Painting the Tacoma Heart Ball 2012, Hotel Murano

     The Tacoma Heart Ball is the annual gala auction for the Tacoma chapter of the American Heart Association. Friday, April 27, 2012 was the third year I’ve painted this event. The venue this year was the über-stylish Hotel Murano. Formerly the Sheraton Tacoma, a stark, mid century Modern high rise, the Murano is now a veritable art museum. It’s namesake is the famed glass blowing island in Venice, where centuries of tradition have refined the glass art that lives on in the Pacific Northwest, in large part because of Tacoma’s native son cum patron, Dale Chihuly.

     In this tall lobby, enormous glass canoes hang like chandeliers— an homage yet again, this time to the Salish tribes of Puget Sound. They appear distant in my painting only because they are. I set up my easel on the third story of a four story atrium, looking down the long hall toward the ballroom. We see the canoes lengthwise, so in the painting, alas, they look like hanging vases. 

     The nearer chandelier is a magnificent tangle of reflective glass from the isle of Murano itself, and the largest that glass artist has ever made. Another hanging feature— for one night only— is a trapeze artist in the stairwell, serving champagne to the guests. 

     The hotel lobby bar is to the left on the main level. Unfortunately hidden beneath the balcony from my view, the bar’s north wall is almost entirely covered by a framed print, my favorite work of art in the building: a full size Chuck Close (another Washington favorite son.)

This labyrinth of architecture was a challenge to paint, and per usual, I bent the perspective to include all that I could see. At charity auctions, I always paint the buyer of the painting into the foreground, and we see him here approaching as if he’d just come off the elevators (unseen, to the right.)

Heart Ball, Tacoma, Washington, February 20, 2010

This American Heart Association fundraiser was held in the spacious Tacoma convention Center, where the theme of the lobby art recalls the city’s timber roots. What looks like a brown X in the left side of the picture is an installation of heavy beams, salvaged from pioneer era buildings that used to occupy the site.

When I began painting, the room was filled with daylight, its panorama extending from the skyline to Mount Rainier. As with the painting in Benaroya Hall last October, the great challenge was for me to anticipate what the room would look like after dark, yet capture as much of the architectural setting as possible before the guests arrived. This is literally a reversal of light and dark. In the afternoon, the atrium walls were dark lines across a bright sky; by evening they became silver bars across blackened reflections. It was necessary to draw the window frames to establish the perspective of the room, but as the light changed, they had to be redrawn with the opposite colors.

Then why don’t I just use a pencil? I draw directly with oil paint, because it can be wiped off and changed much easier than erasing pencil, and because anything that doesn’t need changing is already finished without additional coloring.

These live event paintings are constantly changing until the evening is over. I routinely wipe off figures and fixtures to replace them with new people who’ve entered the room. But if I followed the academic method of drawing first with pencil or charcoal, then applying a fixative and coloring afterward in oils, I would not be able to change the initial drawing as the party moves and morphs. Not only would I be unable to erase the fixed pencil lines, once the painting began I would not be able to go back and add more pencil lines. My direct technique allows me to decide at the last minute to add your flower girl, as she is suddenly chased through the scene by the ring barer, and then gone.