Skylines built in paint

Picture this: a parade of bulldozers, derricks and dump trucks spewing fumes as they swarm, like gigantic mechanical ants, around a massive hole being dug for the foundation of a building or bridge that’s big enough to define a city’s skyline, alter its tax base and change its traffic patterns.

Now insert, into your mental picture of burgeoning urban development, a landscape painter.

Arm him with the best set of brushes money can buy. Spare no expense with his paper or sketchbook. And be sure to include a folding stool and a portable easel; otherwise he’ll probably spill the little dish of water his paints must be mixed with.

No matter how well you outfit your imaginary watercolorist, he’s no match for the powerful social forces he’s up against. Compared with steel and concrete, not to mention the labor of legions of engineers, architects and other skilled workers, his materials and efforts seem pathetically anachronistic, more suited to a Sunday painter’s study of cut flowers than to an ambitious exploration of what it means, socially and psychologically, to build cities.

If this scene were in a movie, it would probably be a comedy, most likely a farce about someone out of touch with his times. But scenes just like it actually occurred, fairly frequently in the mid-20th century, all over California.

At the Orange County Museum of Art, the results of such endeavors can be seen in “Cities of Promise: Imaging Urban California,” a thematically consistent yet artistically uneven exhibition that brings together 33 pictures by 27 painters. Organized by curator of collections Sarah Vure and sponsored by the Automobile Club of Southern California, the accessible -- yet oddly divided -- show fills two midsize galleries.

The first features watercolors: 24 page-size images 18 artists painted between 1931 and 1974. They range from the hokey to the hopelessly quixotic, with corny and preposterous works interspersed among charming and poignant ones.

In “Golden Gateway Groundbreaking” (1961), Kenneth Potter gives heavy equipment all the heft and seriousness of toys. Bathing his scene in the warm light of a pink, yellow and blue sky, he depicts the hubbub of construction as if he were illustrating a saccharine-sweet children’s book.

Roger Armstrong’s “Taking Down Bunker Hill” (1950) is meant to capture the dark side of city-building. But his picture is so bland and imprecise that it looks as if it belongs in a kids’ book, one from which the upsetting details have been edited.

Similar sorts of Social Realism appear in James Patrick’s “The Sulfur Pits” (1939) and Jake Lee’s “Oil Fields, Signal Hill” (1940s). Both strive to bring viewers eye to eye with the deadly grind of working-class toil. But the genteel niceties of watercolor transform biting social commentary into a toothless rehash of realistic works by the Ashcan School, whose East Coast artists did similar things more effectively in the 1910s and ‘20s. Even more callow are street scenes by Dong Kingman, Edward Reep and Erle Loran. Some are downright sappy.

Shameless sentimentality links these willfully grim watercolors to their cheery counterparts, which predominate. Many of these artists worked as illustrators for travel magazines, whose publishers required them to depict cities as tourist destinations, making them over into sights worth seeing.

Phil Dike’s “Balboa” (1947) and “Olvera Street” (1949) may not have been commissioned for travel advertisements, but they might as well have been. Each packs loads of local color into lively scenes of weekend leisure.

Maurice Logan’s “Boats at Fisherman’s Wharf” (1959) and “San Francisco Cable Car” (1961) steal their subjects and compositions from postcards. Stylistically, their comforting, picturesque fantasies are thick with nostalgia.

All four have been borrowed from the collection of the Automobile Club of Southern California, as have Merv Corning’s snapshot view of a neighborhood beneath Griffith Observatory (from 1974) and Gordon Brusstar’s Precisionist-inspired, bird’s-eye view of the Golden Gate Bridge (from 1952).

More familiar landmarks appear in Louis Macoulliard’s “Looking Past the Bay Bridge” (1956), Joseph O’Malley’s “Hollywood Diner” (1948), Charles Payzant’s “Wilshire Blvd.” (1931) and Millard Sheets’ “Symphony Under the Stars, Hollywood Bowl” (1956). The best of these pleasant pictures convey a sense of mid-century stylishness, blending streamlined forms and nighttime glamour in tasteful cocktails of optimism.

Three artists’ watercolors stand out because they neither recycle Social Realism nor spin out of travel advertising. Elmer Plummer’s “The Dead Palm” (1936) and John Haley’s “Hilltop Hotel” (1939) bring the tight-lipped sorrow of Edward Hopper’s vision of the American heartland to the West Coast by adding, respectively, comedic absurdity and campy drama.

Emil Jean Kosa Jr. also draws on Hopper, but more deftly. The only artist with three works on display, he shows himself to be a melancholic connoisseur of understated ambiguity. Painted in the 1940s, his evocative pictures of L.A. neighborhoods capture the oddly collaged feel of the city. The sense that L.A. not only expands outward, eating up the desert, but buries the past beneath new buildings takes vivid form in “Freeway Beginning” (1948), a masterpiece of tarnished idealism and ghostly regret.

Kosa’s watercolor establishes a more distant view of its subject -- an unfinished freeway cutting through the long shadows of a sunbaked landscape -- than any of the other watercolors. It functions as a bridge to the next gallery, its measured detachment becoming the cool objectivity of the nine paintings on canvas and panel made between 1950 and 1995.

No people appear in any of them. Instead, houses, highways and skies are portrayed as if they’ve taken on lives of their own.

Each of the images of buildings by Edward Biberman, Larry Cohen and Edward Ruscha freezes the cacophonous tumult of big city living into a moment of silent stillness that’s at once serene and terrifying.

Robert Bechtle, Roger Kuntz and Wayne Thiebaud similarly turn city streets into the backdrops for existential dramas that ricochet between the ridiculous and the sublime. Peter Alexander, Carlos Almaraz and Pierre Sicard paint L.A. after dark, when the night sky is aglow with stars and streetlights and anything seems possible.

In contrast to the watercolorists, who believe that the best way to capture reality is to march into the world and directly record one’s impressions, the oil and acrylic painters spend more time in the studio, refining their compositions, keying up their palettes and amplifying the artifice in their canvases and panels.

Consequently, the second gallery of “Cities of Promise” provides far more pleasures than the first. As a whole, the bifurcated show demonstrates that it’s a mistake to treat art as a transparent window through which to view such sociological issues as urban development.

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Cities of Promise: Imaging Urban California

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Where: Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach

When: Tuesdays-Sundays,

11 a.m.-5 p.m.

Ends: April 25

Price: $5 to $7; 11 and younger, free

Contact: (949) 759-1122