California View Fine Art -- Plein Air, Impressionism, Early California, paintings and antiques bought and sold. California View Fine Arts is a new name to art collectors, but an organization that has been dedicated to the collection and restoration of Early California Art since the late 1970's. Plein air fine art painting is making a huge comeback in California some 75 years after the Early California Impressionists dominated the California art scene. Following in the tradition of the French Impressionists and Post Impressionist such as Monet, Cezanne and Van Gogh , painters are dragging their boards, canvases, and French easels into the hills in record numbers. There are six established art organizations and numerous informal groups in the State that champion plein air painting and hold paint outs, competitions, fund raisers, workshops and exhibitions. Each group reflects its origins in early California traditional and representational art. Painting for the sheer joy of it, the new plein air painters have added another component - they use their art to promote environmental and historical preservation. The newest of these groups is the "Outsiders." The Outsiders are seven top San Francisco Bay Area plein air painters. The name derives from the form of painting they do - outdoor or plein air - and also from their placement away from more traditional landscape and scene painters. They are: Nikki Basch Davis, Warren Dreher, Pam Glover, Ray Jackson, Judy Molyneaux, Bill Rushton and Jerrold Turner. Colorists first, their bold brush work and liberal use of paint echoes the Fauvist style of their precedents - The Society of Six - who were active in the Bay Area in the early part of this Century. Founding Outsider member, Pam Glover, painted with the last surviving member of the Society of Six - Louis Siegriest and his son Lundy - in the 1970's. Like the Six, the Outsiders often paint together for c amaraderie and feedback while they rapidly capture in paint the rural scenes and funky old towns just minutes from the bustle of San Francisco. The Outsiders will promote plein air painting through group shows and fund raisers to preserve open space in the San Francisco Bay area. Outsider Influences: The Society of Six Who were the Society of Six? The Six were a group of East Bay plein air painters who joined together in 1917 to form a dynamic and mutually beneficial painting association that lasted until the Great Depression. Members were Selden Gile, Louis Siegriest, Maurice Logan, August Gay, Bernard von Eichman and William Clapp. Their work was characterized first and foremost by bold color, unpretentious subject matter and a spontaneous and generous application of paint. They were more Fauves than Impressionists and were definitely "outsiders" to the mainstream of Northern California landscape painting at the time which was dominated by Arthur Matthew's classical, tonalist paintings and William Keith's rather dark, romantic landscapes. Who influenced the Six? The Panama Pacific Exhibition of 1915 at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco jump-started the Six. For the first time they saw the paintings of the French Impressionists and also the American Impressionists who had been painting on the East Coast in the new style since the 1890's. Selden Gile and the others were dazzled by the bright colors and spontaneity of the brush work. Northern California had been isolated from the currents of modernism because of its remoteness and the aftermath of the San Francisco earthquake in 1906 which saw many artists move to Southern California. Rambunctious, fun-loving and mostly self taught, the Six literally sloshed through the mud flats of Oakland and scrambled over the hills around the East Bay to practice their new-found techniques. Days often ended at leader Selden Gile's house where they critiqued each other's work and ate his home-cooked meals accompanied by abundant brew. The Depression signaled an end to the productive years of the Six as a group, and each went his separate way. Their first major recognition by art professionals and the general public wasn't until 1972 when the Oakland Museum held a retrospective. Like Panama Pacific in 1915, this show had far-reaching consequences throughout the painting community. For an in-depth study of the Six with extensive color reproductions of their work see The Society of Six: California Colorists by Nancy Boas. In 1917, several Northern California artists formed an association that was to become known as the Society of Six. 'The Six' Selden Connor Gile, Maurice Logan, William H. Clapp, August F. Gay, Bernard Von Eichman, and Louis Siegriest- were plein air painters who are known for their fresh and direct approach. The height of their association lasted for more than a decade, and as William Gerdts wrote in his book American Impressionism, "The Oakland Six may constitute the most important modernist development that occurred in this country during the 1920s." Known for their unified sense of visual purpose as well as very intense and independent personalities, these regional artists were considered outsiders in their own time, but their work is now increasingly appreciated for their contribution to the greater lineage of American art. The Six found themselves in the position of an avant-garde, not because they set out to reject convention, but because they aspired to express their own new vision, versus that of previous more 'Europeanized' California artists. Their color-centered works shocked establishment tastes of their time, but remain the most advanced painting of the early 20th century in Northern California. Like the swallows returning to Capistrano or the Monarch butterflies to Pacific Grove, historic California landscape art will make an annualreappearance this summer at the Hearst Art Gallery of Saint Mary's College in Moraga. In fact, views of Mission San Juan Capistrano and Pacific Grove are included in the exhibition "Early California Impressionists: The Ronald E. Walker Collection," which opens Saturday, June 28 and continues through Sunday, September 14. California Impressionism, although related to French Impressionism, developed several decades later, and probably had more to do with the state's spectacular natural beauty, vast areas of open space, and rich natural resources than any deliberate effort by the artists to copy the style of Monet or Renoir. Because of the popularity and influence of the poetic and melancholy Tonalists Arthur and Lucia Mathews, Gottardo Piazzoni and William Keith, in his later paintings, and perhaps without the sunny optimism and spectacular climate of their south coast counterparts, the Bay Area did not become a major center of the new Impressionism. However, a thriving artists' colony was developing further down the coast on the Monterey Peninsula, especially after the exodus of artists from San Francisco following the 1906 earthquake and fire. In 1915, San Francisco hosted the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal. The fair's most popular venue was a painting and sculpture exhibition of more than 10,000 artworks. Along with a retrospective display of the works of William Keith, the paintings of the new California Impressionists drew huge crowds and served notice to the world that California was becoming a significant center of art. In addition to spectacular Monterey seascapes by Albert DeRome, Paul Lauritz, Carl Sammons, and other painters, the Walker Collection provides a rare opportunity for Bay Area audiences to see exceptional works by Southern California plein air (outdoor) painters including Maurice Braun, Franz Bischoff, Edgar Payne, Donna Schuster and William Wendt. Many are associated with the important Laguna Beach art colony, where Hawaii collector Ronald Walker formerly lived. Significant examples of High Sierra landscapes by Hanson Puthuff, Marion Wachtel and Christian von Schneidau and desert views by Sam Hyde Harris and Carl Sammons round out the show geographically. The exuberant and generally optimistic spirit of their works changed with the onset of the Great Depression of the 1930s. However, their painterliness, use of color, and deep alliance with the land and the light was to become a beacon for postwar Northern California modern painters such as Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. 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