Snoseas grows from a life spent attending to the natural world — in the landscape, in the studio, with charcoal and ink and the slow process of looking until something opens.
Ivan Grieve is an artist and educator based in Totnes, Devon. He grew up in Bohemian Sixties Camden — the Roundhouse, kites on Hampstead Heath, happenings and visionary grown-ups all around — and carries that formation with him still: a belief that art is not a specialised activity for a gifted few, but a fundamental human way of being in the world.
His practice is rooted in the Devon landscape. He divides his time between being out in the landscape — walking and sketching along the rivers, estuaries and hills of South Devon throughout the year — and working in the studio, where materials gathered from the landscape itself become the means of expression. Feathers, clay, mud and leaves. Found pigments and Bideford Black. Charcoal and liquid graphite on paper. The river, like time, flowing from the moor to the sea — both a physical and metaphysical element in everything he makes.
Self-portraits begin with a process of tactile observation — translating the face through the fingertips onto paper, to see what emerges. Landscapes are documented through sketches on site, then returned to in the studio, where the experience of place is built into the surface of the work through gesture, pigment and layer. The process is always sensory. The making is always a form of attending.
Snoseas — the seasons reflected — is the natural culmination of this practice. It brings together natural history, folklore, etymology and the writing of Shakespeare in intimate creative sessions, moving through the sensory process of making toward a moment of stillness. A moment of Ma — the Japanese concept of the pregnant pause, the interval in which the real thing happens.
We are part of nature, not observers of it. Every experience has a genesis in a single plant and opens into a world.
Ivan is an Ambassador for Outside In, the award-winning national charity — patron Grayson Perry — supporting artists who face significant barriers to the art world due to health, disability, social circumstance or isolation. Having been named Outside In’s Artist of the Month and completed the charity’s workshop facilitating programme, the values at the heart of Outside In are woven into everything Snoseas does. The Snoseas method asks nothing of a participant except a willingness to look slowly at a living thing. That is a threshold anyone can cross.
There is a personal thread running through Snoseas that Ivan holds with both humility and meaning. His father, the late Alan Grieve, founded the Jerwood Foundation at the age of 63 — a philanthropic legacy that has shaped British arts and culture for decades, supporting artists, galleries and creative programmes across the country. Ivan began Snoseas at exactly the same age. He does not claim the parallel as anything more than what it is — a quiet resonance, a sense of continuity, a reminder that it is never too late to begin something that matters.
Sensing toward stillness
What Snoseas reads
How Flowers Made Our World
David George Haskell
Haskell gives every Snoseas experience its scientific spine — flowers as the engineers of habitats, architects of food webs, the biological infrastructure of the world we live inside. When we draw a flower, we are attending to something that helped build everything.
Minding the Earth, Mending the World
Susan Murphy Roshi
Murphy Roshi is the contemplative heart of the practice — Zen, ecology, the radical proposition that we are not separate from the world we are trying to protect. The charcoal on the paper is not observation. It is mending.
Seasons — Volume Six
Emergence Magazine
The Snoseas year moves through the emotional arc of this volume — requiem, invitation, celebration. What vanishes and what remains. Both Haskell and Murphy Roshi are contributors. Snoseas sits at the table where these voices have gathered.