By Eliza Ridgeway

JOE HU/TOWN CRIER Helen Scheel, right, and Cathy Zander participate in Saturday’s Plein Air Los Altos Painting Competition and Arts Fest in downtown Los Altos.

Canvases dotted downtown this past weekend as artists gathered to compete in Los Altos’ inaugural Plein Air Painting Competition and Arts Fest, sponsored by the Los Altos Cultural Association.

Painters from Los Altos and as far as Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay set up easels on downtown streets Saturday to capture the early autumn morning. Their challenge was to capture a local scene on canvas before the end of the day.

Plein air, a French phrase meaning open air, is a style of painting done outside the studio environment in the natural world. The discomforts and practical realities of painting in the midst of wind, bugs and other distractions is one of the challenges - and attractions - of the style.

Saturday, the painters were aided by dry weather, a sunny morning and a trickle of curious passersby peaking at the projects.

“It’s very hard to have to decide what to paint on the spot, and paint what you see with all the distractions and bugs,” said painter Shirley Rhoads, who came from Scotts Valley and picked a spot on State Street overlooking the clock tower and rose bushes of the Community Plaza. “You have to narrow down your perspective to one thing.”

The event appealed to painters of a range of ages and experience. Along State and Main streets there were gray-haired and teen competitors, painting students and painting teachers. Published art author and teacher Jane Hofstetter took the day off teaching to do a watercolor of the red brick and white paint of the Town Crier building at 138 Main Street.

“To me watercolor has the most variety of all - color changes, lost and found areas,” she said as let color bleed across the canvas to shape a weeping willow out of crimson and green. A yellow-jacket crawled across the painting, adding verisimilitude to the captured scene.

The completed paintings revealed unique glimpses of downtown, sometimes showing two or more painter’s perception of well-known objects like the clock tower between State and Main Streets.

Thirty-two artists, including a mother and daughter team, painted 31 canvases. Many more people participated in the event by watching the painters at work and enjoying the live music as jazz singer Susan Rancourt, accompanied by Larry Chinn on the keyboard, lit up the community plaza with classic jazz vocals.

Mike Abrams, one of the event organizers, said the good turnout for the contest was, “just an extension of the artist culture of town.”

First-place winner Ann McMillan created a pastel of the Tour Eiffel restaurant on State Street. Her work captured “a real slice of Los Altos,” Abrams said. Guest judges Jim Smythe and Brigitte Curt of the California Academy of Painters named the event’s winners, who shared in a total of $1,000 in prizes, included $500 to McMillan.

The completed works will go on display for sale at Main Street Cafe & Books Nov. 1.

For more information, contact event organizer Will Maller at 941-1654.