The quality of these two images is not great. I’m not sure what was happening, but I visited the exhibition at about the time I was starting to feel unwell last year, so maybe this went with the territory – as possibly does the subject.
Callan Park Gallery held a show titled Snakes last November, and I enjoyed several lovely examples of this mysterious animal by Jose dos Santos. The snake woman on the left was rich and more overtly sexual than the image makes out – complete with painted red vagina (which seems to have become muted in this photograph).
I’m thinking that the approach to dos Santos’ snakes should be as Hillman’s approach to snakes in dreams, i.e. phenomenological rather than analytical. In this nice quote from Hillman’s Inter-Views (1983):
“…a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what this snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake that’s walking into your life…and the moment you’ve defined the snake, you’ve interpreted it, you’ve lost the snake, you’ve stopped it…The task of analysis is to keep the snake there…”
Such an approach keeps the snakes of dos Santos (as it does the dream) alive, able to affect the consumer afresh on each encounter; chaotic, disturbing, as is his nest of vipers below.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m a big fan of snake sculptures myself. I sculpt them in clay and mixed media if you would like to look at my work. The images you posted are very good.
I like your work Eddie, yes, send me some snake work!
Hello and thank you too.
I enjoy your pages
My lines were just moans from the otherworld
My friend painted a little monster soon after starting painting in oils. It has oil snaking out everywhere and a red eye peeping through.
Since then the paintings are like
Encounters with a monster – they often look left and turn right and the snake will be there to keep you there and if you’r not careful it will swallow you whole.
On the other hand
So it was in my mind, along with a small painting I had done, which somehow transformed from an apple to early australian women in the bush – and a bogong moth had also something to do with it.
– just before exhibiting in a local gallery became terrifying for me and a profile of a monster in front of the curtain came to me..then another in mirror image and more or less symmetrical .
I found in a book which just happened to match the profile – an Egyptian funeral procession of bare breasted women was a line drawing and the arms were raised and flailing, and the jutting elbows of the two women at either end just happened to be symmetrical…
Rose
Your painting sounds great Rose. Maybe if you have photos we can arrange for you to send them to me?
Regards,
Ron
Monster
Monster moment
Monster’s crown
Medusa mourning
ah! thanks Rose