In drips, gobs, and blots, her paintings pulse with life

FRAMINGHAM -- The bold white pin stands out against Joan Snyder's black bag: ''U.S. Out of Iraq." It matches the painter's dramatic look: white curly hair tossed in a windblown froth around her head and dark, round glasses that make her look eternally curious yet somehow protected.

Snyder was in town from New York this week for ''Joan Snyder: A Painting Survey, 1969-2005," which just opened at the Danforth Museum. The show pulses with the artist's operatic energy. She piles paintings with thick gobs of paper mache or crumpled burlap; she tears open her canvases so they look wounded.

Snyder came of age at minimalism's height.

''For me, it was maximal," she says of her work.

The artist, who also has a solo exhibition up at the Nielsen Gallery, has always worn her heart on her sleeve, and painted it on her canvases.

The Danforth show, pared down from a retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York, traces Snyder's career from her early, daring ''Stroke" paintings, which set lushly drippy bars of color over pencil-drawn grids, to dense, vibrant works she made this summer, when she spent a frantic but fertile couple of months preparing for the Nielsen exhibit.

Snyder's paintings are rich with contradictions: They're abstract, yet often narrative; formally precise and thought out, yet intuitive and spontaneous; pointedly political, yet open to interpretation. Each painting is deeply felt.

Early in her career, she made it a point to paint, expressively, her experience as a woman. In the 1970s, she got a lot of flack for it. In particular, she remembers being needled for using text in her work.

''I write in a painting and they call me a feminist, and it's a dirty word," Snyder says. ''Then Julian Schnabel puts text in a painting and it's 'Oh, he's so sensitive. The work is so personal.' "

Snyder has long been a favorite of local collectors.

''Boston has always been interested in painterly expressionism," says Katherine French, director of the Danforth. ''Joan has never lost her sense of paint, and the impulse toward pushing it around, even when it wasn't something people were doing. She has stuck to her guns that way."

The centerpiece of the Nielsen exhibit, ''Two Rivers," is a linen canvas gashed with two dark slashes that seem to rise from the gritty earth of the dripping, blotted painting and cut right through it. The piece didn't start out as two rivers -- rivers were not part of the painter's visual lexicon.

''It was going to be a smashed pumpkin field," Snyder says. She's painted pumpkin fields before: a brilliant grid of orange orbs that might be pumpkins or suns arose from her brush like a phoenix after 9/11.

Now, the smashed gourds would be ''a metaphor for what's going on in the world," she says. ''But the painting started to look so beautiful to me, I couldn't do it. I thought, 'I'll put a river in, I've never done that before.' Then I thought I needed another river."

When she showed the painting to her friend Andrew Foley, he told her the dark gashes reminded him of the Tigris and Euphrates.

''And he gives me the whole story -- they're history, how craggy they are," Snyder says. ''As I was making it, I was wondering why what I was painting was so craggy."

She shakes her head. ''People have told me that I'm tuned into the collective unconscious. Here, I started out making a painting about destruction, and it came out being about the beginning of civilization. Those rivers, they're in Iraq, you know. They're dried up now. Saddam Hussein dried them up."

The 1997 painting, ''Oratorio," up at the Danforth, touches on many motifs Snyder has used throughout the years: the grid, fields, body references, strokes, cherries. ''I'm giving myself a retrospective," Snyder says of the piece. ''It's so much fun: How all the sections touch each other. How do you make it work? That's the challenge."

The layers and correspondences make the piece symphonic and carefully structured, a little more about form than about politics or emotion. ''This one's more like Beethoven," Snyder says of ''Oratorio." ''Others are more Wagnerian, or like Bartok. More cacophony."

Snyder's paintings vent her own anguish and joy, but in their sensuous expressiveness, the personal opens up to the communal. Viewers can bring their own grief and gratitude to Snyder's work, and find affirmation and companionship -- most of the time. Her more overtly political paintings, such as ''Women in Camps" (1988) depicting prisoners, come across as shrill and scolding.

While she's had her share of criticism, the artist is unapologetic.

''My work is my religion. That was true in 1966 and it's true now," Snyder says. ''It's the altar where I make my offerings."

"Joan Snyder: A Painting Survey, 1969-2005’’ is at the Danforth Museum, Framingham, through Feb. 5. 508-620-0050. www.danforthmuseum.org.

"Joan Snyder: Two Rivers" is at the Nielsen Gallery, through Dec. 3. 617-266-4835. www.nielsengallery.com.