“My process starts when I paint an abstract painting on a surface, usually a panel.  Once the painting is completed, I began to form the image that will go on top of it.  In this case, I was interested in using the image of a corpse of a snake I had found by the side of the road that I had stopped to photograph. I had several sequential images of the snake, which, although they were taken in color, I changed in Photoshop to black and white.  I loved the simplicity of the shape of the snake, and the beautiful pattern on its’ body.  As I began to work with the snake, a snake “boy” began to form itself, along with another painting I was working on at the same time, a snake “girl”.  I found the perfect head for him in my stockpile of photographed heads, a doll’s head that I had come across in a book on dolls.  The bottom part of the image, the boulders, came from a parking lot in Colorado, where rocks had been stockpiled to do future landscaping. The top part of the image comes from another snake corpse that I had photographed in Mississippi, but in this case, it wasn’t the snake I was after, but rather the beautiful background of pine cone needles that it rested on.” – Holly Roberts, 2010