Impressions of Laguna Beach

AT THE GALLERIES

“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand,” said Claude

Monet, “as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply

necessary to love.”

This anti-intellectual streak was at the beating heart of

Impressionism from the very start in the final decades of the

nineteenth century; but it was tempered by a contradictory

fascination with new scientific developments in optics and the

perception of light by the human eye.

The goal of the early Impressionists was to capture the movement

of light and color over an object in a more naturalistic way,

painting the movement and changeability of light in real time, out of

doors.

So important were these ideas that to this day popular conceptions

of painting and the painter are almost exclusively that of a single

figure standing alone in the middle of a landscape, canvas propped on

easel, swiftly recording the scene.

It is an image visited frequently around Laguna Beach.

California Impressionists, like their European counterparts,

painted out of doors using the same swift, small brushstrokes,

diffusing the object’s surface, breaking it into “impressions” of

reflection and play of color. They eschewed underpainting, blended

color on the canvas and stopped when the light faded.

By the time Impressionism arrived in America, painters had already

found a preference for landscape in the wide spaces of the new

country. But California, with its year-round outdoor opportunities,

became a place to visit, winter, or reside for many East Coast or

Midwest painters who brought with them a wide range of Impressionist

and post- Impressionist influences.

Partly because of the rapidity of execution, these artists were

prolific, producing many canvases over a lifetime. Right here in

Laguna, you can walk through the galleries and see the wide range of

styles and influences that have created this vibrant branch of art

history that continues to this day.

Edgar Payne (1883-1947) was one of the great figures among them,

and a lover of Laguna Beach (he was the first president of the Laguna

Beach Arts Assn.). His paintings are peppered throughout the

galleries that specialize in American Impressionism, and exemplify

many of its tenants. “Mountain Peaks,” a large oil on canvas (40 x 50

inches) at The Redfern Gallery (1540 S. Coast Highway), combines the

early love of sublime landscape in American art with an

Impressionist’s use of color. The canvas is composed of a single gray

mountain face with a lake at its base. But the occupation of the

painter makes it a vehicle for unusual color. The range of greens in

the pines, water and trees is lovely and extreme, the water is almost

teal, the trees nearly black in the shadows. The mountain itself is a

study in the ranges of gray, conveying the differences in depth found

in shadows. That shadows can be perceived in terms of color is a

distinctly Impressionist idea.

The preoccupation with color is also in a small gouache by Payne,

found at the nearby De Ru’s Fine Arts (1590 S. Coast Highway),

“Breton Boats” (4 x 5 inches). Such a painting-light, with few lines,

and done with watercolor-can capture the billowing, triangular sails

and swift movement of small boats in a cramped harbor. But it is the

bright orange translucency of the sail, the rapid reflections of

light off the small wind-blown waves that make the painting

wonderfully compact and poetic.

Look farther down the gallery, and you can see a more heavily

Post-Impressionistic influence on a canvas by an artist with the

perfectly Western name of Harold “Buck” Weaver (1889-1961). “Horses

on Mesa” (oil on canvas, 12 x 16 inches) is much flatter in its use

of brushstroke, less afraid of the line. The colors are the same

bright greens, oranges and blues the Impressionists so loved. But the

composition has the primitive quality of cave paintings, or of

Cezanne. The peace of the low mesa, the long shadows of the sagebrush

frame the four orange horses that push along under a sky gracefully

colored and clean. The very air seems big in this small frame, a

delight to behold.

De Ru’s also has on display another interpretation of

Impressionism by Anna Althea Hills (1882-1930). “Evening Light, Palm

Springs” shows fantastic layering of color. Hills was clearly

familiar with optical mixing, setting dots of different colors next

to each other to blend in the eye rather than the canvas. This is a

skilled hand with oil, utilizing the color of the landscape rather

than the tube of paint, combined with flattening the color with a

palette knife.

The odd green cast of the desert sunset suffuses the foreground

sage and the bare hills, conveying that sense of lost detachment that

background hills have in the desert. The sky itself fades gently,

grain by grain, from yellow to green.

Small flowers in faded blues compliment the tan soil and

gray-brown rocks. Hills’ method shows the influence of Neo

Impressionism, of the pointillism of Seurat, the color theories of

the French chemist Chevreul.

But perhaps the paintings that have remained most influential --

at least in terms of what contemporary plein air painters still call

upon as part of their repertoire -- have a simple, unencumbered

subject rendered as the perception of a fleeting moment, the kind of

subject in Carl Oscar Borg’s “California Oaks” (30 x 40 inches), The

Redfern Gallery.

Borg (1879-1947) paints the instantly recognizable silhouette of a

stand of huge oaks as if they were placed for him to paint. The

hanging moss, the massive trunks, the spreading branches are all

rendered in minimal detail, with each leaf present but no single leaf

painted. Looking at these distinctly California trees with the golden

parched hills in the background, it becomes clear why a French

painter with bad eyesight would say to us that it is not necessary to

understand, only to love.

* BOBBIE ALLEN is a poet and writer who has taught art theory and

criticism. She currently teaches at Saddleback College.