Artist immortalizes weddings as they happen
After months of planning, agonizing over every last dripping detail, unloading piles of cash, the big day has finally arrived.
And your wedding cake is more of a muddy orange than gleaming white.
Don't worry. Joan Zylkin can fix that.
With the sweep of a brush, the academy-trained artist and longtime Delaware resident can literally erase every drunk groomsman, wilting peony, cold chicken cutlet, hailstorm and back bulge that's interfering with the wedding of your dreams.
Trained en plein air, she transfers her impressionist technique of capturing vibrant colors and quick movements as they unfold to the pomp of the Hotel du Pont Gold Ballroom, the Brantwyn estate and Rockwood Park Carriage House.
In the end, the couple receives an oil painting that's a highlight reel from their wedding day, displayed on the mantel instead of collecting dust with the photo album and video.
Many clients, including Anne North Reed of Wilmington, view fine wedding art as an add-on, not a substitute for the above.
"I don't think I had anybody who ever heard of it, including my wedding coordinator," says Reed, who hired Zylkin to paint her French-themed wedding at Brantwyn in 2013.
The artist counts a half-dozen competitors nationwide, charging $600 to more than $5,000 per piece. The live event painting industry took off only in the last decade, and Zylkin says most of her competitors specialize in realism, caricature or primitive painting.
Wedding vendor associations don't track the number of live event painters. As with most trends, the art form emerged in New York and California and then trickled down to Delaware, according to Nicole Bailey, who runs Elevee Events in Rehoboth Beach and serves as vice president for the Greater Philadelphia chapter of the National Association for Catering and Events.
"I see it as an evolved form of the caricaturists that have long been popular at corporate and social events," she says.
Zylkin believes her work is "priceless," but she charges from $2,200 to $3,500 for her most popular sizes (20 by 24 inches to 24 by 36 inches). After all, she can dress your lute player in more authentic garb, resurrect a deceased loved one and bedazzle that bare bones Las Vegas chapel. Often, the couple's first dance is front and center.
"I take a blank surface and put a world on it," she says from behind her canary yellow-rimmed glasses.
Some balk at the fee, she admits, discounting the amount of preparation and editing involved in composing a work of art. Typically, she arrives two to three hours before the event to begin painting the background. She can finish a painting in one evening, but will often take it home to tweak before delivering it to the couple.
She paints roughly 25 events a year, and more than half of her inquiries are from the New York area. She has traveled to Chicago, California and down South, but charges extra for travel and accommodations when a venue is more than a 30-mile radius from her home in Center City, Philadelphia. Wilmington makes the cut; southern Delaware incurs additional expenses. Popular dates are booked far in advance.
Zylkin advertises a host of services on her website, theeventpainter.com, including painting ceremonies from photographs or creating a miniature portrait of a father-daughter dance as a gift for the father-of-the-bride. For an extra fee, she'll provide a digital image of her work to be slapped on thank-you notes.
"What I'm really doing is demystifying fine art for the man on the street to enjoy," she says.
She used to brand herself as a wedding painter, until she received a flood of inquiries from bar/bat mitzvah parents, corporate fundraisers, and retirement, birthday and reunion party organizers. Her corporate clients include Merck, Microsoft, Mercedes-Benz and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia. Her largest painting ever completed – 48 by 72 inches – was for the grand opening of Mercedes-Benz of Wilmington.
The company CEO raved about it, she recalls, and the painter was as much a spectacle as the belly dancers.
At weddings, she will wear earplugs to drown out the DJ and regular requests from passersby to be memorialized on canvas. (Zylkin consults with the couple in advance to determine who's in and who's out.)
She grimly recalls a Long Island wedding immediately after Superstorm Sandy, during which she arrived late due to weather, walked straight into a plate glass door and forgot her blessed earplugs.
Still, she made it work.
Late bloomer
Now 69 with a silver crop cut, she discovered art later in life, after working as a bilingual secretary in Paris, a journalist in Sydney and as a high-end dress shop owner in the London suburbs.
Born in England, she moved to Delaware in 1986 when her husband took a job at Imperial Chemical Industries, now AstraZeneca.
After studying art as an undergraduate, she took classes as a 40-something in painting figures, landscapes and still lifes at the Delaware Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she trained for three years. There, she learned to paint poses in under 20 minutes and refine interior worlds.
In her free time, she experimented with painting scenes while strolling Wilmington's Riverwalk or hanging out at Bellefonte Café, the DuPont Clifford Brown Jazz Festival, or the downtown train station. With her loaded brush, she composed the backdrop and filled in the figures, drawing inspiration from impressionists and neo-impressionists like Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Henri Matisse.
A former resident of Greenville and Arden, she has shown her work at the Delaware Art Museum, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, and at several local galleries.
Her technique is reminiscent of a simpler time, when every image of your cake-plastered face wasn't shared with 500 of your closest friends.
But her clients are anything but simple. A bald groom wants a topper, while a bride asks that her ceramic bulldog be represented. No one has ever asked for a refund due to divorce, however.
"Maybe a painting will make a couple think twice about a divorce," she muses. "After all, if you commit to a painting …"
Celebrity clients have included Kyle Lowry of the Toronto Raptors and former Wilmington Blue Rocks pitcher Brian Bass.
For one northern New Jersey ceremony, Zylkin honored the bride's father, a firefighter who died during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, by incorporating the Freedom Tower and a spraying fireboat in the background. (Both were actually visible from the venue.)
In another outdoor wedding at an 80-acre family farm in St. Georges, Zylkin included the couple's initials in fireworks and erased unsightly tent flaps.
"The painting was just so unique and it's such a great keepsake," says mother-of-the-bride Robin Lester, who hired Zylkin for her daughter's May wedding. Mother and daughter, Katherine, discovered Zylkin's work five years ago at a Lewes café – before Katherine had even met her husband.
The Reeds' radiant painting hangs in the main drag of their Wilmington home, just past the foyer. It depicts the bride and groom dancing with abandon, surrounded by abstract loved ones.
The bride, a former marketing executive, wears a satin cream gown with embroidered netting. Her back is turned, arms outstretched behind her. The groom, a lawyer, is barely recognizable in loose strokes, acknowledges Reed. But that's not the point.
Zylkin captures distinct mannerisms, she says. Reed's sister, for instance, is a blur with a contemplative head tilt.
For her own wedding, Zylkin was content with the non-idealized version. With four days of planning, she got married at the Richmond Registry Office on the outskirts of London in a one-shoulder dress with fox cape and clip-on sequin skull cap. The couple has been married for 33 years and raised two children. They recruited a witness to take some photographs, albeit limited to linear time.
It was different back then, Zylkin acknowledges.
Today, the average wedding costs nearly $30,000 and couples have registries to keep track of their registries.
"Besides the wedding rings and vows, what else is really permanent from that day?" she says.
She won't promise you forever. But those cascading orchids, that gleaming chandelier, your weepy grandma, your back-flipping best man, that embrace on the dance floor – they'll live on forever.
Contact Margie Fishman at (302) 324-2882 or mfishman@delawareonline.com.
For more information
Go to www.theevent painter.com or call (302) 475-0990.