HILLS SNYDER
MAGDALENA DRAWINGS
Essay by
Jennifer Hope Davy
December 2024
*a portion of this essay in a different iteration was previously published in Glasstire (September 20, 2024),
https://glasstire.com/2024/09/20/out-here-in-magdalena-three-approaches-to-draw-from/
Lost Its Stirrup, Found Its Ground
The worst labyrinth is not that intricate form that can entrap us forever, but a single and precise straight line.
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (1962)
I remember reading that Hills Snyder was born on a Tennessee mountain top. I heard he worked in a canning factory in Lawrence, Kansas. Somewhere in between he may have been some kind of hippie. He ran an art space in one side of a duplex on the south side of an old river city in Tejas. Now he runs a little art space, kind of a small array, in a storefront in an old New Mexico mining town in the high mountain desert just east of the Very Large Array, made famous by Contact (1997), where 27 radio telescopes collect, combine, and translate cosmic radio waves to picture the cosmos.[1] Snyder has also been an art professor and while I was visiting he and Cara Snyder there, 6,548 feet above sea level, he shared one of his syllabi with me for his UTSA art course Contemporary Studio, which he amended to be titled Contemporary Studio/Ancient Knowledge (2011-2018). His suggestion or assignment for the course was to “infiltrate” like an archeologist working “in reverse”—the task being to plant evidence rather than gather it. He asks: “can art be incantation?” He adds: “additionally we will be exploring nature and community.”
Magdalena is a small community clustered ‘round Magdalena Peak, a unique rhyolitic lava dome “remnant of a cluster of lava domes that erupted between 18 and 11 million years ago.”[2] This unique rhyolitic dome in the natural erosion over geologic time has come to offer a particular “petrifact” on its eastern slope.[3] Lore has it that the village got its name from a few Spanish Conquistadors who saw this petrifact or profile of a woman, as if in a cameo pendant, on the eastern face of the mountain peak as an apparition of Mary Magdalene. While the image had long been known to natives in the region, who, according to lore, would avoid the image’s gaze, it is the Spanish name inscribed in the colonial register.[4] All things relative, Snyder sees the profile of the Popeye cartoon character Olive Oyl.
In town, between kind of a small array and Warehouse 1-10, is the Magdalena library stationed in the old railway depot. It’s where I spent a fair amount of time during my visit. Riding to and from on a bike I borrowed from Cara during my stay in Snyder’s studio, I’d pick up glimpses, colors, shapes, outlines, and contours. My pace was often swift enough for my eyes to translate a patchwork collage of the neighborhood as opposed to a tracking shot of record—an incohesive picture that recalls more than it describes.
This perceptual gathering is akin to Snyder’s drawing series Magdalena. There are eighteen drawings aligned in a grid of three rows of six. Taking them in all together, the twists and turns of lines, punctuation of colors, hints of perceptible forms, give the whole an animated sensibility suggesting a traditional [western] narrative read from left to right, top to bottom. My eyes are drawn in toward the center by heavier weighted lines depicting cholla cactus like stick figures calling out in Willie’s Airstream (2022). They demand attention, rather repeatedly, in their uncanny draw. So much expression in the central cacti/figure, which seems to say, “hey!” in a handful of ebony pencil lines. Not quite to us, but perhaps within cholla chatter happening inside the drawing. They are situated within an array of color forms and lines––a weathered fallen tree, various parts or debris––the large rounded square object reads as the Airstream trailer. All set upon a ridge with the distant mountains minimally outlined in multicolor. This is the most naturalistic in appearance of the set.
“Trails end & gateway to the stars” is Magdalena’s tag line; it kind of makes the decision for you. The Snyder’s took their time realizing that decision over the course of two years (2017-2019) settling into a bungalow in a canyon near the slopes of Magdalena Peak. When there, they’d walk most mornings along a neighboring dirt road that gave access to public land, from which they could hike to the peak. The road was eventually gated, blocking the way, though Snyder cut a new trail following the contours of the land, mindful of its geological and biological inhabitants.
This cutting a new trail at trails end is an apt metaphor for the Magdalena drawings; figuratively, it is how Snyder relays his approach to drawing them. They follow in the footsteps of his drawing series Altered States (2016–ongoing) and Your Nowhere is My Somewhere. See You There. (2017). In Altered States, Snyder visits a cross section of the Great Plains and mountain areas of the United States with towns chosen for the evocative resonance of their names. He also visited Miles City, Montana, where he was a mid-1980s artist-in-the-schools, finding the remains of his abode including a “red shoestring his five-year old son had looped and knotted on the front doorknob.”[5] He has said that the Magdalena drawings are an extension of the explorations made in Altered States. I see a cumulative trajectory, which doesn’t mean it was straight forward, from his earlier drawings to these most recent ones. Take the one I have hanging in my old Berlin flat, All Alone in Romance (1986)—whether “baroque” or “minimal” Snyder’s “line has drive,” as Jacqueline Gilliam pronounced in her Introduction to the exhibition catalogue Gloville (1998); “it gets to the point, straight into the heart of the matter, it can play with words, it is sly, ironic or humorous, never bitter or self-conscious, always elegant” (10).
This follows the contours of his Plexi pieces, which could be considered drawings of another material form, albeit initiated through graphite. From his 1990s Hand Not Hand period, the Plexiglas pieces were industrially produced from wooden templates the artist fabricated from free-hand drawing. The late art historian Frances Colpitt noted how many of those works “illustrate this phenomenon of abstract representation,” in “The Road to Gloville” (29). Straddling both and becoming something else we trace ancestry in Willie’s Airstream.
Drawing further, from Altered States to Magdalena, much of the drawings, and the process of their rendering, as well as reception, are like feeling one’s way through the dark. The actuality of such feeling Snyder realized in his landmark exhibition, Book of the Dead (2005) at Artpace, San Antonio, in which the visitor finds themself in “limbo.” Situated between spaces designated with rubrics Stay and The Living Room, lay a completely dark “nebulous space akin to limbo.”[6] Similarly, the Magdalena drawings flirt with/in Limbo too, finding and losing connections, envisioning their way through, relying on other sensibilities. Edging out small worlds or worlds unknown with hints of the familiar, the drawings draw from this lineage in short, long or elongated movements, arching or curt, in parallel and perpendicular, playing in hues, shades, and tones to take certain and uncertain form.
Jenny’s Corral (2024) curves in the upper center beginning with a short bold black, turning in a softly laid green, its turn alighting a suggestive craggy line. Spare playful forms tinted with blue and orange, pea green, red, and blue in the center ground, an upward tear drop, a hole. Perhaps one of these forms is a wood post. A straight red draw heading diagonally toward the upper right corner disappears and picks up again the other side of a contour line that maps the head of a horse, ear perked, its neck extending down ahead of its front leg. It has a beautiful line to it rendered in a few moves. Its simplicity and familiarity are emphatic in its reassuring contoured naturalness. Oh, look, it’s horse.
Whereas the horse of a different kind in Holsapple Interior (2024) is no such punctum. Rather, it goes the way of the Trojan––sneaking in unbeknownst to the interior or the artist rendering it there. Perhaps it’s looking for an apple hiding behind the mug on the table in the foreground, opposite a cubed hoof. A mane could be extending upward to the right set back beyond the table. For Snyder, it is often what stumbles in that takes the lead, even in disguise. What isn’t there as opposed to the trace or tracking of what is. Such playful trickery is at the core of these drawings to which Snyder allows that which slips in to play until it reveals itself.
Like Altered States, the Magdalena drawings are based on snapshots. Purposefully, Snyder utilizes only the thumbnail images of the photos to choose from as that is the scale in which the artist finds their content’s energy most palpable. He then looks at the full-scale image a while before setting to mark. The aim isn’t to render the photograph or its contents, per se, nor is it aimless. Rather, it is a “call and response” as the artist refers to it. Michael’s Studio (2023) is a circumference of such energy––animated permeating marks of their own exchange. Each move or line or mark or lack thereof responds to the others there and not there, including the empty space of the paper. Neither forces a will but listens for the other, allowing “call” and “response” to happen, mindful of when to stop.
Such algorithm instigates an intuitive playfulness that explores the community, nature, the site, the image, the recall, the imaginary, and the art of drawing. It yields an array of possibilities. Where Snyder ends up and what you end up seeing can be as surprising as finding a way, or a light, in the dark or what you may or may not stumble upon on the trail––a petrified curvilinear stick that takes on the shape of a snake or is it a leather strap having lost its stirrup? Sometimes all it takes is a gesture, a stray line alongside a concerted one, or just enough multi-hued shading as in Hop Canyon Workshop (2023), that suggests a particular place and direction fantastically unidentifiable. Hints of Prismacolor take certain moves, pink overtakes orange in a line around the corner from blue line curve in a small central section of El Farolito (2022), where the details have you, and your eyes, (re)contouring, meandering, wandering, darting, amusing, as much as the overall drawing conjures, among others, a sci-fi pictogram from another world.
They are playful and poetic amongst themselves and in their reception. Much like the call and response dynamic, they are inquisitive at you as much as your curiosity looks at them. Sierra Propane (2023) renders this inference transference most acutely. A straight edged plane almost dissected levitates expelling three tears, a red line above rushes direct toward the upper right corner under or through lines that pull or boomerang left and yet, still––caught within a perpendicular, intangible simultaneity. In this energetic stasis, ghost lines appear in traces and erasures. An indecipherable prismatic apparatus anchors the piece with multiple arms adrift, maybe it’s loosely in control or out of whack, disarrayed from duty. A stray line floats below, a soft dipping curve, a line of smile. Drawn not to define itself, but to draw––draw from, and draw toward––the artist suggests and affirms that his “drawings are not meant to reveal anything about the base locations except maybe as a quantum fantasy. Quantum because it can’t be seen, fantasy because I’m pretending it can.”[7]
At the end of Contact, the viewer is left with the question as to whether or not to believe that Jodi Foster’s character made it to the star of Vega over an eighteen-hour span that lasted roughly 40 seconds. Like the propositions Snyder offers in his Ancient Knowledge course, “can art be incantation?” Snyder’s oeuvre consistently answers yes, while exploring, among other things, nature and community, the nature of community, history, place or site, chance and happenstance. In small marks and movements, the Magdalena drawings are such offerings and invitations that span as long as you like in however many seconds.
[1] The 1997 film Contact directed by Robert Zemeckis was adapted from Carl Sagan’s novel of the same name (1985) by Michael Goldenberg and James V. Hart. The novel itself originally began as a story/screenplay by Sagan and Ann Druyan in 1979. For more information about the VLA, see: https://public.nrao.edu/telescopes/vla/
[2] Robert W. Eveleth, “Our Lady on the mountain––history, folklore, and geology of Magdalena Peak,” New Mexico Geology 26, no. 2 (May 2006): 43-44.
[3] “Because of a most curious happenstance of nature, the loose talus, most particularly in the center of the east-facing slope, is held in its current configuration by fortuitously positioned rock outcrops and vegetation. Fortuitous also is the slope of the mountain: sufficiently steep to have permitted some movement in the past and also sufficiently below the angle of repose to allow some stability in the present. This entire assemblage, sculpted solely by the hand of nature, has assumed a most startling and clear impression of a woman’s face in profile. It is this ‘petrifact’—the apparent image of a woman’s face—that has instilled superstitions within, and so completely captured the imaginations of, human observers for time immemorial.” Eveleth, “Our Lady on the mountain,” 44.
[4] Ibid, note: I find Eveleth’s research sound yet his inference and language rather biased.
[5] Hills Snyder, “Altered States, Part Six,” Glasstire {Texas Visual Art} (October 29, 2018), https://glasstire.com/2018/10/29/altered-states-part-six/ accessed December 22, 2024.
[6] For more see the Artpace overview: https://artpace.org/exhibitions/book-of-the-dead-15/ . And an interview about the piece with Wendy Weil Atwell on Glasstire: https://glasstire.com/2005/09/02/interview-with-hills-snyder/
[7] Hills Snyder, “Q&A with Hills Snyder,” Art Report Today (December 7, 2024), http://www.hillssnyder.com/docs/Art_Report_Today_20242020.pdf