A Bainbridge Island Birthday Party

These people know how to throw a party.

Over a year ago, the wife contacted me to do a caricature of her, which she then personally copied onto her own handmade china plates for more than fifty guests for her 70th birthday. It would take her a year to create the ceramics. When she came to the studio for her caricature, she saw examples of my wedding paintings, which I often keep at the studio and deliver after they've dried. She loved the idea, and immediately booked me for the date.

The couple live on Bainbridge Island, looking across Puget Sound at Seattle, Washington. The party was set on their expansive, many terraced lawns, amid lush flowering gardens and ancient cedar trees. A well kept path led down the bluff to the sandy beach. A dance floor was laid for the occasion, and a cover band played classic rock. There were fire dancers, belly dancers, and exquisite food. The guests came dressed to the nines, but also in extraordinary costumes (note the elephant on a stick in the lower center of the painting.) Desserts included fresh spun cotton candy.

And since the event was at the client's home, I was able to leave the painting there, for a change!

I'm hoping to be invited back for her 80th.

Museum Quality Reprints

I don't know why I didn't think of this before. A groom recently asked me if it would be possible to make reprints of my painting of their wedding. As a matter of fact, I have an excellent source for that. The guy who make giclée prints on canvas of my religious paintings is right here in the neighborhood (Pioneer Square, Seattle), and can print individual copies on demand. These are archival, museum quality prints, canvas stretched over wood, just like the original oil. In the case of my client who thought of it first, prints were made for the grooms' parents. But a couple might also consider reprints as thank-you cards, using traditional offset printing.

Having an artist painting live at a wedding tends to be a great entertainment for the guests. It goes without saying that the couple will enjoy the painting in their home, happily ever after. With today's technology, so can their guests!

The Barron-Coles Wedding, The Canal, Seattle

For the Barron-Coles wedding, I was privileged to return to one of the very first venues at which I have created a live painting. The Canal overlooks the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks, a.k.a. the Ballard Locks, on the ship canal connecting Lakes Washington and Union with Puget Sound. It's the site of the infamous, nearly perennial battles between the Washington State Department of Fisheries and and certain lox-eating California sea lions. The view is entrancing, especially for lovers of yachts and other maritime comings and goings. But because the event venue is a stone's throw downstream from the actual locks that raise and lower vessels between lake and sea level, the crowds of tourists which gawk there are kept at a distance. There is actually a sense of privacy where we were perched. And this was a family gathering.

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.

Photos from the Roemer Davenport Wedding

Photos from a wedding always seem to trickle in for months. I'm grateful to Mrs. Jamie Davenport for sending me these photos of me painting at her wedding at the Seattle Art Museum's sculpture park, which I blogged about here.

Magnolia Cooperative Preschool Auction, December 4, 2010

The Magnolia Cooperative Preschool Auction presented some painting challenges, as it was set in Seattle's Fremont Studios, a soundstage production facility that doubles as a venue for events. There are some definite positives in such a venue. One can always ask for gaffer's tape or proximity to an electrical outlet, which I need for the lamp I perch on my easel, in order to paint in the dark. Painting in the dark is always a challenge. And a soundstage has black walls, black floors, and a black ceiling.

The first thing I paint at a wedding or event is the room. For most of my clients— weddings, that is— the venue is an important part of the memory of the occasion. But at any event, I have to establish the plane in which the social activity unfolds. (The academic word for this is perspective, but I twist perspective so much as to defile it.) This means, in the most mundane sense, painting the floor, the walls and the ceiling. And in this room, that means painting with a lot of black.

I don't carry a tube of black paint. I mix ultramarine blue and burnt umber (an ancient pigment, a very dark brown) to get the sootiest, most charcoal like hue— but with more interesting undertones. In a conventional technique, this would be used very sparingly until after other colors and brighter areas are defined. But with the unique demands of these event paintings, the figures are painted last. So the challenge of painting this black room full of luminous, beautiful people was to keep it bright. When I was a less experienced painter, I swore through many elegant evenings, as bright dresses got muddy and faces got sooty on my canvas.

I am most pleased with this painting for managing the light in a room full of dark.

Also unique to a soundstage or large photo studio is a wall known as a psyche. It is generally painted white, and used to photograph objects so that they appear to be floating in space. This is accomplished by a sweeping curve that blends the wall with the floor. At Fremont Studios, the room that doubles as an event venue and concert hall has two psyche walls, south and west. A semi truck with a sixty foot trailer can be photographed in this room. And for this event, the psyche walls were transformed, movie screen like, cast in neon blue with rising bubbles.

One does not paint lines to establish the perspective of such a room. It is all done in fields of color. That color is mostly black. And against that dark frame, the clear, bright faces of the couple who bought this painting really shine.