Reproductie van een schilderij van een slangenbezweerder door Etienne Dinet before 1901

This is a reproduction of a painting by Etienne Dinet, of a snake charmer. It's grayscale, so the charmer emerges from the crowd in monochrome. I can imagine Dinet, outside somewhere, sweating, squinting, and mixing up his paints. Maybe he's thinking about Delacroix, or some other Orientalist painter, or maybe he's trying to get that feeling of sand in your shoes just right. You can almost feel the baked earth in the limited palette. The gaze of the snake charmer directs the whole picture. It makes me wonder if Dinet had to charm his models too. I always feel like that when I'm painting someone - you have to make friends with them. It's like you're both in the painting. Painters are always looking at other painters, borrowing, stealing, and having secret conversations across time. Painting is this language - embodied, ambiguous, and always open to interpretation. Like magic, it can summon up a whole world with just a few marks.