Friday

The Crit went well last night; Rick Graham, who teaches art at the community college here in Salt Lake, brought two works and even Geoffrey Fitzwilliam, our local furniture/wood maker brought a painting in for the scrutiny of his fellow peers.

No blood was shed, but the wine flowed and the comments were swinging!

I brought out two works, first the "clothing store street painting". As it turned out, the umbrellas needed some work, along with some blue added to the shadow side of them. The child also had a little work done on her dress, as well as some of the cloths hanging next to the umbrellas.


This painting along with the other 24x36 below, I was going to send off to the May Gallery in Scottsdale, most likely next week after the paint dries some more.


Next I brought out the 30x40 boat painting and most seemed fairly glad about that one. Not too much needed to be fixed on this one.
The dock in the lower left corner was toned down with some blue and yellow ocher, along with some cool color added to the post on the right side. A few of the refections from the boats were changed for the better, either I made them darker or just broke them up a little so they wouldn't look so predictable.


I signed it lower left, so I guess it must be done then ! I was going to send to Jim at the Mockingbird Gallery in Bend, Oregon.

A few of our critique members were missing last night!

Congratulations go out to Dave Strayer, who was in Chicago as a guest on the Oprah Winfey show. Dave is our local researcher at the University of Utah Department of Psychology, and for the last decade, has been studying the dangers of cell phone talking while driving. He has been coming to our crit sessions for several years now and some of us were his guinea pigs in the first study he did about cell phone driving. His point - "Cell phone drivers are more dangerous than drunk drivers behind the wheel". So with that in mind a group of us came to his lab and were told to start drinking shots of vodka, until our blood level reached .08, then we were placed in a simulator and forced to drive behind some slow moving car for twenty minutes. None of our group crashed, unfortunately I can't say that for the cell phone test group!

Any ways, Dave was in Chicago on her show to talk about the dangers of it all and of course Oprah had every imaginable guest there, who had lost a loved one due to a cell phone driver. As Kay, his wife put it, it was a very emotional show. We get to see it in January.

They called us at the crit session from Chicago, Kay did at least.........Dave, on the other hand, called from Boston. He was off to meet up with Click and Clack from "Car Talk"

"There's going to be no living with him now!"

Richard Boyer