he ivy-covered brick house Michael Snow shares with his wife of twenty-eight years, the writer and curator Peggy Gale, is a far cry from the bohemian Manhattan loft where he spent much of the ’60s. Situated in an affluent Toronto neighbourhood, from the outside it looks nondescript, but on the inside it’s every inch an artist’s home. One wall of the living room is packed floor to ceiling with books, artists’ catalogues, and hundreds of vinyl recordings; on another wall hangs a big abstract painting by Snow’s contemporary, Ron Martin, as well as one of Snow’s famous Walking Woman pieces, the profile of a woman rendered in stuffed cloth, bulging out from its frame; and in the middle of the room stands a shining black grand piano.

At eighty-two, Snow is, as he self-deprecatingly puts it, “ancient.” And he looks it. His once-thick sweep of hair has thinned to white wisps; and he is slightly stooped and brittle, his face and hands liver spotted, one eye drooping. But in his case, the depredations of age are misleading. His blue eyes are fierce, his wit quick and biting, his presence by turns playful and petulant, and his creative energy has scarcely flagged. When I visited him last fall, he had only recently returned from a summer at the log cabin he built himself in the Newfoundland bush — “There’s no phone or Internet out there, so I get lots of work done” — and he was sitting at his piano, demonstrating riffs he was thinking of playing at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art a few days later, as part of an exhibition by American artist Christian Marclay. Like Snow, Marclay has a reputation for combining visual art and music, and he asked Snow to improvise on clusters of notes in his recent photographs, images of which Snow had propped up on his piano.

“Here’s one!” he called out as his hands, as nimble as they are wrinkled, flashed across the keys. “But for this one, I think I’ll play the blues. I’ve always loved the blues.” With that, all smiles, he lit into a few bars of stomping blues.

Snow is a serious jazz musician, so much so that it’s hard to get him to talk about anything else. But he is also, and more significantly, the most influential Canadian artist — ever. There have been other important twentieth-century Canadian artists, but none of their work has achieved the reach of Snow’s, over the course of a career that has spanned more than fifty years. Painters of the stature of Tom Thomson, Lawren Harris, and David Milne are virtually unknown outside Canada. Montreal automatistes like Paul-Émile Borduas remain in even deeper obscurity, as do William Ronald and the other members of Toronto’s Painters Eleven. The only artist whose international impact has been even comparable to Snow’s is Vancouver photographer Jeff Wall.

The reason for Snow’s impact is in part the promiscuity of his output: he has made abstract and figurative paintings, collages, sculptures, films, videos, photographs, multimedia installations, sound art, jazz albums, and every imaginable combination thereof. It is no exaggeration to say that for virtually every approach to art popular among younger contemporary artists, Snow was doing it decades earlier. In 1994, Dennis Reid mounted the Michael Snow Project, a massive retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario and Toronto’s Power Plant, which included four separate books on Snow’s work — one devoted to visual art, one to film, one to sound art and music, and one to his various writings. And he’s still at it. In 2009, the Power Plant mounted a survey of his video projections called Recent Snow. In February of this year, the largest survey of his art in Europe since his 2003 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou opened at Le Fresnoy in France; curated by Louise Déry of the Galerie de l’UQAM in Montreal, the exhibit includes a bilingual catalogue. As if to make a point, he is also working on three books.

“I hope we’re not just going to talk about the past!” he exclaimed, standing up from the piano and heading to the kitchen to pour us more black coffee from a big Thermos he keeps there. He was decked out in a checkered shirt and jeans, as though ready to go out and chop wood; despite his elite credentials — Companion, Order of Canada; Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France — he projects a homespun, boyish enthusiasm for his work. “I have a lot going on. I’m doing a lot of writing right now, because nobody knows more about my work than I do. And I started a new piece on the road to our cabin in Newfoundland. I did it panning back and forth over the rough road, all the rocks and puddles, from the back of my truck. It’s going to be called In the Way.”

Vintage Snow, even in his eighties an artist whose unselfconscious confidence allows him to pursue ideas as they come to him — the artist as jazz musician.

Michael Snow was born in 1928 in Toronto, to a francophone mother and an anglophone father, and while he lived as a child in both Montreal and Chicoutimi, summering at his grandparents’ cottage on Lac Clair, it was in Toronto that he grew up. He was already making paintings and drawings when, as a student at Upper Canada College, he discovered the jazz of Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five, and the moody, supremely sexual sounds of Jelly Roll Morton. “So I started to play,” he says. “I was basically self-taught. My mother was a fine pianist, and she tried to take me to lessons, but I wouldn’t go; I’ve never been an easy one to teach.” Unbeknownst to the young Snow, the exotic, urbane, improvisatory nature of jazz had already made an impact on modernist paintings — from American artist Stuart Davis’s bright, whimsical city scenes of the ’20s, to dour Dutch painter Piet Mondrian’s swinging masterpiece Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43) — and jazz music and bands soon made their way into his early work. A small cubist drawing from that period hangs on the wall in his living room: a bunch of guys with big heads and wild, eager eyes set against a receding, fragmented cityscape. “This is a portrait of guys I was in a band with,” he tells me. Jazz was his introduction to the freedom and possibilities of art.

After high school, he attended what was then the Ontario College of Art, studying painting and drawing under director John Martin, who introduced him to the small Toronto art scene. Martin urged him to submit an abstract painting entitled Polyphony (“It was just a rip-off of the work of Mark Tobey,” Snow admits) to the Ontario Society of Artists’ annual juried show, and it was accepted, resulting in the first public exhibition of his art. After graduation, he worked for an advertising agency, made paintings, performed jazz music and travelled around Europe for the first time. Then, in 1955, he got an odd but defining break. The animated film producer George Dunning, who went on to direct the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, saw a small show of Snow’s drawings and offered him a job as an animator at Dunning’s Graphic Films. “I told him I wasn’t interested in the movies,” Snow recalls, “but he offered me the job anyway. Dunning wanted to hire fine artists, not just animators. With painting and music, I was inspired by example, so I had a lot of influences. But in film I had no real background, so I learned from the inside.” At least two important things happened during his brief tenure at Dunning’s Graphic Films: he met his first wife, the artist Joyce Wieland; and he made his first film, the animated short A to Z (1956).

It’s a quirky little film, but it implies themes that are consistent throughout Snow’s work: his close attention to the materials he works with, and his irreverent and often bawdy sense of humour. Shot in black and white and drawn in dark tones, it’s set against a background of two oblong windows and a swarming, sensuous ground. Two chairs face each other and begin hopping up and down, kissing each other at their fronts, flipping over and interlocking in a goofy yet ardent coital dance. By the second scene, domesticity literally creeps in. There is a house set on the horizon, and the two chairs sleep locked in a kind of cubist embrace, when in march a table and a vase. A to Z ends with the chairs politely pulled up to the table — a somewhat pessimistic allegory of the course of a relationship.

By the end of the ’50s, Snow and Wieland were married, and he was making a living as an artist and a jazz musician, exhibiting at the Bay Street gallery started by the Winnipeg-born frame maker Avrom Isaacs. It is easy to forget that Snow was an accomplished abstract painter. Lac Clair (1960), named after his childhood summer stomping ground in Quebec, is a work of oil on paper with taped edges. The piece’s central portion is a gorgeously brushed blue, the colour of water at twilight. The taped edges, on the other hand, underscore the constructed character of the image: this is a work that recalls the wind-whipped lake water typical in paintings by the Group of Seven, and that also looks inward toward its own nature as a work of art. But Snow was not by temperament an abstract painter, nor an artist oriented to working in a single style. He was always too restless for that, his mind crackling with too many different ideas.

“Even while doing purely abstract works, I was thinking about doing something with the figure,” says Snow. “So I started doing single figures without background on the wall. One day, I had this five-foot piece of cardboard, and I cut out a walking woman. I realized I had a stencil, so I decided to make a couple of copies. I then realized that what I had here was a female contour with a flat surface — and that I could do anything with it.” The prototype of the walking woman is a generic female form: breasts, a generously curving behind, her arm swinging back as she steps forward; and every subsequent iteration in the Walking Woman series, whether a painting, a drawing, or a sculpture, is based on that prototype. Snow has always insisted that the Walking Woman series has nothing to do with politics or feminism. “My subject is not woman or women, but the first cardboard cut-out of the walking woman I made,” he has said. “It’s not an idea. It’s just a drawing, and not a very good one.” But Walking Woman created a conceptual revolution in his work, allowing him to improvise in theme and variation, like a jazz musician, and, as he said, to do anything.