Laguna Beach

Clarence Hinkle
Laguna Beach
Oil on canvas, 1927
30 x 36 1/4 inches
Gift of Mabel Hinkle
1960.002

This is Clarence Hinkle’s signature view of Laguna Beach, looking toward Main Beach from the bluff just north of town, close to where the Laguna Beach Art Association gallery was constructed in 1928 (the gallery survives as the large Steele Gallery in today’s Laguna Art Museum). It is with bold, painterly works such as this, in which brushwork seems to take on a life of its own, that Hinkle stands apart from most Southern California landscapists of his generation. As the art critic Arthur Millier wrote in 1933, “Some men love to paint . . . Hinkle, however, is a man in love with painting.”