Painting in the heat

Here is a photo from yesterday.  It gives you a good idea of how large the painting is and of how bright my new space it.
I know I'll finish this painting in August, was hoping for tomorrow.  The painting hasn't yet told me that it is finished.  

Carmine Street

Carmine Street

80x120 cm

oil on canvas

I've been painting like a fiend to finish this before some sun at the beach near Cannes.  I thought that I could cheat some and use the palette knife then ended up scraping off almost a days work.  After I projected the photo onto the canvas, (yes, I do that) I realized that the only part of the photo that struck me originally was the part on the left with the three guys in the sun but I wasn't about to cut the canvas — not those wonderfully lightweight Italian imported ones from Pieraccini.  

Here it is, thirty or so hours of painless brushstrokes, a labor of love; more for the canvas than the subject.  Part of the difficulty in painting this was due to two things:  I prepped the canvas too light in color and then when I opened the new tube of Mars Black it wasn't black, it was a bizarre red-brown. 

Instead of wasting time looking for the invoice of purchase and trying to exchange the rotten tube, I squeezed a gob on to my palette and added Ultramarine Blue. To my delight the color is not only unusual but rich and lovely.  Now I want more of it but don't know what color it truly is.  My companion told me it is probably the end or the beginning of the mix that mistakingly was packaged.