Dear Snyder, please be more creative

One of Snyder's recent pieces. Photo by Snyder

Update: This post should have been about Snyder’s lack of originality rather than a lack of creativity. As pointed out in the comments, Snyder has been drawing Doodle for many years. While perhaps creative, I still find much of Snyder’s work, particularly this piece, to be unoriginal. Maybe that’s worse.

From time to time, I have posted about Snyder. He seems like an enthusiastic artist, and that’s commendable. He also as a talent for finding good placement for his pieces.

Sure, Snyder’s best work was always a fair amount like something Banksy would or had come up with, but I tried to ignore that and find the positives about Snyder’s work. After all, how many contemporary stencil artists can say that they’ve never been a bit too inspired by Banksy at least once?

A classic Banksy. Photo by Wokka

And then Snyder introduced a character into his work whom he named Doodle. Okay, the character looks like a stenciled version of Dran’s character whom Dran named Scribble, and they are pretty much the same character. Both are slightly mischievous young artists. Again, this alone was frustrating, but Dran isn’t particularly well-known outside of Europe, so maybe Snyder, who is based in LA, hadn’t heard of him. Maybe it was just a coincidence.

Dran's Scribble character. Photo by Marie Aschehoug-Clauteaux

And then I saw the stencil by Snyder at the top of this post, which is actually one of at least two in a series of similar pieces. Again, I was reminded of Banksy and of Dran, even a specific piece by Banksy (the maid, shown above). But now another artist came to mind too: Saber. Revealing tags beneath the buff is pretty much exactly like Saber’s Ripped Tag series of canvases. Saber’s canvases are significantly better executed than Synder’s work, but the similarities are clear.

A painting from Saber's "Ripped Tags" series. Photo by Lois Stavsky

At first, I saw Snyder’s clear Banksy influence and I thought that it was a phase. I thought that he would eventually grow out of it and get his own style. Influences are one thing, but Snyder goes beyond that. As time has gone on, it is clear that Snyder has not only failed to develop a personal style, but he has perhaps even increased his reliance on the ideas of other artists.

This buff/zipper piece goes too far. It’s actually not a bad idea. But it is quite transparently 3 other artists’ ideas mashed into one with little original content added by Snyder.

As flattering as it may seem for artists’ to be inspired others’ work, at the heart of this issue is pretty simple: if you are going to take inspiration from others’ work or blatantly rip their ideas, then do it better and make it your own. Snyder has clearly done neither and that in itself is disappointing at best.

Photos Snyder, Wokka, Marie Aschehoug-Clauteaux and Lois Stavsky

Weekend link-o-rama

Snyder in Beijing

While I spend my day at my other job explaining to people how a skee-ball tournament is art (seriously), I hope you’ll enjoy these newsbites from the past two weeks:

Photo by Snyder

Weekend link-o-rama

Snyder, a tribute to Kase2 (RIP) by Krush, Dame and Evol and other pieces

You know what’s really nice? Sleep. Hence, this weekend is a blessing. For now, life is school school school and more school. Hopefully there’s still a trip to NYC in my near future though… Here’s what has been going on around the internet and on the street:

Photo by Snyder

Snyder’s angry student

Even if Snyder‘s character is called Doodle and looks and sort of acts like Dran’s character Scribble, a fun stencil is a fun stencil. This piece by Snyder is at Melrose and Fairfax in LA. Apparently Doodle is meant to have kicked a hole in the wall, although it looks to me like he’s stared a hole into the wall, if that makes any sense… Maybe Doodle has superpowers.

Photo by Snyder

Weekend link-o-rama

Overunder

This week is spring break, so I’ve been enjoying some relaxation and watching too many films on Netflix, but in the mean time, there were of course some stories that slipped by me. Here are some of them:

Photo by Overunder