Bio

Extensive travel, frequent moves, and multiple school changes through her formative years, caused Ginny Snowdon to view her world as an outsider looking in. These observational skills contribute to her artmaking today, framing moments, seeing how the imperfect and unpolished is in fact, the connective tissue of our lives. Born in Windsor, Ontario, Snowdon started travelling at age 5 when her parents moved the family to Zimbabwe, Africa. On visits back to Canada, the family would travel to various countries, many in Europe and South America as they made their way to North America and then back to Africa. When Snowdon was 12, the family returned to Canada permanently, but they continued to move to various cities. While attending Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, Snowdon was in a serious car accident, impressing on her the fleeting sense of our lives, and contributing to that heightened view of life’s pivotal moments. She persevered and graduated with her class earning bachelor’s degrees in sociology and psychology and later a master’s degree in social work at the University of Toronto, fields of study that continue to inform her art.

As a young adult, Snowdon settled in Sydenham, Ontario. She got married and started a family. But along her journey she knew there was a “creative something” in her. In addition to raising four children she played an important role in the success and expansion of the family business. Outside of the family business, she had varied and broad interests and worked in a variety of jobs, searching for a fulfilling career. She felt unmoored, limited. Her creative outlets were cooking, gardening, travel and photography, which was, in retrospect, an important step towards painting. “I needed to develop me. I was a helper, mother, an adjunct to life. I hadn’t made time for myself. The pull of creativity was so strong.”

So she listened to it and became interested in photography, developing her skills and her voice through global travel workshops with well known photographers. Strongly informed by the impressionistic effects and abstraction that she was exploring in her photography, she was compelled to paint. “I learned to see through photography and I began to understand who I was. In both painting and photography I want to share the fullness of the experience, capturing and framing moments that suggest there is more beneath and behind the image. This was significant, foundational to my interest in finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.” 

Fast forward to the present and Snowdon has done the work. She has immersed herself in classes and workshops, seeking the guidance and support that comes from working in community with an instructor and other artists. When she reflects on those early painting classes, she admits, “I would sneak out of class early so the instructor couldn’t see and comment on my work. My work was raw, I felt exposed. The paintings came, and I was shocked by them.” She stayed with it, focusing on highly gestural figures, abstraction and non-objective painting. “There was a boldness and strength, even in those early paintings, that I had to catch up to.” And when she did, there was a realization that she has a place in this world of artists and art making. 

In 2015 she had her first solo exhibition and has exhibited in solo, juried and group shows ever since. ”Life is about connecting the dots. Growing older offers the perspective to see the relationship between events, even the very early ones, to the present.” Aware of her sensory self, her tendency towards introspection has led her to intensely study the interconnectedness of her life and art. “Our surface view of life is edited. I lean into the unrefined, feeling an urgency to look beneath, to not be satisfied with the polished view. There is often something found behind or underneath that exposes a subtle truth. There is no room for timidness. Bold, decisive art arrived – just like me.”