular iconographic imagery relative to everyday American culture, William Snyder would often create parodies of old masterpieces such as Rembrandt's "The Night Watch." |
| He was born in San Francisco and grew up in Los Angeles. He attended the Chouinard Art Institute and San Francisco State College where he earned a BFA in 1954 and an MFA in 1957. From 1961 to 1963, he did graduate studies at Stanford University. In 1963, he established a studio in Oakland and taught at Laney College until the early 1990s when Parkinson's disease led to early retirement. ~ AskART.com |
"Born in 1926 William Snyder is part of the Mickey generation. From 1955 until his death in 2000 he taught art and showed his own work almost exclusively in the San Francisco Bay Area. His Disney characters walk the streets as the three-dimensional costumed figures of Disneyland but no one pays any attention to them; they are as ordinary and uninteresting as anyone else. The cool, sophisticated West Coast attitude toward the "stars" is not to stare or rush up for an autograph like a tourist from the Midwest but to act just as cool and disinterested as they are. This is the atmosphere of Snyder's paintings" ~ Holly Crawford, PhD; author of ATTACHED TO THE MOUSE - DISNEY AND CONTEMPORARY ART |
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| "I attempt to make the insubstantial, sometimes banal nature of cultural symbolism as beautiful as possible through the use of painting techniques and methods that reflect a Baroque sensitivity to materials. I employ an under painting and oil glazing technique that I have learned from the study of the old masters" ~ William Snyder. Expanded Biography, A Tribute to A Tribute to William Snyder |
| I modeled (above), worked for and apprenticed under Bill Snyder for about two years in his waterfront studio in Alameda California. He was an incredibly talented artists and it is a shame that his works aren't widely known or exhibited. The few works of his that remain unsold can be viewed at The Joseph Chowning Gallery In San Francisco, CA. ~ vazalt |