On Painting Architecture

The first order of business, before painting the guests, is to paint the room in which they congregate. I’ve always been drawn to painting people, and though I love architecture, the thought of painting it as subject matter would have bored me stiff when I was younger. But weddings tend to be set in grand places, and brides and grooms place their memories in these great places. And as I’ve learned to scribble these settings quickly, I’ve come to appreciate architectural painters. As I have an eye for faces, those who are good at buildings have an eye for perspective. I forget about it. Sure, I studied it in school, learned to draw it with a tee square and triangle, even remember doing that homework on the bus. I don’t particularly remember the particulars now, though. And in these paintings, I’m bending the rules as far as I can see without making it look deliberately distorted. The scope of a painting is often more than 180 degrees. Some lines, then, get bent like a fish-eye lens. But I don’t distort the figures, at least not in a wide-angle lens way.
The painting shown here was done in the Northern Lights Dome Room at Seattle’s recently restored Arctic Hotel. It is a magnificent ceiling of stained glass and gilded molding, and presented a delicious challenge as the evening dimmed.