Gilda Snowden

Bright Stars at Night: Green Chair, 2006
Acrylic on canvas.


My name is Gilda Snowden. I’m a painter. I paint many things. I paint pictures of tornadoes, flowers, chairs, lots of things. I mainly work with encaustic, a wax paint from antiquity.

I do this because they make me happy. I do this because I’m obsessed. I paint, I take photographs, and I draw, and I need to have these things around me. The paintings smell good. Photographs are documents of my whole world. It’s almost like I’m obsessed with capturing these things: sunsets, flowers, trees, chairs, cracks in the sidewalk, but you can’t paint everything. So I do paintings of certain subjects and that slows me down. That makes me see the world around me in a much more organized way.

It is important for me to document and save and preserve. I started doing it with pictures of my family. And now I am so afraid that if I don’t document everything around me that my vision will be lost and I want to pass that on.