the wedding coat

This painting was recently sold to a law firm. It's based loosely on antique Palestinian cloth designs. The finest garment a man might own would have been a wedding coat, handsewn by the women of his bachelor household, i.e., mothers, sisters, aunts, etc. I like red. For the past few years everything has been red. The overcast designs in the wedding coats were very abstract and colorful, and as long as they weren't followed too faithfully in my work, I found them a great basis for the painting. In fact, nothing in my work is ever followed too faithfully.

As Elaine DeKooning said when explaining that her husband 's work often began with cut-outs of Marilyn Monroe's lips, "You have to start somewhere".