Billy and Ingrid at Melrose Market Studios

What can be more elegant than the basement of an old urban produce warehouse, with exposed brick and old growth fir beams? Said basement dressed up by Tacoma based wedding designer Amanda Rose, who’s company Oak & Cyprus Weddings and Events also did the flowers. The small bouquets were simple and colorful, with surprising elements, like succulents. She brought in carefully selected antiques from Vintage Ambiance. Cake by People's Cake. The band played exquisite, understated jazz. The gathering was intimate, with only about 70 guests. There were nieces and nephews aplenty.

 A seven year old named Liam kept me on my toes with questions about oil painting— citrus thinner, linseed oil, the particular use of a four inch wide badger fan brush, and how to erase mistakes. (I can do that with oils, since they stay wet for quite a while.) Perhaps his best question was in response to my comment that I used to have a friend named Liam: “Do you still have a friend named Liam?”

There was a baby in attendance who was just old enough to crawl. As she played with the latches on the antique trunk that centered the makeshift living room, I painted her as fast as I could. One never knows how long a baby will pose for a portrait.

The bride and groom eventually stood for a few minutes for me to paint them, sometime after the first dance. The parents of the bride are on the couch, and of the groom, standing in the lower right.  

A 60th Birthday Party at Newcastle Country Club

This celebrant’s friends appreciate her sense of style. They all came dressed in black and white; only the guest of honor was dressed in red. Prestwick Terrace, the permanent party tent at The Golf Club at Newcastle, was likewise festooned with black table cloths and white flowers.

As always, I arrived early enough to get a head start painting the room (big top) and the view. This is a magnificent place to watch a sunset, and the last time I painted here I depicted the evening at dusk. This time I chose the bright summer sunlight. By the time the sun went down, all I had left to paint were faces, anyway. Oh, and one tireless birthday girl in a bright red dress.

The Peterson-Clawson Wedding, Alderbrook Resort, Hood Canal

I really should start offering an Alderbrook package deal. This venue was the first place I ever painted at a wedding, almost eight years ago. I love coming back here, especially when my wife and I get to stay over.

Being in the shadow of the Olympic Mountains, one has to plan for a rain contingency. I brought an extra canvas, just in case I might have to start over completely in the ballroom. But as I set up my easel on the lawn at about 3:00 p.m., the clouds began to scatter, and the sun came through the trees. The yard umbrella, provided for me by a thoughtful catering manager, became a parasol.

 The peak of Mount Washington still trailed clouds, and the mile wide Hood Canal was as flat as a lake. A harbor seal dove for shellfish in the shallows (he’s represented only by a ripple in the painting.) A row of yachts moored along the dock. The children spotted a family of raccoons high in a Douglas Fir tree, and I eventually painted the critters chasing the flower girls and ring bearers across the lawn. I painted the landscape, the lawn, and the tent set up for cocktails first. But the people were all behind me, where lounge chairs surrounded a fire pit. Photographs were being taken, conversation was warm, and they could watch me painting, instead of me watching them. But at 5:00 p.m. the D.J. called them to cocktails, and they moved down where I could see and paint them.

But all the while, the children ran on the lawn.

 I decided to place the couple front and center, dividing the ceremony from the cocktail hour in a symmetrical composition. After the wedding, the guests went into the ballroom for dinner, and the brides retired to the spa area for a respite before making their appearance to the ballroom. But before their entrance, they came back to the lawn and stood for their portraits for a few minutes. I usually manage this task late in the reception, and rarely get more than five or ten minutes with a couple before they get pulled away again by their guests. There were some complications with a bustle, and as the day-of coordinator pinned her up again, I got a luxurious fifteen minutes or more to paint their likenesses.

For the first time in all the years I’ve been painting weddings, I was done, and signed the painting, before dinner!

And then my wife and I enjoyed a relaxing weekend at a wonderful resort.

Please don’t tell the staff we fed crab to their cat. 

Esselbach-Gwinn Wedding, Newcastle Country Club, Bellevue, WA

When I paint a wedding, one of my pleasures is the individuality and character of each couple, their event design, and the culture specific to their family and friends. This couple were part of Wazzu culture, the epicenter of which happens to be my hometown. I’ve painted at a few Cougar weddings. It was great to hear the WSU fight song again. (John Candy sang it in the movie ‘Stripes.’)

It’s also a pleasure to paint beautiful people, and this bride was so beautiful, it felt like a sacrifice to paint them on the dance floor instead of up close, where you could see her smile better. But the couple spent so much of the evening on the dance floor, it was quite appropriate to depict them there. These are the challenges of a wedding painter. Unlike a photographer, I’m creating just one image over the course of several hours. It is a montage of the event and the scope of its time, but depicted as a snapshot as if it all happened at once. Parents aren’t any easier to pin down to stand for a portrait, since they’re so happily mixing with their guests. But that’s why I stay ‘til the last dance, if need be. They’re here in front, as proud as they should be.

The venue was the Golf Club at Newcastle, perched a thousand or so feet above the suburbs of Seattle, almost in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, with one of the most spectacular views of any venue in the region. The ceremony, and later the dancing, were held on Prestwick Terrace, a tented pavilion of circus proportions. Dinner was inside the clubhouse, in the St. Andrews Ballroom.  I painted the tent before and during the ceremony, including the expansive view, while anticipating how the light would change as the sun went down. But it wasn’t until nine o’clock, when the guests came back from dinner, that I was able to begin painting people.

And that’s my favorite part.

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.)

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. 

Voila Wedding Show, Woodmark Hotel, Kirkland Washington

This was the third year for the Voila! Wedding Show, at the Woodmark Hotel, Yacht Club and Spa at Carillon Point in Kirkland, Washington. I painted at the first Voila, and last year I did caricatures instead. Yesterday I returned with my easel.

Harpist Alishia Joubert tickled my ears throughout the afternoon, and made a lovely centerpiece for the painting. Tania Shepard of Azzura Photography happened to bring her parrot. Outfits by La Belle Reve stand in front of a cut paper backdrop by artist Celeste Cooning, whose work always lifts me into the clouds.