I didn’t plan it this way. The schedule just worked out naturally.
Each night this week, I attended a different event featuring a thought-provoking speaker. By Friday, I sensed a theme.
A Week with Vintage Men….
Tuesday: Beauty is in the Eye of The Beholder
On a balmy October Tuesday, I drove through Laguna Canyon towards the ocean. It would be a night of discovery, a lecture at the Laguna Art Museum during their week-long Plein Air Invitational Event. I know next to nothing about what makes art special. I can’t draw, sculpt or rattle off names of important American painters. I can’t tell a priceless piece of art from an amateur’s first efforts.
But I know what I like.
Edgar Payne
I love strolling through the Sawdust Festival every summer, breathing in the colors of the artwork around me. Painters fascinate me, the way they can set up an easel at the shore and capture the light and the movement of the sea. It is a mystery to me, the way a painting can shine in a darkened gallery almost self-illuminated with the energy of color
Camille Przewordek
I just don’t get it, that’s all. 
So I met my friend Victoria, an accomplished artist and teacher, for an evening of art education. Our guide would be Jean Stern, Executive Director of The Irvine Museum. The subject for the evening would be a crash course in art appreciation: composition, perspective, color, with a focus on my favorite genre: Plein Air Painting.
I expected to find a stately gentleman, scholarly and stoic, dressed in a serious professorial suit and tie. But I was greeted at the door by a jolly man in a Reyn Spooner shirt, welcoming me with an easy smile and joking that he hoped I had brought my credit card so that I could pick up some new treasures. Then he suggested that I have a glass of the complimentary Chardonnay to improve the quality of his presentation. No stuffy art lecture here.
As I sat listening to the surprisingly jovial Mr. Stern discuss how to develop a critical eye for art, I began to realize why I am so attracted to the work of Plein Air artists. I didn’t realize how quickly they work, painting pieces in just a few hours. It’s all about capturing the moment, being present and awake to the beauty that’s before you, and then expressing a reaction to it through painting. There’s no time to slowly assess the perspective or mull over possible combinations of composition. Plein air painting is immediate. Its artists must capture the light before it fades away, and reflect life as it it is right now, before the sun shifts and the moment disappears.
The more I listened to the lecture, the more I began to feel a kinship to the painters that sat in the room all around me. As artists, we are all striving for the same thing, to capture moments. I may not be able to express myself with a paint brush. But, as a writer, I try to share what I see; the moods and dimensions of life, stories from a fresh perspective, phrases filled with light and movement and just the right splash of color.
Mr. Stern helped me define what I was feeling when he clicked on a slide that said,
“The goal of an artist is not to reproduce reality, but to recreate a reality of the same intensity.”
Each artist has their own unique response to the world. What we create reveals who we are. It is our voice.
Thank you, Jean Stern, for an entertaining evening of self-discovery.
And a plastic glass of Chardonnay.
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