From blob to beach scene

As cars whizzed by and families in flip-flops and bathing suits wandered past, Val Carson stood almost unmoving amid the streaming crowd in downtown Huntington Beach.

Standing in front of her paint-splattered easel with her hand moving deftly across the canvas, Carson worked to re-create a single moment. The canvas was a blob of murky blacks as Carson tried to capture the light by immortalizing the shadows with her oil paints.

Carson was one of a handful of artists in the Huntington Beach Plein Air Painting Festival’s Painting in the Streets event Saturday. Artists invaded the first three blocks of downtown Main Street, setting up their easels and capturing the iconic sites and unique atmosphere of Surf City. This is the fifth year of the three-week festival put on by the Huntington Beach Art Center.

Thirty-four artists were invited to participate in the festival and showcase the style of plein air painting, which takes painters outdoors and focuses on how the changing light alters a scene, said Kate Hoffman, director of the Huntington Beach Art Center.

This is the second year artists can submit their work for awards and the first year the festival has had an award for best historic site painting. The new award is possible through the Centennial Celebration Committee and will add a new dimension for residents to appreciate the city’s history, Hoffman said.

For Carson’s painting Saturday, she decided to focus on the iconic image of the pier. Sketching the crowd bobbing along the pier with the cone-shaped roof of Ruby’s Diner in the background, Carson situated herself at the mouth of Main Street. With her neutral paint as a background for her canvas, she added all the dark onto her canvas before the light changed. The dark whishes of her paintbrush created forms and blobs unintelligible to anyone but her.

“What you do is relate one shape to another,” Carson said. “Everything is a relationship of shape and the value of dark and light.”

Once the dark was filled in, Carson changed focus and concentrated on the light, color and smaller details. The canvas full of dark blobs and lines slowly turned into a landscape with palm trees, a street light and a crowd of people moving as one along the pier.

A typical painting takes a couple of hours — time is one of the challenges of plein air painting, artist Lynn Wiederman said. Wiederman settled herself farther down Main Street in front of a bridal shop to paint a friend looking into the shop windows full of tulle dresses.

While working, passersby stopped to admire the artists’ work and ask questions about the technique — another perk of working outside, Wiederman said.

The painting done during the Painting in the Streets event will be up for a cash award. All entrants in the festival will be displayed in the art center until Sept. 27 and will go on sale today. A portion of the sales will go toward the art center’s educational programs.

There will be a public opening reception at 6 p.m. Friday. Admission is free and people can meet the artists and see the results of the festival.

If You Go

What: The opening reception for the Plein Air Painting Festival

Who: Open to the public

Where: The Huntington Beach Art Center

When: 6 to 9 p.m. Friday

Cost: free