Art Movement With a Hollywood Backdrop

It’s part of Tinseltown lore: Aspiring actors waiting on tables while striving toward stardom.

Years ago, however, the arrangement was reversed, at least as far as severalfine artists of the ‘30s and ‘40s were concerned: They took work in Hollywood to support their true calling.

George Gibson, one of the so-called California Regionalists who painted thepristine natural beauty around them, also created scenic backdrops at MGM for nearly 36 years, putting in six days a week at the studio.

“It put a big crimp in my artistic activities in the ‘30s,” Gibson--whoturns 90 next month--said recently. “But I still managed to paint and get exhibited.”

Gibson and artists like him are the focus of “Visions of California: TheStory of California Scene Painting,” an original three-part series produced by KOCE Channel 50 in Huntington Beach. It is being shown tonight, Tuesday and Wednesday at 8 p.m.

The era of the Great Depression and World War II offered plenty of subject matter for Gibson, Millard Sheets, Phil Dike, Barse Miller and Rex Brandt and the rest, who turned out mostly representational views of burly surfers, rolling hills, tenement life, flophouses or dead soldiers. The KOCE series is something of a narrated gallery tour of their work.

On the phone from his home in Morro Bay, Gibson--one of several artists, collectors, curators and art historians interviewed in the series--recalled that Hollywood’s need for representational artists was his ace in the hole.

“The motion pictures never dealt with anything but utter realism, and I was already painting what was practically utter realism,” said the native of Edinburgh, Scotland, who resume includes backdrops for “The Wizard of Oz” and “Brigadoon.” He worked for MGM from 1934 through 1969.

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Meanwhile, a preference for “well-defined outlines” over “realistic detail” was helping other artists find animation work at the Walt Disney Studios, according to Susan M. Anderson, the acting director of the Laguna Art Museum who appears in the series.

In “American Scene Painting: California, 1930s & 1940s,” a related publication, Anderson noted that “the artists were also masters of characterization and the depiction of action or movement. Phil Dike’s ‘Echo Park’ (1935) personifies the happy, clean-up world of American life that Disney loved to portray.”

One way or another, Hollywood helped greatly to support these painters who in turn, according to the series, helped California move “from the margins to the mainstream of American art.”

Gibson says he was well aware of the impact he and his contemporaries were making. “We were developing something that was essentially a California creation.”

“Visions of California: The Story of California Scene Painting” was produced, written and directed by Paul Bockhorst, who has produced such other KOCE projects as “Architects of Change” (1992) and “Orange County Centennial Snapshots” (1989). It will be made available to public television stations nationwide later this month.

* “Visions of California: The Story of California Scene Painting,” a three-part series, is being shown on KOCE Channel 50 today, Tuesday and Wednesday at 8 p.m. It will repeat Sept. 19, 26 and Oct. 3 at 9 p.m. A related exhibition opens Wednesday and will continue through Nov. 12 at the Irvine Museum, 18881 Von Karmen Ave., Irvine. 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays. Free. (714) 476-2565.