Gilda Snowden Album: A Retrospective 1977-2010

Excerpt from the essay by Dick Goody: It is difficult to ascertain whether the tornado form chose Gilda Snowden or she selected it for herself. Is it a subject, an image or a theme? She started using the form because, as she has often stated, she fears tornados. It is an exotically menacing form, which she has wrestled with again and again, but it rapidly became a defining leitmotif. Initially, it provided the impetus to abandon more narrative approaches to making art in favor of ones that became increasingly formalistic and abstract. In a manner of speaking, the tornado is Snowden’s version of Cubism, not in the sense that it pays homage to Modernism (it does not), but if, for example, Cubism emancipated form from realism, then the tornado provided her the freedom to become an abstract artist.