Michael Snow’s diverse practice in the visual arts has been of enormous importance on both a national and international level. It has encompassed photography and filmmaking in addition to more traditional media. Born in Toronto and educated at the Ontario College of Art, Snow was visiting New York regularly by the late 1950s. News is one of his early works, done while he was still very much under the influence of Abstract Expressionism. The painting demonstrates Snow’s concern, even at this stage, with popular culture and the question of art as a representation of reality. News takes its composition from the pattern of a daily newspaper page but Snow breaks up the rigidity of the columns through his loose handling of the paint, thus calling attention to the surface of the work itself as the subject of the piece.