Abby and Ben, Melrose Market Studios, Seattle

Yawitz Wedding, Melrose Market Studios, Seattle, oil painting, 24 x 30

When I painted the holiday Jubilee at the WAC, I captured in the crowd a woman in a black and white chevron skirt. It was a bold print, and stood out clearly in the room, and in the painting. Someone recognized her in my scribbling, found her in another room at the party, and told her she was in my painting. She immediately came to see.

So, just a few months later, I painted her wedding.

Abby and Ben’s reception was at Melrose Market Studios, a renovated former grocery in a red brick and Douglas fir timbered 1927 building. This is classic Seattle.

It was a cozy family style affair, complete with darling blonde flower girls, dressed in white.

Flower girls and their mother, Yawitz Wedding (detail)

Garza-Ginther Wedding Reception, The Ruins, Seattle

This couple, both local television producers, tied the knot in a very private ceremony in Paris, in July. But they wanted to bring home a bit of Europe for their family and friends, so they held a stateside reception at The Ruins in Seattle. This hidden venue is tucked away in an old industrial space. Knowing the address, one finds a concrete building with a non-descript metal door, and a doorbell. But once inside, we are transported, as it seems, to a villa in France. There are vine draped courtyards, and room after room of elegant furnishings and art. The most formal of the dining rooms is framed in gilded trim, and features floor to ceiling murals which took artist Jennifer Carrasco three years to create.

 This is the third time I’ve painted in this room, and I hope to do it again. The place is magic.

Having dressed my canvas in some semblance of Ms. Carrasco’s nature scenes, half a dozen chandeliers, and some Venetian lamp posts, I was ready by the time the guests arrived to paint the most important features: the people. As they trickled in from cocktails in the adjacent room (to the right of my canvas), I caught a six year old girl peeking through the curtains. She was the first. Then came the couple’s teen age daughters, preteen son, and the array of parents, grandparents, siblings, and friends. Off in the distance, behind the cake, the Prague-born pianist Luke Doubravsky tickles all the keys. And shimmering in the center are the sophisticated couple. 

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.

The Adkins-Harris Wedding, The Rainier Club, Seattle

The Adkins Harris Wedding, Rainier Club, Seattle, ©2012 by Sam Day. Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches.

The Rainier Club is the oldest, and arguably the most important private club in Seattle. Founded when the city still had mud streets, the club hosted the first trade delegations from Japan to the United States. A century later, a US president broke bread here in Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings with Japan, China, and other Pacific Rim nations— the first APEC meetings in the United States. Lesser events within these walls are too numerous to mention, with the notable exception of the Adkins-Harris wedding of August 25, 2012.

The architecture is appropriately grand. Designed by Kirtland Cutter in 1904, in what was later called the Jacobethan style— a mixture of Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture; in short, a mash-up of everything. There are curvilinear parapet gables on all facades. The exterior is flash-fired clinker brick. And in room after room, one finds homage to a different age. In this one, ten solid Doric columns as thick as a Douglas Fir are illuminated on the west by peaked, gothic church windows, and on the east by a walk-in fireplace big enough for a half a cord of wood to be stored in the shadows (no longer used). The east walls are painted a dark crimson/Venetian red, from which the clinker brick of the fireplace recedes. But the other walls are a glowing Georgian yellow, trimmed in cream. The Doric columns are a glossy Van Dyck brown, looking chocolate in sunlight, and nearly black at night.

The art collection is one of the best in the city. The lobby has the usual Northwest Masters such as  Morris Graves and Kenneth Callahan, as well as living masters like Alden Mason. The halls are lined with photogravures in their original Art Nouveau frames by Edward S. Curtis, the famed photographer of Native Americans who lived in the club for a time, and paid his rent in original prints. There’s an Albert Bierstadt oil painting of Mount Rainier in the room where dinner was served. Among period seascapes, an incomparable portrait of Emma Frye hangs in the room where this couple was married.

It is into that room that we glimpse on the right side of my painting, and from which the couple emerges to join their guests.

The bride, a high school classmate of mine, wore a gown of pure sunlight refracted by something much softer than sequins— designed by Reem Accra—, and carried a bouquet by Aría Style. The groomsmen wore carmine colored orchids; the groom’s was white.

On the far left of the painting, the groom’s daughter sits at the Steinway, effortlessly embellishing Beatles songs. His son stands tall in the center with hereditary aplomb, next to the bride’s sister and the father of the groom. The genial best man and his wife are in the lower left, and a niece and nephew hold up a pillar with great interest. The mother of the bride is seated (in white) in mid distance in a room crowded with friends and family.

Along the north wall the band A New Groove belted out 70s R&B and rock classics, and Geoffrey Castle, a soloist on six string electric violin, fused musical styles with unparalleled virtuosity.

It was a great evening, in a great place, with great people. It was great to be there, and a privilege to paint it.

The Brooks Wedding, Hotel 1000, Seattle

Hotel 1000 is a swank West Edge venue in downtown Seattle. The wedding was on the outdoor terrace, Which became the scene of the dance floor after cocktails and dinner. My view looks west (on the left of the painting) into the Library, and north on the right, into the hall where dinner was served. When I visited the venue with the bride to plan my location, there was a floor to ceiling window here. But it was removed, frame and all, at the bride’s request, and replaced with these flowing curtains.

 A creamy, conservative northwest palette was punctuated with brilliant spring colors, in small bouquets. Similarly, the bride’s unassuming but oh-so-beautiful dress was accented with carmine red pumps, and her bridesmaids’ shoes were orange. Noticed perhaps by only the wedding party, there was also a covert theme of black and white stripes, on the groom’s socks and the bride’s heels. Having had this pointed out to me, I made sure they were in the painting.