Thursday

We have a storm front moving through the valley today, so my studio is rather dark. Some of the ski resorts have opened up and they are expecting another foot of snow up in the mountains

I like to use natural north light, which of course make you very susceptible to the weather conditions, one dark rain cloud and everything comes to a grinding halt.

I worked more on the boats, mainly the hulls, getting them to sit in the water and to look believable. The middle ground was also resolved more. It takes a while on these larger paintings, just because of the amount of space that needs to be worked on. With a smaller plein air piece, much of the detail you can omit, since nobody would see it any ways if the piece is small; when you do it several feet across then those smaller areas, need to be addressed with. A small little brush stroke on a 12x16, when blown up to a 30x40, can not be just treated as a larger brush stroke. The viewer wants to see more detail.

Tonight we have the crit night, as I call it. About ten years ago I started having a few art friends over to look at my paintings and critique them. Usually with a little wine, this becomes relatively too easy. My skin got thicker through this bashing process and I guess the art work got better.

Fast forward to now and we are about eight all together critiquing each others work until midnight and bringing rather higher end wines to the occasion.

It turns out that art is not the only thing we are critiquing. My wine for tonight will be a Grenache from the south of France.

Richard Boyer

http://richardboyerart.com/