The Snake Charmer - Original

He charmed the painting into being.

Some paintings have more than one birth. This one had several.

It began as a meditation on stillness — a portrait of a man near a Cascais gift shop, reading Pessoa's Tabacaria, watching an immigrant salesman with the philosophical patience of someone doing his job the way the poem's character does his. That figure went onto canvas. Then the painting mutated.

Moroccan arches started appearing — doorways photographed in Tangier, shapes from Lisbon layered underneath, sketches from the Málaga museum bleeding through. The surface accumulated geography the way a traveler's clothes accumulate dust. Song lyrics in Marathi were written across it. Layers of brown and blue were painted over, then partially wiped away with a paper towel — and the buried history of earlier versions came back through, alive.

The composition resisted resolution until the snake charmer arrived.

I had seen him in Tangier, sitting outside the famous Kasbah gate, while following Matisse's footsteps through the medina. Our guide walked us to the exact places Matisse had painted a century before. I paid the snake charmer to photograph him. He needed no staging — he was 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 placed him — black robe, yellow turban, crouching in the corner of the arch — the painting resolved. He is my fruit vendor, like Matisse's fruit vendor in Tangier: the figure that holds the whole composition together and makes it inevitable.

• Medium: Multimedia on canvas
• Dimensions: 20 × 30 cm
• Year: 2026
• One of a kind — original, mounted on the the frame.
• Artist: Satish Prabhu