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