Arryn Snowball: The same moon hangs above it all

Arryn Snowball is turning triangles into waves, grids to landscapes, morphing patterns into text and stars into octopus’ suckers. I surveyed this latest body of work via video call from his studio in Berlin. A sea of black and white images reading as abstract poems ebb and flow past as if carrying an owl and a pussycat to faraway places. And while French philosopher Gilles Deleuze might describe the sea as “a chaos of a few drops”, in Snowball’s hands it is a polyrhythm, a tension of circles and curves that drift in an enigmatic space.

The Sydney-born artist speaks in animated discursive tangents about his forthcoming show in Australia. His palette however is not a poetic pea-green, rather, it’s a warm matt black, in tempera that he manufactures with linseed oil, egg and iron oxide pigment.

The monochromatic musings then segue to a suite of tiny watercolours the artist makes while travelling with his anthropologist partner. “I fell in love with Monica,” he tells me…