Series #5: Procession of the Magi

Procession of the Magi by Benozzo Gozzoli. My current muse.

 Characters in Search of a Story

 BIG IDEAS:

1. I love to draw characters. Often cartoony in style.

2. I love looking at fantastic and well-crafted landscapes. Often rendered classically.

3. I don't have a story to connect them. I wish I did! 

(Everything appears and wanders randomly in my brain).

If it were 500 years ago in Europe, and I needed a story, I would paint a scene from the Bible. I'd have structure, patronage, all the main characters, some creative license, and suddenly my work would have universal significance. Amazing! 

Case in point: this is one of my favorite paintings in the world, the Procession of the Magi by Benozzo Gozzoli, painted from 1459-1461. It's part of a series of frescos in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi in Florence.

Gozzoli put his contemporaries' faces on the biblical procession: you can see Medici family members Lorenzo, Piero the Gouty (on the white horse) and Cosimo (on a donkey) and even a self-portrait by the artist (he's one of the figures wearing a red hat, on the left side of the composition).

Why I enjoy this painting so much:

1. It represents a journey. In a macro-sense, I imagine a universal journey-- we're all traveling from one place to another, simultaneously in a crowd and alone. 

2. Multiple levels of meaning- can be interpreted on a Biblical level, or as a vehicle for the artist to comment on the society he lived in, or many other ways as well by the modern viewer.

3. Visually exciting to the eye. The wealth of detail, with imagination and observation combined to make this fantastic landscape (i particularly love the cliffs).

SO: Here is my idea:

to take my hipster-cartoonish characters for a journey though a medieval-style landscape.

Beginning: unknown. 

Destination: unknown.

Significance? Some kind of universal, life-long journey.

I'm hoping a story will emerge as I continue. Here's my first experiment so far:

1- cliffs

2- begin the parade

3- advancing steadily

4. onward and forward! Dad said it looked like an 'exodus', so i'm attempting to make the background more cheerful. They're not fleeing from anything in particular-- just traveling from somewhere to somewhere else.

Alright! we've got a mysterious futuristic structure in the foreground and I've been working hard to develop the topiary. There are so many details in the original 'Magi' painting--next time I'm working on a larger scale!