Raising of Cattle

David Harrington

The mural Raising of Cattle was painted with oils on wood by David Harrington.

Laguna Hills resident David Harrington cannot remember a time when he did not love to draw. As a young boy growing up in Covina, California, he divided his attention between basketball and art. When he was about eight years old, a visit to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art tipped the scale in favor of the latter. “I stood looking at the beautiful paintings for hours and hours” he recalls, “and knew then that art would always be very important to me.” Several years later, at the age of thirteen, he began to paint and has never stopped.

For the Laguna Hills Civic Center lobby wall, David painted three impressionist scenes depicting the principal land uses in the Saddleback Valley: raising cattle, growing crops, and cultivating citrus groves. Before touching brush to wood, David studied historical photographs of the area and hiked over the land, noting carefully the ways in which light played across the gently rolling hills and creek-carved valleys, and imagining what the area might have looked like more than a century ago.