Artists bring whimsy to McMenamins entertainment complex in Bothell

  • By Jennifer Sasseen For The Herald Business Journal
  • Friday, September 18, 2015 3:18pm
  • BusinessBothell

BOTHELL — There’s magic in McMenamin land.

“The excitement and electricity in the air is quite palpable,” said longtime McMenamins artist Olivia Behm, at Bothell’s historic Anderson School. “You start feeling it on the construction site.”

Along with McMenamins artist Myrna Yoder — a mostly-stay-at-home-mom and “wizard behind the scenes” in Portland — Behm, 62, is guiding the artists helping to transform Anderson School into the newest McMenamins playland.

Set to open Oct. 15, the $26 million project at 18603 Bothell Way NE will feature a 72-room hotel, a 134-seat, first-run movie theater, three main bars and four smaller ones, a game room and a 112-foot-long saltwater pool that will be open for Bothell residents and guests.

Famous for inspiring the craft-brewing industry in the Northwest and for turning old buildings into a string of pubs and entertainment meccas brimming with history and quirky artwork, Mike and Brian McMenamin are also known for the rallying cry: “The main thing is to have fun!”

And the artists are having fun. Plenty of it.

Patty Forte Linna, 55, of Brier, said she can hardly wait to go to work every day and create art. Encountered recently as she painted a tiki-inspired border around bathroom walls, she marveled at the freedom to paint her own vision on walls, bed headboards and panels.

“This whole thing is really fun,” she said. “It really is. I feel like I’m in Disneyland every day.”

Forte Linna is one of about a dozen artists hired locally to help paint the school McMenamin-style, which gives them a lot of leeway.

“Mike McMenamin is a genius because he encourages artists by not telling them what to do,” said 42-year-old Damian Zari, one of the few Portland artists onsite.

As if to demonstrate the ability to be different, Zari was airbrushing a bathroom border of undulating gray pipes and red faucet handles across the walls. He does it all freehand, he said.

That differs from the decorative-painting technique Behm teaches, in which artists make stencils by drawing designs on painters’ masking paper.

They cut through the stencils by tracing their designs with sharp-toothed pounce wheels.

Then they transfer the designs to the walls with pounce pads filled with charcoal, which seeps through holes in the stencils. After painting the basic design, they can add to it at will.

It’s all done independently of the bedroom artwork, which will include a headboard and wall panel, usually 38 by 48 inches, depicting a local character or group for whom the room is named.

The process starts with a meeting with McMenamins historian Tim Hills, who gives artists printouts of stories he’s dug up around Bothell.

Artists pick a story that interests them “and then we get to just go and think about it and come up with our own vision,” said Carol Meckling, 50, lately of Shoreline but now in Colorado.

“There’s a lot of room for each of us sticking to our own style,” she said.

Sometimes that involves borrowing from the style of the past, such as Meckling’s painting of Tom Poll, a

Canyon Park Junior High student suspended in 1966 for refusing to cut his Beatles-style hair.

Done in the pop-art style of Andy Warhol, the painting features Poll reading a book and looking decidedly Beatle-like against a poster of the Fab Four.

A cartoonish Biblical-character Samson, whose strength purportedly “lay in his hair,” helps prop up Poll’s book.

World War II ads for Rosie the Riveter “where she’s rolling up her sleeves,” Meckling said, inspired her portrayal of U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, who’s known for her tireless crusade to help working families.

Mount Rainier, evergreens, and salmon swimming upstream also figure in the piece.

Forte Linna said she gets inspiration from the “child that’s inside of you” and that’s why she chose a whimsical look for her painting of Karen Thorndike, who was in her 50s when, in 1998, she became the first American woman to sail around the world.

Friends told her she couldn’t do it, but Thorndike didn’t let that keep her from her dream.

“It just spoke to me,” Forte Linna said. “You know, our dreams that we have, we’re doing our dreams.”

It wasn’t always so for Forte Linna.

It took having a baby and becoming a new stay-at-home mom for her to forsake her marketing career for her childhood dream.

She said she told her husband, professional photographer Jim Linna, that she wanted to be a professional artist.

“And he said, ‘Follow your heart and the money will come,’” she said.

Since then, she said she’s been in art shows up and down the West Coast, from Edmonds to Sausalito, has shown in galleries and won awards. But nothing compares to McMenamins.

“I am absolutely overjoyed to be working here,” she said.

Meckling, too, said she followed another career, working in the mental-health industry before seriously returning to art a few years ago.

She and her husband moved to Colorado last month “for an adventure,” but Meckling said she was sorry to leave McMenamins.

“This has been great, just having this professional experience at McMenamins,” she said. “It’s been really great for me.”

For McMenamins artists, the magic lies in getting paid to do art all day, said Cleo and Cyrus Hehn, 24 and 21.

It’s all in the family for the sister and brother, who were up from Portland last month to help paint bathroom borders; Uncle Lyle Hehn has been a McMenamins artist since 1988 and father Paul Hehn was a company manager until retiring to be a stay-at-home dad.

“As an artist, there are no other jobs like this,” Cleo said. “There really aren’t.”

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