If you happen to stop into a FedEx store in Atlanta and see a woman obsessively cutting out shapes from blown up photocopies of photographs of grand interiors, then splicing them together to create a cohesive composition of near proportional perfection, it may be artist Gail Wegodsky. It is one step in a long, painstaking creative process that results in elaborate oil paintings of the interiors of some of the world’s architectural wonders.

A little more than a decade ago, Wegodsky took a selection of her paintings to New York to shop them around to galleries. In her portfolio were figurative works, interiors, landscapes, still lifes and portraits.

The artist in her studio.

“For years, I would paint whatever I saw in my daily life that I found inspirational,” shares Wegodsky. “I’d be walking early in the morning and see footprints in the wet grass and think ‘how spectacular!’ or I’d be in the studio and feel like setting up a still life…I was really floating between whatever interested me at the moment.”

But when she presented her canvases, none of the galleries showed any interest. “Except for one woman who took a look at my website and told me the problem was that galleries didn’t know how to market my work. She said I needed to pick one thing and do it for a few years and see what happens. She suggested I focus on my interiors. I took her advice and I’m so glad I did.”

Window to the Past, 2025, oil on linen, 34 x 34 in. Courtesy Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte, NC.

Wegodsky has kept in touch with the woman who nudged her in that direction ever since, and still turns to her—and others—for creative insight. During that same trip to New York, she was trying to figure out what would complete her dreamy painting Green Legs and Pan, in which a dog watches a woman make iridescent bubbles as light streams in from a wall of windows, casting patterned shadows on the honey-hued wood floors. The stained glass door is open just enough to see a house and a man mowing the lawn in the distance. She received a lot of suggestions, but it was the same woman who suggested she paint something coming in from the outside. Wegodsky added a bumblebee in the center of the painting, which went on to win multiple awards.

Wegodsky’s blueprint for Window to the Past. 

Some years later, Wegodsky and the woman from the gallery were having lunch at the historic Morgan Library and Museum in New York City.

“Out of the blue, she suggested I try painting a library,” shares Wegodsky. “It was weirdly specific. But she knew I love to read and am not very good at electronics, and even though she had moved on from the gallery by then, was familiar with the marketplace. She thought it would fit my personality and I think she was right. She has an intuitive sense that most people don’t.”

Back in Atlanta, Wegodsky set out to explore noteworthy libraries in her area with plans to take reference photographs, but between fighting traffic, off-lighting and feeling uncomfortable taking photos of people while they were studying, she turned to finding images online, which literally opened up a whole world of possibilities. Windows to the Past and Book Sale at the Forum both depict the same public space and library in Norwich, England, and specifically the light-filled atrium whose end wall frames a 15th-century Gothic church. Wegodsky found images of the interior and roof on the architect’s website, and another photograph from the library itself and set to work on Windows to the Past.

The Fall, 2023, oil on linen, 38 x 36 in.

“I have to find photos that are close in perspective so I can fuse them together,” explains Wegodsky. “And the horizon line on the two photos are very similar—whoever took them were probably standing on the same level. Then I had to get the colors to fuse together. The one photo of the roof was taken on a cloudy day, everything was a purply gray; it was a sunny day in the other. I can fuse together a number of photographs into a beautiful composition, and take the color from one, the light from another.”

Then it’s time to go to FedEx, where Wegodsky will spend the better part of a day creating a blueprint for her painting. “I bring my scissors and painter’s tape and move things around until they fuse correctly. It’s like a Frankenstein thing.”

Sanctuary, 2022, oil on linen, 30 x 40 in.

When her composition is cobbled together, she blows it up in black and white, and using carbon paper and a ball point pen, traces it onto pre-primed linen.

Other tools she employs include a proportional wheel to accurately scale each component of her composition, as well as a 50-piece plastic elliptical set. She used the latter in works like Sanctuary to accurately portray the depth and slant of the round recessed windows in the arched ceiling of the Salle Labrouste, one of the most beautiful libraries in Paris.

“And just to clue you in on how compulsive my personality can be, I then created paper patterns with those ellipse templates of the concentric circles around the skylights,” Wegodsky says, “which I traced onto my painting after I had made them bigger and smaller to fit perfectly around the size of skylights on my Frankenstein paper pattern of [the] whole room. The fusing of so many photos to create one big, visually believable view of those domes nearly sent me to the nut house!”

Xxuberant Light!, 2025, oil on linen, 32¾ x 38½ in.

Working from three different photos, she chose what figures she wanted to put in the painting and where and, like the bumblebee in her earlier work, decided that the final touch it needed was the silhouette of a person marveling at the magnificent ceiling at the far end of the room.

An artist of a different temperament (and skillset) would probably do all of this editing digitally, but not Wegodsky. “It’s so unpleasant for me to use the electronics…it’s easier for me to go to FedEx and move things around than learn all the different codes with Photoshop…I took a course once and almost lost my mind.”

Reflections, 2015, oil on linen, 48 x 43 in.

The Fall, a painting of the Boston Athenaeum reading room, is another example where Wegodsky did quite a bit of interior design. She moved in artwork, like the statue of Adam and Eve, took out someone who was reading, put a nearby historic cemetery out the window, and busts in the niches that cast their glances down toward the sculpture.

“It’s almost like I’ve visited these places after I’ve examined every nook and cranny for months at a time,” says Wegodsky. “They’re all very challenging…It requires a certain amount of self-flagellation and a lot of patience but it’s meditative, too…I usually don’t want to know how long they take.”

Green Legs and Pan, 2015, oil on linen, 52 x 52 in.

Her last painting, Xxuberant Light!, depicting the Seattle Public Library, took Wegodsky nearly five months to complete.

Telepathic Chatis a more intimate scene of the West Sider Bookstore in New York City, one location she has visited in person, where the three-point perspective—how the stairs narrow toward the bottom of the canvas—enhances the painting by drawing the viewer’s eye down to the cat sitting at the door. She made it her own by changing the name on the storefront window to “Wegodsky Books.”  “Someone contacted me and asked me how I could possibly run a bookstore and also make these paintings,” the artist laughs.

Telepathic Chat, oil on linen, 38 x 22 in. Courtesy Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte, NC.

She recounts being at a friend’s house and, for entertainment, put on some tan bunny ears, and someone saying how they matched her green eyes. “I realized that outside it was all green, the trees and the grass, and they were reflecting into the room making the ears look green. I realized that I see those things because I am looking all the time. That’s my religious, or spiritual, experience…it’s like those footprints in the grass, and thinking how beautiful, how it brings me such pleasure to notice them. I don’t know if other people see those things.”

For Wegodsky, being a realist painter is more challenging than being an abstract artist—in addition to mastering the fundamental principles of composition, which apply to all paintings, you also have to make something look real. She also finds a sense of comfort in representational art.

Book Sale at the Forum, 2024, oil on linen, 321 ⁄8 x 37 1⁄8 in. Courtesy Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte, NC.

“I like knowing what I’m looking at now that I’m an old lady,” she says. “I’m in reality. When I’m just painting what’s in my imagination, I feel like I’m fishing around in my mind for an interesting pattern or shape, and I feel kind of lost. I feel like I’ve got my blanket pulled up around me when I’m painting what I see…it feels safe.”  —

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