The Grooms of June at the Fairmont Olympic

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The Victor-Barnes Wedding, The Fairmont Olympic Hotel, Seattle

TheFairmont Olympic Hotel is the grandest old hotel in downtown Seattle, housed in an Italian Renaissance edifice with marble clad lobbies, Corinthian columns, and vast, ornate ballrooms. The Garden Room is the centerpiece of these gathering spaces, with double height windows rising above the hedges of the motor court.

The gentlemen who chose this place to exchange their vows are lovers of the arts, and I was pleased to have been among the evening’s artistic offerings.

Upon entering the lounge, guests lined up to have custom poetry written on the spot by Typing Explosion, a performing trio in the guise of mid-century secretaries. The nostalgic song of their typewriters was accompanied par excellence by the Seattle String Ensemble, and dancers emerged from the shadows, choreographed by Rainbow Fletcher.

The grooms with flower girls

At the end of the cocktail hour the violins went down, and the convivial voices rose. But suddenly the crowd hushed, as Jennifer Krikawa, an operatic soprano, began—mezzo piano— to call them to form a ribbon- lined aisle.   She sang from both the standard opera repertoire and Broadway show tunes. I got a little verklempt at Somewhere There’s a Place for Us from West Side Story; later a Mezzo joined her for the famous Flower Duet from the opera Lakmé, by Delibes.  As an avocational tenor myself, I was in heaven.  

During dinner the grooms and their flower girls found time to stand for quick portraits, and the painting was done by the time the dance troupe returned to pull them onto the dance floor with white feather boas.

The Seattle Hotel Association’s Evening of Hope

The Seattle Hotel Association's Evening of Hope Gala 2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches, by Sam Day

Every time I do a live event painting for a charity auction, I show up early enough to paint the venue, and then when the guests arrive for cocktails, I can just paint people until they’re called to dinner for the live auction. As my painting is auctioned off, I go on stage and do the Vanna White thing. The buyer is then welcome to meet me back in the lobby after the auction to have his or her face, along with a guest or two, painted into the scene.

Seattle's Finest

The Seattle Hotel Association’s gala Evening of Hope benefits the Seattle Police Foundation, which allowed me to paint some things I don’t usually put into a picture of a cocktail party. I really wanted to put the police dog in the painting, but I heard him more than I saw him; he was down in the lower lobby. Alas, they kept the horses outside. There was a bomb squad robot at the other end of the room, and the SWAT team had a radio controlled crawling camera dodging peoples’ feet, but those didn’t make it into the painting either. However, I was fortunate enough to be placed next to this cool table of “small arms.” I asked what one of the rifles was called, and got an exhaustive answer detailing its range and capabilities. These were all very expensive, state of the art tools, essential to some very expensive programs. The Seattle Hotel Association was gathered to raise funds to equip them, helping to make Seattle a safer place to live and visit.

 But it turned out the buyer of my painting was more interested in the architecture. The magnificent venue is the Olympic Fairmont Hotel, one of the grandest spaces in the Pacific Northwest. Built in 1924, it quickly became the premier destination in the region for Presidents, foreign dignitaries, and celebrities. But after decades of age, and the recession of the 1970s, this grand dame was in need of a facelift— and new owners. In 1981 she became the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel (and later, in 2004, the Fairmont Olympic). In 1982, the black lacquered Spanish Foyer was stripped down to the beautiful walnut paneling we see here.

And the man who bought my painting reminisced that he had been the one to make that all happen. In addition to the hotelier friends he asked to stand in, he also requested that I paint in another friend— a waiter who had served in this room for decades.