Painter, designer and teacher, born and lived in London. In 1946 he worked as a journalist for the South London Press and studied at Goldsmiths’ College School of Art before joining the Royal Engineers, 1946–8, announcing for the Forces’ Broadcasting Service in the Middle East. From 1948–53 Snow studied painting at Slade School of Fine Art, joining its staff in 1957. In 1962 he was commissioned to design an altarpiece for St Mathias Church. His extensive theatre designing experience began in 1951 when he designed Love’s Labours Lost for Rupert Doone in Southwark. Also designed for the English Opera Group and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop; in 1955 he designed a ballet for Frederick Ashton at the Royal Opera House, also Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Arts Theatre.
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Also worked for Ballets Minerva and Western Theatre Ballet Company and in 1971 and 1975 designed and wrote the multimedia Reflections I and Reflections II in London and Cardiff. He founded The Electric Theatre Company in 1970. In 1979 an exhibition of Theatre Designs was held at Sadler’s Wells Theatre. In addition to extensive group shows Snow showed solo from a 1956 exhibition at the Prospect Gallery, having a retrospective at Morley Gallery, 1995. In 2002, Guildhall Art Gallery acquired Snow’s unsettling St Mary’s Gardens – Night and Rain. Of such night scenes, many of his Kennington locality, Snow said that they were “about threat, really…often concerned with rain. Nobody paints rain, I thought. Why not paint it and the way the light catches it and changes the colour.” In 2003 Snow suffered several minor strokes, leaving him with vascular dementia, and he moved to a nursing home in Salisbury, Wiltshire. In 2005, his daughter Selina organised another retrospective at Snow’s London house, 131 Kennington Park Road.
Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)
