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.)
