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It’s two hours before Wesley Thompson and Braydn Dresser exchange vows at a wedding venue near Fargo-Moorhead. The photographer is busy. So is Shanna Cramer, who’s there to capture a memory that a picture alone can’t match.
“Is it OK if we do a first kiss, because you want the first kiss right for the painting?” she asks the wedding planner.
The couple do one more first kiss. “Beautiful, yes, thank you,” Cramer tells the couple after she snaps a photo with her phone, ready to turn it into a work of art in oil paint.
A longtime artist, Cramer a few years ago started painting wedding scenes in real time. It takes a special skill to manage art and people on perhaps their most important, frenetic day. In an era of instant video and photography, she finds young people embracing her old-soul approach.
“It’s just more than a picture,” said Dresser, who discovered Cramer at a wedding expo and fell in love with her work. “It’s something special that we can always hold on to and it will mean something in the long run where we could show our kids one day — and for family to cherish.”
Cramer, 51, loves setting up her wedding-day easel and working as activity swirls around her.
“You can sit and paint in the studio all day, and it’s just boring and there’s nothing there,” she said. “But you can get out into life and with all the energy of the people, and it just — the paintings are just so much more, like energetic and just more beautiful, more interesting. I just love the vibe of it.”
‘It doesn’t always go perfectly’
Cramer’s painted for decades. She considers herself an impressionist. She’s long worked with groups of people, including “paint and sip” parties in the Fargo-Moorhead area where guests pay for wine, painting supplies and advice from the artist. She calls it fun art, not fine art.
She also does live painting at events where she’ll produce quick, impressionist portraits of guests during the event. She’s an avid plein air painter, a style where painters set up an easel outdoors and paint the scene in front of them.
“And weddings, I think of as more like plein air on steroids. So you’re still capturing the day, but you’re also capturing the vibe of the people.”
At the Thompson-Dresser wedding, the vows will be exchanged outdoors, so she starts framing and painting trees and other background before the ceremony starts.
Photos on her phone clipped to the easel help her create shapes, but the live scene is essential to getting the light and colors just right. “Painting from life is always better,” she says as she paints the outline of the kissing couple in front of the trees.
“I can work from a photo for that as well, if I need to, because there’s wind and everything else outside. So it doesn’t always go perfectly,” she said. “Sometimes veils go flying across the yard.”
And she's free to use artistic license.
“It doesn’t need to be photorealistic. That’s what you have a photographer for,” said Cramer. “I want it to be art, vibrant,” with a soft impressionistic style. “It’s all about the light, all about the color.”
Dresser said she’s been doing all the planning for the wedding. Her husband-to-be had only one request — a Cramer painting. “I saw it on TikTok and was like, ‘That’d be pretty cool to have,” said Thompson. He plans to hang the painting in a prime spot in the couple’s home.
The couple won’t get the painting for about a month. Cramer will add final details in her Moorhead studio. She prefers oil paint because the colors are luminous and natural, and oil takes time to fully dry. The paintings run from $2,000 to $6,000, depending on the complexity and size.
She has about one wedding a month scheduled this summer. While wedding painting has been popular for a decade in some parts of the country, she said it’s been a bit slow to catch on here.
Cramer confessed she really doesn’t like weddings unless she has a paintbrush in her hand.
“If I was here not painting,” she said with a laugh. “I would probably be hiding in the corner.”
English (US) ·