Studio Notes

Drawing the Gorgon

The design had nothing to do with snakes. It was about a woman who had stopped performing.

How Caravaggio, Ovid, and three weeks of wrong sketches led to The Gorgon.

Written byK.H.A.Zimmermann

Published on18 April 2026

I spent three weeks drawing Medusa before I understood that the design had nothing to do with snakes. Every early sketch leaned on the obvious — coiled serpents, a frozen stare, the kind of imagery that has illustrated this myth since the Renaissance. I had Caravaggio’s severed head open on my desk for most of that time, the one on the ceremonial shield in the Uffizi. It is a painting that mistakes horror for power, and I kept returning to it the way you return to an argument you know you have already won but cannot stop replaying.

The problem was not technical. I can draw snakes. The problem was that every version I produced looked like an illustration of a myth rather than an illustration of what the myth is actually about. Ovid tells the story plainly in the Metamorphoses: Medusa was a priestess of Athena. She was assaulted by Poseidon in Athena’s temple. Athena’s punishment — directed not at Poseidon but at Medusa — was to make her so terrible that no one could look at her without turning to stone. The monstrousness was not Medusa’s. It was projected onto her.

Caravaggio, Medusa (1597). Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

Once I understood that, the drawing changed. I stopped trying to render a monster and started drawing a woman in the act of refusal. The snakes receded — they are still present in the final design, but they read as texture rather than subject, woven into the border pattern the way a memory sits at the edge of a room. The face at the centre of The Gorgon is not frozen. She is looking directly at you, and what she is communicating is not threat. It is the simple, annihilating fact that she has stopped caring whether you find her beautiful.

I drew the final version on my iPad in Procreate, working from a pencil sketch I had taped to the wall above my monitor. The transition from paper to screen always changes something — pencil has a softness that digital rendering resists — but in this case the sharpness helped. The Gorgon is not a soft design. The lines are deliberate, almost architectural. I printed a test on plain cotton first, then on the nineteen-momme silk, and the difference confirmed a suspicion I’d had since the beginning: this design needed weight beneath it. On lighter fabric the gold tones washed out. On the heavier silk they burned.

She is looking directly at you, and what she is communicating is not threat. It is the simple, annihilating fact that she has stopped caring whether you find her beautiful.