Plein-Air Painters: Outsiders by Choice

“Can you talk and paint at the same time?”

I’m trying to be polite but as soon as the words came out, I fear they form a nice little insult. Besides, you know how touchy artists can be.

But instead of hurling a full palette at me and screaming, “You insufferable boob, can’t you see I’m creating?” Brian Stewart says, “Yes.”

And so as noon approaches Friday, we talk and he paints. Stewart is standing at his easel and dabbing at the canvas as his sight line takes in the Laguna Beach coastline south from Heisler Park. Within a few hundred yards of him, some 50 other artists also are painting scenes--”live and in color,” you might say.

I soon learn this isn’t as common as I might have thought. I’ve stepped into something of a time machine. Stewart hands me his business card:

“A Living Artist Who Paints Like a Dead One.”

OK, please explain.

The artists, from California and several other states, are spending the week in Laguna at something called a plein-air painting competition, with the French word combining to mean “open air” painting. It means what it says: The artists find their venues wherever they please in Laguna and paint what they see.

It hasn’t occurred to me that, just as much of the world seems to have gone synthetic, painters have succumbed, too.

“This is the way artists painted 100 years ago, directly from nature,” Stewart says. “In the last 70, 80 years, artists have gotten lazy. They go inside to their air-conditioned studios and paint from photographs, and that’s why their paintings don’t have that real quality to them.”

Stewart is putting the finishing touches on his painting. He and the other artists are in the “quick-draw,” competition, the week’s capper, which requires that the artists complete their painting in two hours.

Capturing the Feel of Nature

Think of it as the equivalent of baseball’s home-run hitting contest during All-Star game festivities.

“This is more for entertainment for the public, quite honestly,” Stewart says of the quick draw. “Not many artists are that enthusiastic about doing it. It’s almost demeaning to the regular work they do all week.”

Maybe you can be an artist without passion. I doubt it. The definitions seem to be entwined. Stewart says his love of the open-air form probably formed as a teenager in Southern California. He was dating a girl whose parents had a houseful of plein-air paintings. “I didn’t know it then, but they had a profound impact on me,” he says. “It seeded something in me that I knew I wanted to get back to.”

He took his sweet time about it. He moved to Minneapolis and eventually had a 25-year career in the advertising and marketing business. He drew storyboards and did ad layouts, but that wasn’t the kind of art his heart and mind told him he could do.

About 10 years ago, Stewart decided to become a painter.

Now 58, he spends his time either painting in and around Minneapolis or traveling to competitions like this one in Orange County.

“Laguna Beach was a haven for plein-air painters back in the early part of this century,” he says. “Although the hillsides are filled with houses, you can almost recognize the land formations and see the areas where the guys were painting back in 1912.”

Everything he says hits a nerve because, like lots of people, I’ve daydreamed many a time in and around Laguna, looking down the coast and up into the hills and imagining what it looked like way back when, before hotels and hillside clutter and paved highways made it all look different.

Stewart explains that a painting done in nature won’t look as much like nature but it will feel more like nature. “And it’s more important how a painting feels than how it looks,” he says. “A painting done from a photograph looks like nature. A painting that’s done directly from nature feels like nature.”

Yes, a painter must sell his works. It is a business. It is a livelihood. But standing there with Stewart and absorbing that Laguna Beach coast and letting your mind wander just a bit, the painting of it seems a task deserving of more than just earthly benefit.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com