Vincent Farrell - 1928 - 2008

48" x 48" Vincent Farrell Oil - Overlooking Entrance to Newport Harbor c.1970's

About the Artist:
Vincent Farrell was a famed artist of Laguna Beach. He was born in 1928 in Orange County, California and died in Laguna Beach on November 8, 2008 at the age of eighty. His art education began at the local community college where he received his Associates of Arts degree from Orange Coast College. After college he began exhibiting in Newport Beach and Corona del Mar in local sidewalk shows where he sold his first painting. He later studied under Sergei Bongart, a Russian impressionistic painter, in the 1960's and his paintings were typical in style to many impressionist painters. In the 1970's he was one of the few Laguna Beach plein air painters to use bright colors and bold strokes in his landscapes, seascapes, florals and portraits. His brightly colored works of Laguna Beach and neighboring areas became much sought after. In 1966 he was accepted to the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts where he exhibited for almost fifty years. 

About the Painting:
One of the first gallery's to carry his work was The Clyde Zulch Gallery in Corona del Mar. The gallery was located on the corner of Poppy and Pacific Coast Highway and in the evening's on my way home from work I would be stopped at the traffic light on this corner and gaze into the Zulch Gallery window. For weeks this painting was displayed in the front window and I would dream of owning it. In 1978 when I left my employment at The Irvine Company I was not fully vested in my retirement plan so I had the option to take the cash and run so to speak. Well as luck would have it the amount in that plan was just about equal to the price tag on this Vincent Farrell painting that I had been dreaming about. So I bought it! 

It has been my window over-looking home for all these years, no matter where I planted my roots. From the time I was one year old my summers were spent living and playing on the beach of China Cove pictured in this painting. As a teenager I would swim across the bay to the Balboa Peninsula and meet up with friends and enjoy hours at the Balboa Fun Zone. The lower structure on the right is the Kerckhoff Marine Lab, owned and operated by Cal Tech (California Institute of Technology) since 1930, where the study of all forms of sea life goes on.

The top of the roof the China House can be seen, but sadly not longer exists. The story goes that the man built the house for his wife who had asthma and was told by the doctors that she should live as close to the water as possible. So being the dutiful husband he literally built a home upon the rocks, surrounded by water on three sides. Why it was built in a Chinese style I don't know, but it was good enough to give the cove its name, China Cove, and while the house may be gone the cove's name remains.