When I worked with this piece I was just playing around with colors, or at least I thought that I was. I especially was interested in the chrome piece in the top right corner. I looked at its mirrored surface and how the lights and darks are drawn on paper when this is printed. When you take the piece apart, it is all about the relationship of colors and shadows which make it interesting. Of course the reason I was doing this was to experiment with the program for making digital art called Corel Paint (from Corel Draw suite). I was trying different effects, and this seemed to be more important than the subject matter.
But after I showed this peace to others they were intrigued by the subject matter, as if they didn’t see all the work that went into it, which is obviously the truth. They didn’t see the different styles of alterations made on the snake before became a snake. He was once just a series of colored lines drawn quickly and furiously. But the painstaking testing of effects, which probably took 15 minutes, total goals simple lines into a splotchy collage of color which I saw as being a snake.
Knowing you are doing art, even if you’re not aware of it, or something more to it than meets the eye. Everyone sees the piece as they see it, it is because I was consciously trying to do one thing doesn’t mean I wasn’t doing another. You realize that as an artist, that you’re just playing with paints or digital art and something gets put down that it’s more of your soul or maybe it is just a marble in your head that may have come dislodged.
So now I sit here and I think about the snake and what it represents, its symbolism, and what it could mean. I realize that for many the snake is a dangerous animal, which can bring fear or intimidation to people. Eve and Adam may have something to say about that, but in the rest of the history of the world the snake has other meanings. Moses once had a staff with a snake on the top of it which represented God’s healing touch. When the people looked on the staff and they were bit by the snakes in the wilderness they would live. The Greeks used the symbol likewise to represent medicine. I mean snakes have venom, which can be used to make poison and a medicine. That concept has been used in medicine throughout the years. When you receive an inoculation, you may be receiving the poison into your system so that your body will develop an immunity to it.
Now the chrome piece, it has this hole. Now snakes can live in holes, but for some reason I really think it’s a snake represents a curious mind, which wants to see what’s inside the hole, to explore the unknown. So the whole represents the mysterious, the unknown, and possibly the unexplained.
Being that I was putting this art together not so much as an expression of my soul, but rather of my mind, this reading, this evaluation of the meaning of the work actually makes sense. At least to me, I can see that my work was to experiment not so much with the design but with the tools for making the art, exploring new techniques and new ideas. Isn’t that what our lives should be filled with? That ever present desire to learn more about ourselves and the world in which we live, and possibly to understand why we are here and why we were created.