The Snake Charmer - Original

Dimensions: 16 × 20 in
Location: Lisbon Studio

He charmed the painting into being.

This painting began in Cascais, with an immigrant salesman’s stillness and Fernando Pessoa’s Tabacaria. Then Morocco entered: doorways photographed in Tangier, shapes from Lisbon, and sketches from Málaga. The surface accumulated geography, Marathi song lyrics, and layers I painted over, then partly wiped away. Earlier versions refused to disappear.

The composition still would not settle. Its unlikely solution was a man I had photographed outside a gate in Tangier while following Matisse’s footsteps through Morocco. In the photograph, the snake charmer wore a blue robe and a yellow turban. In the painting, I made his robe black and kept the turban yellow.

Those two colors unlocked everything. The arches became more abstract; poems crossed the surface. After so many revisions, the figure in the corner finally held the painting together.

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

An original artwork by Satish Prabhu, created through his own studio practice. An artist-made work, not an AI-generated image.