The 83-year-old artist has dubbed her painterly detonations of color, which physically undulate from their surfaces, as “structural abstract expressionism.”

Sylvia Snowden has a curiosity about the human condition that begets active, engrossing paintings. Her canvases hover delicately between figuration and abstraction, evoking abundant movement and energy. Standing before the artworks feels electric — like something in you is being activated, previously suppressed emotions riled to attention.

Snowden and I met in November, after her solo exhibition opened at White Cube New York. On the Verge gathers 20 of her paintings across two floors, on view through December 19. Our conversation began with her affinity for color and its potency, a lesson from childhood imparted by her beloved mother, who adored vibrant hues. “Color is life,” Snowden declared. “Without color, what would you have?”

The heart of the exhibition is her M Street series — abstractly rendered portraits of bodies with engorged extremities. While they are not depictions of individual people, they are named after her neighbors from the eponymous street in Washington, DC, where she has lived since 1978 and raised her children. Their purpose, however, illustrates something more universal about the nuances of human emotion.

Snowden was raised on the Dillard University and Southern University campuses in New Orleans by parents who introduced her to artmaking. She received her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Fine Arts degrees from Howard University in the 1960s. There, she studied under James A. Porter, Loïs Mailou Jones, and James Lesesne Wells, titans of midcentury Black art. Her work has been displayed at the National Gallery of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, and Montclair Art Museum, among others.

At age 83, she still paints every day. Her approach to texture, which she dichotomizes as both visual and tactile, has been developing since age four. She uses acrylic paint and oil pastels on masonite, an innovation born out of a residency in Australia, where she wasn't able to procure enough oil paint and knew her canvases would not dry in time to be shipped home. (Also, her children “could not stand the smell of turpentine,” she told me.) The resulting artworks are thrilling impastos, sculptural in quality. She has fittingly identified these detonations of color, which physically undulate from their surfaces, as “structural abstract expressionism.”

I spoke with Snowden near White Cube in Manhattan about her schooling, family, and making the first mark on canvas. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Hyperallergic: I would love to start at the beginning and talk about your roots as an artist. So, how did you come to find painting?

Sylvia Snowden: My mother, Jessie B. Snowden, is the one who introduced my brother and me at a very young age — age four — to painting and to color. My mother knew a lot about color and wore color, and she introduced us to it. Now, when I was four, what we did was — I don't know if kids do this now or not — use coloring books.

H: Yeah. I bet a lot of the time, they do it on their iPad; they color it in on the iPad. [Laughs]