Part Two: Themes & Iconography in the Art of Jos Sances
In Part One, we looked at how Jos Sances became the artist he is. Here in Part Two, we explore the imagery he returns to again and again—whales, laborers, collapsing landscapes, and bodies made of cities. These motifs form the backbone of his storytelling.
If Part One traced the arc of Sances’ artistic life, this section turns to the symbolic language that animates his prints and monumental scratchboard drawings. Sances is not simply a chronicler of contemporary issues; he constructs visual worlds where history, labor, ecology, and spirituality fuse into something fiercely personal yet culturally resonant. Many of these themes appear vividly in the prints available through Warnock Fine Arts, offering collectors an intimate entry point into his larger conceptual universe.
Whales: Icons of Majesty, Memory, and Warning
Among Sances’ many recurring symbols, none is more commanding than the whale. For Sances, the whale embodies vastness—of time, of consequence, of the narratives we project onto the natural world. When he created the fifty-foot scratchboard installation Or, the Whale, he transformed the animal into a vessel containing layers of American history, from colonization and capitalism to migration and environmental damage.
But the whale appears in smaller works, too, and always with multiple meanings:
A witness to the long arc of human impact
A figure of environmental fragility
A container for forgotten or uncomfortable histories
A mirror held up to human ambition
Even in the prints offered here at Warnock Fine Arts, variations of the whale motif carry this mixture of awe and forewarning. Sances uses the creature to collapse past and present into a single, haunting form.
Capitalism, Labor, and the Architecture of Power
Sances’ images are deeply shaped by his political commitments and lifelong engagement with working-class narratives. His figures frequently merge with machines, scaffolds, and industrial landscapes, suggesting that modern life imprints itself physically onto the body. The worker in Sances’ work is rarely a passive subject; instead, the human form becomes an active site of struggle, endurance, and transformation.
Common motifs include:
Heads constructed from factories or refineries
Bodies formed from tools, engines, or ship hulls
Hands that mimic cranes or mechanical arms
Crowded urban spaces growing from shoulders and spines
These are bodies shaped—sometimes literally—by systems of production and power. Several prints in the Warnock Fine Arts collection capture this brilliantly, offering collectors small-scale but potent examples of Sances’ ability to compress entire economies into a single figure.
Colonialism, Migration, and the Stories That Don’t Get Monuments
Another central thread in Sances’ work is the long shadow of colonialism and its ongoing impacts on communities in the Americas. His images trace the movement of people across borders, the erasure of indigenous landscapes, and the persistence of cultural memory despite political displacement.
In many prints, viewers encounter:
Families in motion
Caravans and border crossings
Ghostly architectural remnants of Mexico and California
Landscapes overwritten by industrial expansion
Sances once described his approach as “drawing the history that doesn’t get monuments.” His prints function as acts of remembrance, restoring visibility to stories that dominant narratives overlook. Works in this vein—especially those incorporating caravans, skeletal forms, or hybrid landscapes—make especially powerful additions to a collector’s wall, offering both visual richness and emotional gravity.
Environmental Collapse and the Living Landscape
Nature in Sances’ art is never silent. Seas churn with tension; forests strain under invisible pressures; skies break apart into fractured geometries. Landscapes behave like bodies, while bodies often mimic the rhythms of the natural world.
This duality reinforces a key belief: humans are inseparable from the environments we damage.
Even the smaller prints available through Warnock Fine Arts carry this idea. The environmental motifs in these works often reveal themselves gradually—first as surface-level scenes, then as deeper structures embedded within the cross-hatching and shadows. The longer one looks, the more the environment feels alive, reactive, and wounded.
The Human Figure as Vessel
Perhaps the most distinctive element of Sances’ iconography is his use of the human form as a container for other stories. A head may hold a city grid; a torso may conceal a coastline; an entire landscape may be tucked into the curve of a cheek or the bend of a shoulder.
This technique reaches its grandest scale in Or, the Whale, but it is equally mesmerizing in Sances’ limited-edition prints. Collectors often comment on how these smaller works continue to reveal new details over time—tiny embedded figures, structural echoes, and hidden narrative threads.
Living with a Sances print often feels like living with an artifact that rewards excavation.
Why These Themes Matter
Part of the enduring appeal of Sances’ work is how gracefully it balances political urgency with visual poetry. The themes explored here—ecology, labor, colonialism, human fragility, and resilience—are not separate ideas but interconnected parts of a larger worldview. His images are dense, layered, and often breathtaking in their intricacy, yet they remain accessible and emotionally direct.
For collectors, the prints offer a rare opportunity: to engage with an artist whose monumental works have appeared in museums, but whose smaller editions bring that same intellectual and visual power into the home.