Pan Pacific Hotel Bridal Open House

It's a pleasure to participate in several bridal shows a year. This one on February 17, 2011, was at the Pan Pacific Hotel-Seattle.

The Pan Pacific-Seattle is the international hotel chain's first location in the United States, having established its luxury mark throughout Asia and the Pacific Rim from its base in Singapore. It is indeed grand, richly paneled in lightly stained wenge, my favorite tropical hardwood. (Look closely at the walls in the painting. They have horizontal stripes. If you go to this hotel, be bold enough to run your fingers along the wall; you can feel the age lines of these trees.)

The Grow Your Love Bridal Open House was not your typical sprawling convention center trade show. It was a more intimate affair, hosted as a mock wedding, with 200 brides-to-be as the invited guests. Actors were hired as the bride and groom of the evening, whose gregarious mothers warbled an amusingly altered version of "Sunrise, Sunset" from Fiddler on the Roof. They were married by a nice Reverend and toasted by their shy, proud fathers, all local actors. They even tossed the bouquet and cut the cake. I've immortalized them in this painting as I would any real couple.

My friend BreeAnn Gale of Pink Blossom Events orchestrated this fair, and I would have painted her into the scene, but she didn't stand still long enough. And frankly, I have a lot of experience painting people who aren't standing still.

I get asked about this a lot:

"Are you going to take photos and paint from the pictures?"

"If I give you photos of my [already transpired] wedding, can you paint from that?"

My specialty is painting live. This is the ancient art of looking at things and painting them as they happen. I do need a few minutes with the bride and groom, generally.

A lot of my wedding paintings can be a bit dark, as they are paintings of receptions in romantically dimmed rooms. This one is brightened by spring green fabrics from Aría|Style, whose talented owner wore a coat of matching silk, embroidered with pink flowers to evoke the accent lighting that uplit the corners of the room. She appears mid-painting, against the wall. For me, this green theme evoked my parents' dining room, which is trimmed in a similar shade of tulip stem, against walls of just barely minter-than-white— my father's design.

But I digress.

Did I mention the few from deck, with its veriegated pebble garden and teak lounge chairs?

Live Auction Painting at the Heart Ball 2011

The Tacoma chapter of the American Heart Association held their 2011 Heart Ball at the Hotel Murano, Tacoma Washington. This is the second year I've been asked to paint at this auction. The 1930 Packard in the corner is courtesy of the LeMay Museum.

Host Hospitality Party and Event Planning put me in the center of the Bicentennial Plaza on a riser the size of a small stage, between the entrance and the ballroom. In the wings to either side of me were the displays for the silent auction. As has become the custom when I paint at auctions, I painted the crowd as they browsed and bidded on the silent items. When the live auction began, I took off my apron, put on my tux coat, and carried my painting to the main stage to parade it around, Vanna White style, during the bidding. After the auction, the buyer and spouse came back to my easel to pose for their quick portrait.

This is not like a presidential portrait, with the smooth finish of a John Singer Sargent— although I can do that too. This is an impressionistic portrait; an oil painting version of the caricatures I honed at events for 20+ years.