Henry Owens, Called Snake by Jenny Craig

$100.00 - Please contact 23 Sandy for current availability.
Old man Snake lived down the road from me when I was a kid. He seemed ancient to me, and we'd see him wandering down the road every now and again. He dropped by on christmas morning one year when I was very young, and I remember him telling me a story. He said that he had never worked a day in his life—he won all his money at the casinos. I don't know if that's true. He had a little cabin which you could see from the road, down on some land right next to the dump. The mesquite is swallowing it up, now, bushes growing all around and through it. I asked about Snake when I went home to visit last year and one of the other neighbors said he'd been gone for years. She said he always used to give her "that good old slovacek sausage" in thanks because she'd make sure he had enough to eat on a regular basis. They called it snake sausage around her house. This print is a bit of a memorial, in the sense that if I don't remember him, I'm not sure who else will. It's also just a reaction to the beauty of that cabin being returned to the landscape. In my head, too, it's not like he had a firm death or leaving date. He was there in the background and then at some point, he was not. I like to think maybe he shed that body and has gone off into the weeds as an old black snake. I think he might have been ok with that. The text is composed of found wood type. The image is a series of original wood cuts printed repeatedly on a Vandercook press.

Artist Bio

Jenny Craig studied Book Arts at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and in Seattle at Day Moon Press on Beacon Hill. Her work wavers between general amusement at the antics of household objects & experiments with ink and paper.