The cloudy day at Gavilan Springs, south of Corona, afforded me some lovely skies to match the vivid fall colors around the body of water. While I was busy painting, suddenly I noticed that the algae covering the water had been pushed to the left, by the breeze. After deciding that this was a plein air painting and I was not going to chase the algae, just like I would not have chased the light or shadow, I let it be and continued to finish painting the brush in the foreground. By the time I finished painting, the algae had moved back to the right in a different formation, because the wind had blown the opposite way!

A Touch of India

Geeta painted this design with acrylic paints over a fiberglass “orange,” which is larger than a basketball, to benefit the Riverside Arts Alliance’s OrangeAID project, where many artists volunteered to paint over the fiberglass white “oranges”, and many generous sponsors paid $500 to receive one of the creations.
Geeta’s design, combines the orange color, to represent Riverside’s citrus history, with iconic buildings of Riverside and many traditional designs from India. She used sepia tones for the buildings and their backgrounds to be reminiscent of old photographs, though all the images were created from her own file of photographs. The Indian motifs were done in gold color. The leaf was painted in green and then tinged with bronze and gold colors, with some browns.
To see all the creations and read more, please visit http://www.riversideartalliance.org/orangeaid_oranges_1.htm

One of the paintings I did in July 2012, when I taught the Beginner’s Watercolor class at Riverside Art museum.

This scene at the State Citrus Park was painted earlier in 2012. I really enjoyed the scene which is typical of the area in late winter / early spring. The hills which were still snow clad provided the perfect backdrop for the Citrus Park, with the rows and rows of citrus plants and dotted around with majestic palms. I composed the scene for the view to enter from lower right, travel up the post, along the brightly lit patch on top of the trees, up the palm trees along the hills, down the tree on the left and down the post, and back to the post of the right. To maintain the flow, I took off the railings which ran across the front of the scene, between the posts and out to the left. This would have blocked the view visually, so I chose to take them off.
The sky and the hills in their pale blue and mauve shades provided aerial perspective and the various shades of green are toned down by the earth tones of the old palm fronds and the ground in the front. The painting is in oil, and is 14” x 11”. I was quite happy with the way this plein air piece turned out.