Celeste Sneed doesn’t have to look farther than her love of the outdoors to find inspiration for her work.
“I started cycling six years ago and the first things I started to paint were cyclists,” says Celeste Sneed. “Many of the paintings I do now are things I have seen first, or seen better, while cycling. You see the world differently from a saddle than you do from a car window. “
Celeste SneedThough she now spends less time biking in order to devote more time to her work, Sneed drew from her cycling background and found her niche in the Chattanooga art community by giving it something that it had little of before – sports paintings.
“I think Chattanooga is a unique spot in the world – geographically and psychologically. I have seen the cycling culture become gradually more pervasive since I moved here eight years ago,” she says. “I can only talk about my own experience, but it seems very clear that the trend is towards more encouragement for outdoor things.
“For example, when I started mountain biking, there was Booker T. Washington State Park and the new trails at Raccoon Mountain. That’s pretty much all you had. Today we have Enterprise South, 5 Points, Stringer’s Ridge still under development, White Oak Mountain over in Collegedale, as well as more mileage at both the trail systems I mentioned earlier.”