I didn’t make it to the opening of “Joan Snyder: A Year in the Painting Life” at the Betty Cuningham Gallery on West 25th Street, and I wonder if many people did since tornados touched down in parts of NYC right before the opening reception. I saw the show two days later on Saturday afternoon, and I liked it. Joan Snyder is a MacArthur Award winner who lives both in Brooklyn and Woodstock, New York. She’s a big-time abstract painter who’s also represented by Elena Zang Gallery in Woodstock. In that artist’s colony atmosphere, I’ve met Snyder at an opening, heard her lecture at the Byrdcliffe Guild, and had the opportunity to hang out with her paintings at Elena’s, really being able to look without a lot of distractions. Elena and Alan’s dog, Nori, hangs out too (and sometimes needs a pat on the head) but that’s not what I consider a distraction.

On Saturday in Chelsea, I walked into a quiet gallery and had a few minutes to sit with the paintings. Then things got busy. An energetic tour group came in led by a lecturer, and the atmosphere changed. Suddenly people were reacting to the paintings and the guide’s speech. He covered Snyder’s personal stats: facts about her life, her stature in the art world, her sexuality. He described how Snyder walked through the woods upstate gathering seeds, twigs, and dirt to use in her paintings. His description of this part of her process in Woodstock sounded almost exotic. I realized I was reacting to the paintings through a filter of all this going on around me, and that became interesting, too.

I’m not an art critic. I’m not a big collector. I’m not a painter looking for a guide to success. What I relate to most in Snyder’s work is her desire to take an emotional life and give it size, shape, color, texure. Seeds and sticks and drips and grids mean something, and I think her work is a reminder that the mystery of being human isn’t something we have to leave alone with no form. We can use it, attach form to it—words or shapes or images. We can point a camera, pick up a pen, open a tube of paint. We can make something that can speak for us, through us. Other people can also make work that speaks for us. Joan Snyder does this at a master level. Her work is worth seeing.