Stuart Snoddy's painting practice focuses on the complex self through a fantastical exploration of loneliness, family, otherness, and imagination. Acting as author and director, the artist integrates storytelling and fantasy into his paintings to illustrate a fabricated, exotic culture. With ties to the historical tradition of American illustration, academic painting, and cinema, his "pleasant fictions" portray people and environments—inspired by reality yet embellished by the artist's yearning imagination—that occupy their own world. Working with oil on paper, panel, and canvas as well as gouache on paper, often in small formats, Snoddy employs vibrant recurring color palettes that further animate his work via quick, energetic brushwork. Rather than simply illustrating pleasant memories that deteriorate or sour when over-scrutinized, Snoddy's observational paintings are snapshots of thoughts or memories formed by his consciousness. By not shying away from the fantastical, Snoddy's constructed fictions explore the nature of humans as cohesive intellectual and emotional beings.