Burb’s Eye View: Wine, paint and learning on their palette

Spread next to the bottles of A-1 and Tapatio hot sauce are long, sturdy paint brushes. Glasses of chardonnay are set next to canvases. The painting party can begin.

Valerie Agostinelli sets up a print of the sunset scene they’ll be creating under the faintly yellow glow of the Coral Café’s ceiling lights. This isn’t her first painting party. In fact, most of the 11 artists gathered in the restaurant’s booths Monday have been here before.

They settle in like an orchestra tuning instruments. Each work space is arranged just so, with blobs of acrylic paint dotting their sheets of wax paper. The globby mounds will become ocean waves, mountain crenelations and clouds streaking through a fiery sky.

“The key to the picture tonight is scrubbing,” said their maestro, Randall Williams. “Take the big ugly brush and scrub it like you’re scrubbing the kitchen floor.”

He demonstrates on his own canvas. The accessible language of Williams’ art is done by design; he teaches kids and adults throughout Burbank and he does it through simple terms, positive reinforcement and stories.

Williams claims his stories help pass the time while the paint dries, but his students see them as a natural part of the performance art they’re paying for. And at the end of his performance, they’ve somehow transformed the white rectangle in front of them into a painting they didn’t know was in them.

“Randall’s the best because he’s a comedian,” said Kristy Carnegie, who estimates she’s attended 30 of his Monday-night painting parties. “Me and my girlfriends are addicted to the painting party.”

Williams is part maestro, part ringmaster. He channels Bob Ross and his free-flowing style, and over the course of the two-hour session, the art itself can take many twists and turns.

Just 10 minutes in, he’s already gone off the reference photograph of a sunset over water. He’s also been through two different stories.

Lisa Finkelstein and her mother, Marla, travel from Calabasas to the Coral Café’s back room to attend the weekly parties. It gets nerve-wracking, she said, trying to follow along with Williams. And just when she thinks the art isn’t good enough, she takes a picture of her canvas to see it in a new perspective, usually to uplifting results.

“I still love (the paintings),” she said. “For someone not in on the process, it may not look that great, but we come for the process.”

In the meantime, Williams hands out subtle tips and encouragements:

“Don’t be trippin’ like, ‘Oh my line is crooked.’”

“Don’t be paralyzed by fear. Pull (the paint) across.”

“Acrylic is our slave — it does what we want.”

As blue skies become streaked with green, then orange, and a yellow-and-white line is added above the horizon, two hours of the painters’ trance had elapsed. The drum circle neared its end.

“Sugar only gets so sweet before you get a stomachache,” Williams tells his students. “I think it’s time to stop.”

The artists are soon out of their seats, surveying their colleagues’ work. It is a time to share what they like about the paintings, and offer tips for improvement. There is no written rule for this, just a heuristic developed naturally between a roomful of former strangers.

As with most art, the artists are their own harshest critics.

“This still looks like a dolphin that’s dying,” Cara O’Donnell tells her teacher. With a few strokes of white he’s helped her blend the colors and see a new way of layering the image.

Many of the artists don’t pick up a brush again until the following Monday when they can reconvene at the café, $30 in hand, armed with paper towels and wet wipes and ready to get down and dirty with their art.

“You gotta have vino, too,” Carnegie said. “A little bit, but not too much.”
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BRYAN MAHONEY writes about Burbank neighbors and the place they call home. He can be reached at 818NewGuy@gmail.com and on Twitter at @818NewGuy.