Yesterday I had a mid-morning meeting, so I couldn’t get a painting start until late morning.  As the summer rapidly approaches, and the sun is overhead, the shadows disappear, and the sun bleaches out the color.

I live in Orange County California, which, although a nice place to live, is sometimes a challenging place to paint.  The last 50 years have led to a building boom, so that it is now the second most populous county in California (over 3 million people).  Much of the landscape that the California impressionists painted, has now been covered over with shopping centers, subdivisions, freeways and parking lots.

Here, we not only pave our roads, we pave our rivers (channelized).  Such is the case of the Santa Ana River, the largest river in Southern California.

Santa Ana River Bridge 12 x 16

The rich colors of the shadow on the shallow water were so interesting, that I forgot to take a few early pictures of my painting, as I rushed to get a few guiding sketch lines and start blocking in large areas of color.  In the two hour time period the shadows were changing- like a giant sundial, so I concentrated on the large masses of color on the water and the pilings first.

Recently I have been using lead based white paint (cremnitz white).  I like the feel of the paint on canvas and I feel as if I have more control.  The titanium that I had been using, especially in a high-key painting with a lot of white tends to get too slick/oily.  Yesterday, I elected to use the titanium and I think you can see the looseness in the brushstrokes, which I didn’t mind since it was 98 degrees (36.7 C) and the heat from the ground made the landscape shimmer.

latitude:33.84595025451457 & longitude: -117.8437113761901