Snake Charmer

This painting has lived several births and death cycles.

It started as something else entirely a meditation on a poem, on a man standing behind a counter in Cascais, on the philosophical patience of someone selling things to people who do not want to buy. I had been reading Fernando Pessoa's *Tabacaria* and sitting across from a gift shop near Lisbon when I saw him: an immigrant, a salesman, colorful merchandise surrounding him like plumage, but what held me was his stillness. His philosophical approach to being overlooked. He was doing his job the way the character in the poem does his — present, waiting, neither resigned nor hopeful.

When I came home I put him down on paper. Two versions of the same man, different hats, different colors, rolled towels stacked behind him. The painting began there.

The Abstractions

Then I wanted to abstract it. I started creating shapes and colors as objects themselves — my regular template emerged: orange, a greenish blue, heavy gray. But I pulled the palette from what I had actually seen in Cascais. Local colors. The colors of that particular Portuguese light.

Immediately after, distraction took over. I used stencils to add more shapes, more colors, a whole lot of chaos. The surface became crowded with possibility and noise.

Morocco Enters

I had just returned from Morocco and Málaga. The arcs started appearing — those doorways I had photographed in Tangier, shapes from Lisbon layered underneath, sketches from the Málaga museum bleeding through. The painting was accumulating geography the way a traveler's clothes accumulate dust.

The arcs became more prominent. I was getting pressured — a show approaching, the Morocco series demanding completion. I started working directly from photographs, and two images kept asserting themselves: an archway, and a snake charmer.

But I was going nowhere with the work.

The Breakthrough

That's when I made a bold choice. A mix of brown and blue for the wall. I painted it over everything. It didn't look right. So I tried to take it off with a paper towel, and that's when the earlier layers started emerging — textures I had forgotten I'd buried. The painting began speaking its own history back to me.

I wrote some of my favorite Marathi songs across the surface, lyrics I had been listening to. But problems remained: the arc and doorway sat dead center. The snake charmer crouched in the corner, and that placement was actually helping, but the composition resisted resolution.

This morning I painted over the bottom again. It had been orangey, then dark, now orangey again. Working with Mira on the atelier app, she suggested I keep the floor orange and asked the harder question: how do I solve the problem of not letting this painting drift toward naturalism? How do I keep it abstract?

She pointed out that the sky and everything inside the arc looked realistic. That was exactly what I needed to attack.

I referred back to an older painting called *The Cleaning Lady*, something I had made almost two years ago. I couldn't repeat that work, but I could consciously push this one in that direction. I started forcing geometric shapes into place — diagonal lines, triangles adding dimension where before there had been none.

The Snake Charmer Solves the Painting

The critical breakthrough came from the snake charmer himself.

When I was in Tangier, following Matisse's footsteps through Morocco, I saw this man sitting outside the famous gate. Our guide was walking us through the places Matisse had painted a century earlier. I paid the snake charmer to let me photograph him. He needed no staging — he was already photogenic, already composed, sitting there the way people have sat there for hundreds of years.

In my photograph, he wore a blue robe and a yellow turban. In the painting, I changed his robe to black. I kept the turban yellow.

Those two colors unlocked everything.

As soon as I made his robe black and his turban yellow, the painting resolved. I changed the arcs to more abstract color, wrote my poems across the surface, and it came to life. The snake charmer literally charmed the painting into being. He is like my fruit vendor — like Matisse's fruit vendor in Tangier, the one I had tried to backward decipher for years, wondering how the actual scene must have looked, where Matisse had stood when he placed those oranges exactly there.