The
California Art Club is headquartered in the Los Angeles area with membership
chapters in the following counties:
Malibu/Ventura
| Orange County | San Diego | San Francisco | Santa Barbara
All
of our Chapters are volunteer-based.* Select a Chapter below to see
their schedules and how to contact them, plus past chapter exhibitions:
If you live too far from Los Angeles but still would like to participate, please check with the Chapter closest to you. They hold paint-outs and meetings for members in their areas and would love to have you join them!
Franz Bischoff (1864 - 1929)
Early CAC Member
For the latest Chapter info, paint-outs and more, please visit the new blog!
*If
none of these Chapters are close enough to you, and you would like to
volunteer your time in organizing a Chapter in your area, here is what
you can do to get started:
Organizing a CAC Chapter
-Get fellow local artists together to find out if there is enough interest
in having a Chapter in your area
-Find a local meeting place (someone’s home or art gallery)
-Contact the CAC with your interest to create a local Chapter or CAC
paint-out activity
-Contact the CAC about collaborating and organizing activities
-The CAC will provide you with a local membership roster and help you
get the word out to fellow members
The
CAC's Main Office can be reached at or 626/583-9009.
We have arranged for a charter bus to take members to the museum and back for a fee of $25 per person; please R.S.V.P.no later than Monday, Nov. 24, as space is limited. You are also welcome to make your own travel arrangements and meet us at the Museum.
Museum Admission: Free on the first Thursday of the month
Meet: the bus will pick up and drop off at the valet service for the Prado in Balboa Park at 4 p.m.
Cost for charter bus: $25 per person
Refreshments will be served on the ride up and back. The bus will arrive around 5 p.m.; if you are traveling separately, please join the group at the main entrance to the Museum.
About the Exhibition
In Nature’s Temple: The Life and Art of William Wendt will be the first full-scale retrospective on the art of William Wendt. In 1912 William Wendt was elected an Associate Member of the National Academy of Design, the same year that he built a studio-home in Laguna Beach. In many ways, Wendt represented the essential nature of California Impressionism both stylistically and ideologically. No other California Impressionist so consistently essayed the sweeping, romantic grand landscape view as Wendt, and no other painter so strongly equated his work with the ideology of Nature as Creation, and Nature as a spiritual path. Dapper, distinguished, and much admired by his many followers, Wendt functioned as a very visible example of what an artist should aspire to, and his ongoing career summarized the idealism that was the foundation of California art in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
California Impressionism—a hybrid style of painting that retained clarity of forms overlaid with the brilliant French Impressionist palette—was once critically unquestioned and regionally preeminent. It nearly disappeared in the maze of 1950s California hard-edge painting and abstract expressionism, 1960s pop and funk art, and the deluge of kinetic and performance art forms of the 1970s. However, to fully engage and understand the evolution of American painting, we need to understand the nuances of this hybrid approach to image making, as California was, of all the States, perceived as the real land of opportunity and reinvention and was destined to become the nation’s most populace and economically powerful member. And, to understand California Impressionism, we need to fully examine its central practitioner, William Wendt.
