Mission: Inspirational

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO —  Time seems to stand still in the serene courtyards of Mission San Juan Capistrano, founded centuries before the human spirit was bedeviled by such inventions as the Internet and Abstract Expressionism.

Truth is, the mission does now have a Web site. Still, when nearly 100 artists gathered here throughout the week to lay paint to canvas for $10,000 in prizes that will be awarded today, Cubism, Surrealism and Pop Art were banished from the grounds.

Instead, the members of the California Art Club came to the mission’s third annual Outdoor Professional Painting Competition to create works that one participant said could resemble “picture postcards.”

Or, as club president Peter Adams explained, “Some people think of it as Realism. Others as Impressionism. You could call it ‘contemporary traditionalism.’ ”

Whatever the style was called, the painters brought their oils and pastels to record their visions of a singularly inspirational landmark, the mission itself.

“With the mission, there’s a lot of mood, a lot of emotion. I’m trying to do a poetic piece,” said Billyo O’Donnell, a St. Louis painter who said the unexpected vowel at the end of his first name should be pronounced “kind of like Picasso, kind of like Michelangelo.”

As he added touches of dusk to his canvas of a mission fountain, O’Donnell, 41, rhapsodized over “the texture of the walls, the richness of the architecture. The light in California is real special,” he added, creating shadings that could never be found back home in Missouri.

The same elements drew Santa Barbara painter Glena Hartmann, 48, who won third prize in last year’s competition. Having painted the missions of Carmel, Calif., and San Borja in Baja California, as well as the so-called Queen of the Missions in her hometown, Hartmann nonetheless proclaimed San Juan Capistrano as “one of the most beautiful. The rustic appearance of it, the ruins, give it a sense of days gone by. I’m a little nostalgic for a sense of history.”

Asked the meaning of that history, Hartmann confessed she had not fully reconciled the significance of the missions and the Spanish conquest of the Americas.

“California has had some pretty rough times,” she said, “but anything this aesthetic is spiritual to me.”

*

Those views were echoed by a fellow Santa Barbaran, Thomas Van Stein, 35. As he cleaned his brush in an old cat-food can filled with water, Van Stein said that “history is about forgiveness. There was struggle and torture and sacrifice that went on here,” he said, “but along come the artists to make something beautiful from all that has happened.”

Although all the artists worked in the plein-air style of landscape painting, they were free to tackle any subject on the mission grounds, at any hour from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m. For Van Stein, who specializes in nocturnal scenes, the chance to paint when the mission usually is closed was a special attraction.

So was the prize money, donated by Joan Irvine Smith, the Orange County philanthropist and collector of California art, who owns a gallery across the street from the mission. With first, second and third prizes of $5,000, $3,000 and $2,000, and the chance to sell works Sunday after the competition ends, the Capistrano event had economic as well as aesthetic appeal.

The artists, however, said they were trying to avoid a competitive spirit.

“Before I begin, I surrender up the finished product to a higher power, to God, to nature or whatever,” said Van Stein. “Otherwise, you can get stuck in the painting--the color could be muddied and not pure, it could be chalky or indecisive.”

N.N. Williams II, a retired actor from Beverly Hills, shared the concern about color. Surveying his incomplete 2- by 3-foot canvas of the mission courtyard at night, he grumbled that “this is pretty bilious with its acidic purple” but promised that “when it’s done, it will be just like peeking over the mission wall at night with a three-quarter moon in the sky.”

*

Williams, who usually acted under the stage name Aron Kincaid, appeared in productions ranging from the 1958 movie “Spartacus” to a Batman cartoon, in which he does the voice of a character called Killer Croc.

Having undergone heart bypass surgery, Williams, 57, said that painting gives him a new kind of satisfaction. “You get a second chance at life, you do what’s really important,” he said.

For the sponsoring organization, the California Art Club, the Capistrano competition also symbolizes a second chance at life. Founded in 1909 by William Wendt, a German expatriate in Los Angeles, the club in its early years included many of the major landscape painters of Southern California.

As contemporary art replaced representational styles, the club withered, losing even its landmark headquarters, the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Hollyhock House, in Los Angeles.

The club began a renaissance, however, when Adams, 46, assumed its presidency in 1993. Himself a painter based in Pasadena, Adams began a recruitment drive that increased membership from fewer than 100 to more than 1,000 today, including 271 artist members who can join only if their works are approved by a seven-member jury.

*

When Smith, the art patron, suggested the Capistrano competition--and offered to underwrite it--Adams seized on the idea. The mission quickly assented; in decades past, it had been a popular subject for artists, who painted everything from its famous bell tower to the celebrity event of 1924: Mary Pickford’s first wedding.

But while the style the art club embraces is decidedly retro, its members embrace California’s present as well as its history, holding events to call attention to contemporary issues.

Their painters have tackled such subjects as California’s endangered wetlands (with some works later exhibited in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County) and the turn-of-the-century neighborhoods of South Pasadena and El Sereno, which Caltrans has long sought to flatten to extend the Long Beach freeway.

“This style was out of vogue for 40 years or so,” says Adams. “But it’s come back in a big way.”

* Outdoor Professional Painting Competition, Mission San Juan Capistrano, 31522 Camino Capistrano. Grounds open today at 8:30 a.m., awards ceremony 2:30 p.m. Admission to the mission and art exhibition: $4-$5. (714) 494-0854.