ArtistsNetwork.com 35I imagined this composition forming the armature of
a contemporary painting. I’ve been to several Jewish
weddings in the last few years, and the two figures waving
down the ship reminded me of the bride and groom being
lifted on chairs above wedding guests. I could picture the
couple waving a white cloth, with guests dancing faster and
faster in a circle around them. As I tried to picture the
whole composition, I also began to imagine inebriated,
apathetic guests draped across the foreground tables, with
increasingly excited figures in the background, surround-
ing the bride at the pinnacle of the composition. It seemed
funny to me to think of marriage as a symbol of salvation.
GATHERING RESOURCES
As the ideas were formulating, it happened that I attended
a summertime wedding that was held in the Garfield Park
Conservatory in Chicago, and I imagined setting my paint-
ing in a similar space. So, I took photos of the room, the
cake, the tables. On the flight home, I made a sketch
(above) based on The Raft of the Medusa along with some of
the photos I’d just taken. I tried to figure out how the space
would work: Could the raft become a series of tables? What
piece of architecture could stand in for the sail?
My idea for how to make the composition more contem-
porary was, paradoxically, to combine Géricault’s Baroque
composition, painted in 1818-19, with the light and space of
earlier painters such as Giotto (Italian; 1266-1337) and
Piero della Francesca (Italian; 1416-92). In Piero’s The
Legend of the True Cross (see detail, top right), each form is
THE DISCOVERIES THAT HAPPEN OVER TIME ARE
MORE INTERESTING TO ME THAN ANY IMAGE
I COULD HAVE PRECONCEIVED AND EXECUTED.
Sketch for Wedding
pencil on paper
5x6
Battle Between
Heraclius and
Chosroes (detail from
a series of frescoes,
Legend of the True
Cross)
by Piero Della
Francsesca
1458–1466; fresco
10 ¾ x24½ feet
BASILICA OF SAN FRANCESCO,
AREZZO, ITALYThe Birth of the
Virgin (from a series of
frescoes)
by Giotto di Bondone
1303–1305; fresco
78 ¾ x72¾
SCROVEGNI CHAPEL,
PADUA, ITALYfully illuminated, forming broad shapes that push up against
one another. The space becomes compressed and flattened
like a collage, and the visual jumps that this creates are sur-
prising and exciting. I wondered: Could I take the armature
of Géricault’s painting and combine it with a space like that?
I took reference photos of friends and family, individu-
ally and in small groups, mirroring the poses and the
relationships of the figures in the Géricault. Next, I worked
on a series of small studies in gouache (see page 36) to
combine all these sources into a single image.
I tried out different conservatory spaces and lighting for
the setting. I determined that the Garfield Park Conservatory
felt far too large for the scale of the figures, and that’s when
I began to imagine building a stranger, smaller structure—
the kind one might find in a Giotto painting (see The Birth of
the Virgin, above).OPEN TO CHANGES
After tacking a giant piece of linen on the wall, I massed in
the big shapes in color, using my final gouache study as a
guide. I made changes as I went, moving shapes and enlarg-
ing figures to fill up more space as the painting developed.