Thursday

Here is another one I pulled out of the box to work on. It still needs a figure some place, either walking or sitting down at the table. I spent much of yesterday and this morning boxing up all the work to send off to Howard Mandville Gallery, four large cardboard boxes in all. Even by ground it was still close to two hundred by Fedex. Hopefully they will get them all early on in the week.

I still have a 30x40 and perhaps the last two 12x16's to send off after the crit session. So maybe I can get those finished off by Saturday and mailed. The last thing I need is the paintings showing up after the opening night ! "There would be hell to pay for that mistake"

Richard Boyer

Wednesday

P.T.L, or as Judy Wade in Santa Fe puts it “Praise the Lord” I sold two of the plein air works from Jim Peterson’s show at the Mockingbird Gallery, he emailed me the results yesterday. Somebody came in yesterday and was interested in the Metolious River works we did up at Camp Sherman. It would be nice if this momentum would continue, but alas that may only be wishful thinking.

This morning I worked on this Amsterdam piece, just down from the red light district. I expanded on the yellow umbrellas and added a few customers in for good measure. The yellow might need some more work since I painted it over some of the underlying colors and they tend to show through a little. Yellow is very much on the transparent side and sometimes requires a second shot over the top.

Richard Boyer

Tuesday

I worked a little on this one today, adding the hollyhocks on the left and improving on the figures at the top of the steps. I keep wondering if maybe a few more flowers on the right might be in order, but then again too much can easily come across as gaudy !

I'll set it aside for a day. Now its time to work on a different kind of painting. The sheet rockers are all done so we are painting the basement with primer, five gallons worth of it. And yes it takes all afternoon to do !!!

Richard Boyer

Monday

Well its back to the grind as they say. The drive back from Bend took the usual ten hours. The show for me on Friday was dismal, I had no sales…….what else is new ! Jim actually sold some 30 works.

Rick sold three, could be that his prices were a lot lower than mine. But I saw other art work there sold for higher prices, just not mine. The only thing that moved for me was the two smaller Amsterdam pieces a few days before!

Now its back to working on the Howard/Mandville show. I’ll finish up that 30x40 of the steps maybe tomorrow.

Soon I think I’ll just apply for a dish washing job at McDonald's, a job with a future !!!!

Richard Boyer

Monday

Well its back to the grind as they say. The drive back from Bend took the usual ten hours. The show for me on Friday was dismal, I had no sales…….what else is new ! Jim actually sold some 30 works.

Rick sold three, could be that his prices were a lot lower than mine. But I saw other art work there sold for higher prices, just not mine. The only thing that moved for me was the two smaller Amsterdam pieces a few days before!

Now its back to working on the Howard/Mandville show. I’ll finish up that 30x40 of the steps maybe tomorrow.

Soon I think I’ll just apply for a dish washing job at McDonald's, a job with a future !!!!

Richard Boyer

Thursday

We painted late yesterday and I promised to make dinner for the group. So there was no time to post the results from the day. Wednesday morning was spent back at Smith Rock. We found a view from afar and decided on that. I threw a road in the foreground to add some interest.

In the afternoon we went down to the gallery to look for subject matter there. Jim wanted a plein aire piece from downtown, so I decided on this right in front of the gallery. As it turns out there were a couple in there looking over my Amsterdam pieces. His wife was from Holland and moved over to the states forty odd years ago. We talked about the paintings and they decided to buy two of them as a memory.

Yes!!!

As I painted out front I met quite a crowd and did my best to get them all in the gallery. Jim liked the idea of free advertising, nothing like parking an artist right out front. For me it was a chance to get them in and interested in my work.

This morning Rick and I spent our time fixing and changing small things on our works, getting them up to the level of deserving a frame around them. By two in the afternoon we were driving them done to the gallery. Thursday was the day to turn all work in for the show tomorrow. There seemed to be hundreds of painting lying around against the walls. Jim was busy photographing them all and logging them into his inventory. Then they will all be put up on the web site. His plan was to hang everything tonight after closing time. I have a feeling he’s going to be there until two in the morning!

We offered to help, but he insisted on doing it alone.

Richard Boyer

Tuesday

Today we went up to Camp Sherman on the Metilous River. A couple other artists were up at the fish hatchery painting, there is an old wooden bridge that crosses over a part of the river with some white water. I set up on the bridge down from Bart Walker and did a view looking up river. The light was overcast in the morning which made for some great color in the water, but by midday I was struggling with the sun that came out. I ran back to the car to grab Rick’s umbrella which seemed to help.

The Vancil’s came by with brownies, as I worked away. You maybe wondering who they are, well they have a painting of mine as well as a few other artists in the Mockingbird gallery. They have been supporters of the arts for quite a while and were excited to hear about this plein air event, so much so that they came by yesterday with brownies for the artists. But Bart and I were down in the valley at Smith Rock and they told us today that it was too much of a walk to deliver the goodies to us. But today they saw us and made the effort to hand deliver some fresh home made brownies. I was grateful for the morning treat and pleased to meet them again. I inhaled it.

This afternoon we went back to the General store and did this view. I need to do a little plein air plus work on it, since the light moved around and I lost the original feeling of the piece.

Richard Boyer

Tuesday Morning

I have been trying to link the blog site up to the facebook site like I usually do, but for some odd reason facebook will not let me come on to my site from another persons computer. What they want me to do as confirmation is to start identifying photos from my friends list of 500.

How the hell could possibly do that ???

Talk about an impossible test, obviously nobody could accomplish that and as a result their so called security test fails...........I can not access my facebook !!!

Richard Boyer

Monday

Monday

We went painting at Smith Rock State Park today. I was thinking the weather might not agree with us from seeing it last night, but when we woke up this morning we saw blue sky out. We drove north for half an hour through Redman and soon enough we were painting down in the canyon with the morning sun. I did this one as some climbers worked their way up the wall to the left….I didn’t hear anyone yelling out to cut the rope, so I assumed it was a successful climb.

In the afternoon I met up with Bart Walker, another one of the artists in Jim’s gallery and we headed down into the canyon again for a view back in the same area where I was in the morning. Then I was back up against a dead tree, just some place to hang my umbrella from. Unfortunately it soon became a mangled mess from the wind. In the afternoon the clouds were rolling in, but I was able to get some of the light play on the rock before it became too overcast.

Tomorrow its up to the mountains for day two.

Richard Boyer

Sunday

Sunday

Location: Somewhere along highway 84 in Idaho, at a godless boring stretch of highway. Rick is driving and I am writing. After all of Strayer’s studies the last thing one would want to hear is that I am bloging while driving.

Last night all the people on our street, as well as some had a block party. Nick managed to get a permit to close off the street in front of our house. For thirty dollars one can go on-line and request a permit to own the street for a social event. Grant it they first consider where you live and the affects it might cause on traffic. I suppose closing down a major artery like 700 east would never fly with the police. But on our small little street it was no problem, so with barricades set at either end they put out tables with linen cloths and candles. It could have easily been some outdoor café in Europe. Three grills were brought out and bratwurst was served and a small table off to the side had all the libations to go with the pot luck dinner dishes that were collecting on the tables.

It was a good event and a chance to get to know some of the neighbors I would have normally never met. The wine flowed past the permits curfew time, but nobody seemed to matter. At midnight people were still sitting around the tables in the middle of the street. I retired at 11:30 since I had to get up early for the drive to Bend. The rest of the crowd hung around until the wee hours of the morning. I heard from Nick that they didn’t make it into bed until 5:30 in the morning. It was a good thing we didn’t live on a major commuting route. I thing one would have been a little perplexed meeting up with a table full of dinner guests on road to the morning commute.

Richard Boyer

Friday

The crit went well last night; it’s just hard to get up early the next morning. Karin is up in Park City for some conference with her work, so it was my job to get up at 6:30 and make the lunches and push Victor and Markus out the door. Lina has a more relaxed schedule and doesn’t need to be ready until 8:10. So with her I have time to drink a coffee !

No matter how many times I bring back a painting to the crit session, they will always find something wrong, some little thing that needs to be changed. So I worked with the figure in the middle on this one and lowered down some of the plants. Its small and most people wouldn’t even notice it.

I then had a little time left over to work on the “stair case to heaven” painting.

Richard Boyer

Thursday

We have the crit tonight so I just worked a little on this one, mainly blocking in the stone walls better. I put a couple of figures at the top to see how they would look.

I’ll bring about four paintings up to Nick’s place to have critiqued and hopefully I can get them finished off on Friday. Sunday morning I’ll drive around to pick up Rick Graham and we’ll head out along route 84 until we hit the small town of Ontario, Oregon. Then we take off on one of the most desolate roads in the nation across the high plains of eastern Oregon. It’s about a four hour drive in more or less a straight line, past sage brush and the occasional juniper tree, for as far as the eye can see. And there are signs that say “Next gas 130 miles!” No wonder you see old rusted cars out in the middle of nowhere.

Ten and a half hours later we should be pulling up to Jim Petersen’s house, right in the middle of his nine year old daughters birthday party. I took Lina today to help me pick out a small present. One thing I’ve learned is that you can not show up to a nine year olds birthday party empty handed !!! You will get some real disappointed looks then.

Lina I had out early from school so we could visit the doctor, she was dancing in the living room yesterday and fell over on her wrist. According to the doc, it’s just sprained and not a small fracture. So as it was we had time to procure the present for my trip.

Unfortunately I will be missing my son’s birthday, Victor will be turning 15 on Tuesday.

Richard Boyer

Wednesday

This is what I've been working on the last few days. If you remember it from before I had the tables arranged differently, so I decided to push them around a bit. Yeah, right, just like in photo-shop! Actually I had to block them out and re-paint some of them. I also added a white umbrella and reduced some of the flowers, so hopefully now the eye can now meander through the painting better.

I was going to bring this piece with me to Bend, Oregon. Jim Petersen from the Mockingbird Gallery is having a paint-out week. So Rick Graham and I will drive ten hours straight west to meet with a bunch of other artists and do some plein air work for a show he is putting on next Friday. Rick was going to bring the laptop, so I can keep up-dated on location there.

The sheet rockers have hung all the dry wall, so now we have real walls down in the basement !!!

Now the dusty part begins with the sanding.

Richard Boyer

If you remember our basement project that we started eons ago? Well finally we got it to the point where it’s ready for the sheet rockers. Odi and his crew will be coming by soon to at least drop off all the materials. As he put it about 40 sheets, which will weigh several tons. I’m glad I don’t have to lift that around!

So maybe by the end of the week we will have the walls all covered and ready for paint. I need to run out to the local store and pick up some plastic to cover the entrance down to the basement, or else we will have the entire house covered in the fine white dust of gypsum. It’s amazing how far that stuff will float in the air, until you finally get the walls painted.

It was a long day yesterday getting all the last minute things taken care of, before it all gets covered up. From experience now I started taking photo’s of the walls beforehand. It won’t be the first time some outlet is inadvertently covered over with sheet rock.

Today I started on a quick block-in of some stairs in Provence for the Howard/Mandville show. It’s a 40x30 from the town of Banon. The stone steps are most likely from the 1400’s.

Richard Boyer

Saturday

Today is the big day, the Avenue’s Street Fair, a one day event where they close down six blocks and open it up to vendors and artists. Every year they pick a different street to have it on, so as not to antagonize the local population. And this time it just so happens to be right around the corner from us.

Our boy scout Troup 34 has a booth set up to tell the world about their organization. So Markus, Victor and I have volunteered to help. One of the local coffee shops here donated four pounds for us to give away and that where my job comes in. Due to our location being so close, it was only logical that I should brew the coffee here at the house. Martin dropped off two large industrial sized percolators and a couple of four gallon thermoses last night. Karin and I were up at seven this morning to start the brewing process, while Martin and the other scouts set up the tables at the fair. The coffee will be used as a fund raiser, a small donation is asked for the cup of Columbian roast and so far they have burned through two pounds. I’m at home now again brewing up some more. It would appear that the coffee was a good commodity. So far they have raised over one hundred and fifty dollars. Not bad for something they got for free!

I walked around a little also looking into some of the other booths. Everybody from politicians to local churches were represented; Asian cuisine to sickly sweet spun sugar stands and the array of amateur painters to potters. At both ends they had live bands playing to add to the festive experience.

A balloon popped and I watched a little girl slowly inhaling for that tragic scream of agony. Her life coming to an end as the string fell to the ground with just a bit of plastic remaining at the end. The mother was trying her best to comfort the teary eyed daughter. “Those things happen, honey!”
Some how the girl didn’t seemed to accept that as a viable excuse as she looked at the limp string in her hand.

I moved on to see Lina’s booth. For the past month she and her friend Katie have been working on duct tape items such as wallets, place mats and purses. Spirits were high, but the sales were not. Karin finally put down seventeen dollars at their stand and picked up a few items to stimulate the economy.

Karin was also scheduled to put in a few hours at the LDS hospital booth. They had glass vials with sugar set up next to various food items to show how unhealthy they were. They were there to answer any of your health care questions.

At 3:30 I left, it was enough

Richard Boyer

The studio was dark today; heavy rain clouds seemed to hang in the air for much of the day. Now the weather appears to have cleared a bit and some sun is coming out.

I actually got a commission from the blog site here. Apparently I did a painting eons ago of a dock with some old boats tied up and a gentleman sitting at the end of the pier. The scene was in northern Germany, more specifically the town of Kappeln. This lovely woman contacted me with the story about her father, who wanted to buy the small painting, but was disappointed when he heard it was sold a short time later.

He has since passed away, but his daughter always remembered the painting. She wanted to know if I could do a piece similar with the older gentleman sitting at the end of the pier. The person in the painting reminded her so much of her father. How could I say no?

I’ll start on it as soon as I get some of the pieces done for the Howard/Mandville show.

Today I worked on a larger 24x36 piece. It’s a café scene from the town of Gordes, Provence I did earlier. There were a few things that bothered me so I changed them. I wanted to run it through the crit session tonight before showing it.

I did work on this piece. If you remember the awnings were more or less a straight line, so I changed them out for umbrellas and now it seems to work better.

The other piece here I just added more punch to the sky; it was a little anemic in color. Its kind of fun coming in afterwards with thicker paint strokes once you have all the value and compositional problems figured out.

Richard Boyer

Wednesday

I spent most of today just fixing up some of the ones I did last week. This one I worked more on the foreground water which needed help
and the other was the quiet little canal bridge. It just wasn't enough with the water, so I added a boat maneuvering its way underneath.
The water behind the boat needs some work, but I'll put it aside until tomorrow. Usually it becomes quite obvious what wrong then !!!

Richard Boyer

We are up at the cabin again. We tried for Friday evening, but got stuck harvesting the Basil plants and making them into a pesto sauce. It’s a tedious job of hand picking hundreds of leaves off the stems and washing them before throwing it all in the grinder. Something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.

Saturday morning we made it up here to the small hamlet of Samak. With the wind blowing we decided to hitch up the sailboat and head to Jordanelle reservoir for a day of sailing. Oddly enough so did a thousand other people have the same idea on this Labor Day weekend.

Sunday we all did a trip to Strawberry reservoir for more crayfish catching. Hank brought the chicken legs and we the pots and pans for cooking them all on the spot. We heard from some locals there that a commercial group of Chinese were there the week before and took out two large coolers filled to the top. I was wondering if there would be any left then? We chatted with the local there and found out that they lacked the Swedish cooking finesse with dill, spices and porter beer. With them it was straight into the boiling water………yuck !

At least we would put them in three clean water tubs to make sure the creatures were cleaned out, if not who knows what you would be eating!

When we arrived the wind was howling, making it a challenge to get the large pots of water to boil. This most likely added to the time it took to get half a cooler filled. Still with all the kids and some other friends each with a chicken leg on the end of a string, they were able to bring in a good haul. We had a large family group down the shore from us trying to do the same thing. Each of their kids had a net in hand, splashing around in the water in a futile attempt to lure the crayfish. It wasn’t working and they seemed perplexed as our group was bringing in the catch just fine. The secret was to quietly place the chicken out in the water and wait ten minutes or more, and then they would all congregate around the meat. With a slow hand movement you could pull the line in and get your basket underneath them before they figured out to release their grip.

Hank took to charge of the cooler and will freeze them in for a future dinner party. With the last one I missed out, this time I want to make sure its at our place with me there!

Richard Boyer

Saturday

Your Brain on Computers - Studying the Brain Off the Grid, Professors Find Clarity - NYTimes.com

I’ve been seeing more and more clips from the river trip we did, the river trip with all the famous research scientists. I, as the token artist and having absolutely nothing to do with the studies they were involved in, never really was of much interest to the story. Their excuse was that I would draw away the attention from their article at hand, a distraction for the main point. Therefore no link was established to my web site and no interview done with the artist. In reality they most likely wouldn’t want to hear my viewpoint of a study about” being disconnected from technology”.

What could I really say, that I though the study was a total waist of time. Similar to a wasted money studying the preferences of a poodle wearing a red or pink knitted pullovers. In reality how hard is it to figure out what happened when you take off on a vacation. Duh….you begin to relax and smell the roses. Is it really that hard to turn off the damn cell phone and just disconnect from the outside world. Most of us do it any ways when we sleep eight hours at night! Maybe an interview with somebody from the 70’s might give a clearer picture of what it was like without a cell phone?

Grant it I would have loved a full page spread on the front side of the New York Times about my artistic endeavors, but still I should be grateful that they even bothered to mention me as the “Quiet outdoorsman”. What they used was more artistic license to describe me.

Report: Unplugging frees your mind – The Chart - CNN.com Blogs

At least I can be consoled in the fact that they did get me in a few silent footages of the “Quiet outdoorsman painting” and a mention of my name in the article.

Richard Boyer

Thursday

The scene is just east of the train station, across a bridge that looks up the Ouide Schans. Here I parked my self under a tall shade tree to work on the boats. There was a guy there working on his boat, so I put him in to add a bit of life to the painting. We have the crit tonight up at Nick’s place so I have quite a few of these smaller 12x16’s to bring to the group.

Richard Boyer

Wednesday

I worked on a painting from Herrengracht today. When I was painting this scene I had the luxury of a bench to use by the canal. A large tree shaded me, so I sat down and started to paint. Soon I noticed a couple staring over my shoulder. I made sure my camera was buried in my pack and that the pack was tied up to the easel. Five minutes went by and they were still there just quiet as could be. I turned around to talk to them. They then stuttered out that they were from Brazil and didn't know much English, let alone Dutch.



It was his wife, who was interested in the process and I invited them to sit down next to me on the bench so as to see maybe better. They both eagerly agreed and stayed there the entire time until I finally finished two hours later.

For me that was a first. Never have I seen that kind of patients to watch a painting from start to finish from a bystander.

Richard Boyer