Snake Charmer
2006 - 16"x20" Acrylic on canvas.
(Available - $200 USD)

This was my first acrylic painting. It is also my only painting, so far, that is pure acrylic without my usual mix of mediums (colored pencil, charcoal, oil pastel). The painting was started on Thanksgiving weekend of 2005, and was completed in early 2006.

I had been avoiding getting into acrylic painting because I found using a brush to be very difficult and intimidating. The painting originally started with paint being applied directly from the tube and spread around with a paper towel or my fingers. It looked terrible. For some unknown reason, I took some yellow paint and mixed it with an acrylic semi-gloss medium, and then applied it to the entire canvas. This became the foundation for my painting, and I believe this is why some of the colors have a glow to them.

I decided that I had to learn to paint with a brush and finished the painting only using a brush. It was a lot of trial and error, but I painted little by little until it started to look like a painting. It was completely improvised, and the snake and charmer were images I saw in the canvas and extracted them. I used many different colors and layered nearly every part of the painting with several different colors. This is a Wosene trademark that I really like. The strange black symbols don't mean anything, and were inspired by Wosene's use of abstract Amharic symbols. The symbols surrounding the snake charmer were inspired by American Indian art.