Thursday, April 28, 2011

Thursday

Yesterday I wanted to paint, but it was dashed by a request from the Boss, (aka. the wife) to work on the stairs. Karin is making the push to get the basement totally done before all the in-laws arrive in June. So I, being naive thought just a quick first coat of Urethane on the stairs shouldn’t take that long to do……I was so wrong, so completely wrong in that time assessment. Trying to paint each round baluster and Newel post, which I might add we have a @%# lot of, took forever. I started at nine in the morning and at one in the afternoon was still at it, so much for my career painting!

Here is a picture of the project, this afternoon I need to sand it all again since the Urethane brings up the grain of the wood and makes it all rough. Then the second coat goes on and the process of sanding starts all over again with steal wool: until you are ready for the third and final coat. God, I’ll be glad when this is all done!

One of the guy’s in our crit group, Geoffrey Fitzwilliam is a woodworker extraordinaire and I would be willing to bet he knows all the work that is involved in making stairs. If you get a chance check out his work at http://www.fitzwilliam.com/ I’ll have to invite him over to give this project a look.

This morning I took a break from the woodworking and painted on the flower pot piece again, it’s still not done, but at least I can take it to the crit tonight and get a few opinions. And yes I know the back ground still needs to be resolved more!

Right now I have to get back to sanding those damn @%$# balusters!!!

Richard Boyer

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Tuesday

We woke up to a few inches of snow on the ground again. I think spring has forgotten us; as I watched the wind blowing the snow sideways against the studio windows. Maybe later on in the week we will finally see that warm yellow orb up in the sky; most people have forgotten how it looks.

I worked on the pots today and some of the back ground door shutters. I figured it best to do all the pots at once and forget about the greenery until tomorrow, this way I was able to keep the brushes loaded up with a wider variety of terracotta colors. If I had started mixing in the greens of the plants it might have muddied up the orange colors of the flower pots.

Richard Boyer

Monday, April 25, 2011

Monday, April 25

We had a large Easter dinner yesterday, with several Swedish friends and the Strayer’s. Everyone came over at two in the afternoon for a large midday smörgåsbord. At six in the evening we were still eating. Somehow when the Swedes break out the shot glasses and start singing, you know it will go on for some time. It was a good dinner with a lot of good friends, and something we need to do more often!

With another front moving in and gloomy skies overhead I worked a little on the stone wall in the painting this morning. The clouds make it dark in the studio, which of course makes it more difficult to judge values.

So when that happened I would just hop down to the basement to work on that. We have some of Karin’s relatives coming over from Sweden in June, so the basement needs to be all finished off so they have some place to stay. Before spring break I finished off the oak stairs down from the main floor; actually I just did the treads and risers, the balusters’ and handrails we contracted out. There is no way I would want to try that part. It’s just too damn expensive to screw up on an angle cut with a custom handrail. Usually that means buying the entire length over again, another words you’ve just thrown out several hundred dollars. Once it is done it will make a great entrance into the basement. I still have to patch the nail holes and put several coats of Urethane on to protect it all

Richard Boyer

Friday, April 22, 2011

Friday

“Some traditions are inevitable passed down from mother to daughter and set in stone, never to be altered.”


Living in Utah “Good Friday” isn’t much of a religious holiday; the thought of what this day is all about is forgotten as people shuffle off to work. Sunday seems to be the day they celebrate with truck loads of chocolate Easter eggs.

Sweden, on the other hand, a country usually considered full of heathens and pillaging Vikings, regards this day as one of the holiest. Nobody works and the entire land shuts down for the three day weekend. On the whole most Swedes are not even remotely religious and generally consider these old places of worship to be center pieces in the town square next to the state controlled liquor store. But nevertheless twice a year it’s standing room only as the entire population packs into the church for Easter and Christmas Eve.

And as with my wife’s mother, certain procedures are a must. The most important is the traditional cleaning of the house and I am not talking about what most guys think, just a quick once over with the vacuum cleaner. No, we are talking about the deepest of cleanings, the white glove cleaning, and the toothbrush in the corner cleaning. My excuse that the garage needed to be picked up didn’t work. I was enlisted to help with systematically removing all objects from the selves, so that the surface could be first cleaned and then oiled in the case of wood; which we seem to have a lot of. When each room was fully dusted from top to bottom it was time to vacuum and wash the floors. I once again reminded my wife that maybe the garage should be attended to, but she shot me a look that would kill. I grabbed the wet rag and started to dust off the piano.

“Easter weekend can’t possible start until the house is cleaned”, she would explain, “so clean that one could eat off the floors.”

So now “Good Friday” has arrived and we can both go to work…….actually in our case just for half a day, but at least the house is clean!

I started this 30x40 for Ron at the May Gallery; he wanted another Provence piece with flowers. Last year I did a smaller version of this one and felt it might just work as a larger piece.

Richard Boyer

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Thursday

So before we left on the camping trip Victor had a runny nose and was complaining about the aching feelings of a cold. After that the ensuing fate was set for every family member; it was just a matter of time. One by one we came down with the same symptoms and on the last day, driving home it was my turn to pay the piper. I have been carrying a Kleenex box around for the last couple of days contemplating my existence.

But one can not complain its back to the 9-5 job again, back to reality. Spring break is over, deal with it!

I worked on this old piece today. I’ve been changing the arm around a bit, because it looked a little like it was pasted on. And once again it still looks odd, so maybe I just need to stand back and stare at it for a bit. That’s why it’s good to have several pieces in the works. Tomorrow I’ll occupy my time with something a little different and maybe, just maybe the answer will come to me next week.

Richard Boyer

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Wednesday

There is in Utah a stretch of highway that crosses over one of the most desolate and visually unimaginative section of the state. The road is highway 6 from Price down to Green River, a small forgotten town left over from the uranium boom back in the forties on a lonely stretch of Interstate 70. This two lane stretch is built upon a muddy semi flat layer of rock called Mancos shale. Sometime during the Cretaceous period, around some 130 million years or so, give or take a few million; there was a giant inland swamp with mud layer after mud layer being deposited. The result now a days is a gray landscape that resembles the moon, dotted with a few scraggly sagebrush. It’s called the endless road by many.

Looking off to the west along this flat topography you can see the distant faded blue mountains of central Utah; no one would be the wiser that over the course of time a small river had eroded away the landscape as it rose up around it and revealed a chasm such as this.

One thousand feet below from the flat muddy Mancos layer this water carved its way through the bright colored sandstone. It is within these towering walls we spent several days camping for spring break.

We were prepared with wine and plenty of food. That first night we drove down Buckhorn Wash, at camp it was chicken fajitas and a 2006 Cabernet of Geyser Peak. We had a fire, but still the night was cold. Mentally you make a note in the back of your head to put the damn long underwear on before climbing in the sleeping bag for the next night. Instead of forgetting about it in your pack, waking up at three in the morning and thinking it’s just too cold to go out to find it in the dark.

The next morning we woke up in the frigid shadows of the cliff walls, the sunlight was fifty yards to our west and slowly inching its way up to our camp. Until then our only warmth was holding a cup of coffee, or in the case of the kids, hot chocolate and letting the heat warm us from the inside. At ten in the morning the sun finally basked our faces and soon we were shedding cloths as the temperature soared up. Such is the fluctuation in high desert country; you can freeze at night and develop heat stroke during the day.

We set out for a short bike ride and soon found a smaller side drainage off to the east call Calf Canyon. With water actually flowing in the wash, we figured this must be a popular spot. Then again maybe the collection of cars at the bottom might have also given us that clue. We tried to bike up a little ways but found it next to impossible on the loose sand. As any biker will tell you, sand will trap you like wet cement and soon we found it easier just to leave the bikes and walk.

Later in the afternoon it was on to the Buckhorn Pictographs, a sixty foot long section of smooth sandstone where the ancient ones put their marks upon the wall. Here we found definitive proof that space aliens visited our planet. We celebrated the evening with a Dutch dinner of pork loin and more red wine; oddly enough this seemed to cement the idea of extraterrestrials painting pictures of themselves on the wall some two thousand years ago.

On day three we continued our drive south along the gravel road and a few stretches of payment until we came to Goblin Valley. This isolated state park along route 24 only convinced us more that the aliens were here, perhaps fossilized in the sand stone. The topography resembles more that of Mars than anything on our planet, with a harder sandstone formation on top of a looser rock on the bottom. The resulting undercutting action of water and wind has left the strange imaginative shapes to marvel at.

We ended up with the last campsite and soon found out way? With all the odd shapes to climb on, it has become a haven for small children to spend weeks on end. Our camp was surrounded by screaming preschoolers as they scampered up every little dirt hill around us. At eight in the evening they were all sound in bed, at six thirty in the morning they were back up on the same dirt piles: it was time for us to leave.

The last day we ventured off on some dirt roads back into the rugged landscape of the swell and after a few hours were once again looking at some more pictographs from several millennium back. With storm clouds approaching it was back to the town of Green River for a warm hotel bed. The next morning we woke up the see the left rear tire flat on the car, looks like we call it right. Trying to jack up 2000 pounds on loose, wet sand and struggling to get the wheel off would have been a nightmare.

Richard Boyer

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Thursday

When I was in college I had memories of taking off to southern Utah for Spring break and basking in the warm sunlight of a 75 degree day in a catatonic state of mind. Now, grant it, we were a half dozen college kids stuffed into a car that now a day’s wouldn’t pass inspection. The trunk over filled with cheap beer and bungee corded closed was the norm for hanging out in the desert heat.

With this weekend being spring break for the kids, why o’ why do we have snow flying around in the air. This morning as I walked the dog it was a full on blizzard with snow blowing sideways. The weather report yesterday was saying this fast moving system should have been pushed out of the valley by morning……right !

Tomorrow we are driving down to Goblin Valley to go camping, let’s hope it’s not in wet snow that would be miserable!

Richard Boyer

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Wednesday

It was one of those days, when you know not much was done. Robert came over with what he figured was a small task, wondering if he could borrow some of your time and in usual fashion that small task ends up taking most of the morning. For some @#%# reason he wanted to dump all his 500 pictures and video clips off of his iphone on to my computer. We are talking about two minute clips of his cat lying on the floor…….the cat was just lying still. I thought it was dead at first until after a minute the tail flipped over to the other side of it. Normally this would be an easy task, but Robert is jinxed, so either the phone was bad, the video clips bad or some else went wrong. After an hour I had to climb back out of the black hole and tell him it was enough. I need to get back to work! Unless he wanted me to hit the delete option, which I was so ready to do. Movie clips should not be about your pet cat lying around in some lethargic state.

So I painted slowly on the right side in the background and a little on the figure holding up the Maypole.

Richard Boyer

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Tuesday

More rain on its way, what else is new!

Last night we had our model session at Rick’s; she wrapped herself in a scarf and put another over her head and relaxed into this pose for two hours or so. The result was a gypsy woman painting.

This morning I was back on the Maypole piece defining the surrounding garden they are in. I still need to add the flowers to the pole and work on the figures; which are the center of interest, so I really need to take some care with it and bring out the colors and contrast. People were wondering about the demon under the pole also, it just so happens to be Sasha, our black Labrador and she is just hanging out in the cool shade.

Richard Boyer

Monday, April 11, 2011

Monday, April 11


We did some cyber critiquing on this painting and another one I have. Carlie set up a facebook page for just the critter members where we can now just dump any image on and get a quick feedback. I think it’s a really good ides and might just help to get those problems resolved before you get too much into them. This piece has seen a lot of transformation. I’ve moving the entire head 90 degrees to the right so that now it’s facing forward and has more of a connection to the figure. I also lightened up the front side of the beast and defined a few of the muscles.

I was also working on the Coeur d’Alene trip for the OPA show. With the closest airport being 25 miles away in Spokane, transportation was a problem. It would appear they have no bus or train system to get me from the airport over to Idaho, my cheapest option was some taxi/bus service for $50 each way……forget that!

A quick search on “Hotwire.com” got me a car rental for $50 and a hotel for about the same price, now I can drive to the lovely, luxurious Motel Super 8 with breakfast included. I know it’s not the best hotel, but for one night I’m not going to be picky.

Richard Boyer

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Thursday


Here is step two on the May poll painting. I defined just the shape of the figures in relationship to each other. This way I can make sure the sizes of each person is correct, once that is done then I can start on the faces and other small detailed parts of the anatomy. There can be nothing worse than spending a lot of time on a face, only to have it in the wrong place. Then you’re left with the depressing thought of taking the pallet knife to it and scraping it off. So tomorrow I’ll work more on the back ground and that should help define better if the figures are in the right place.

We have the crit tonight, so who knows maybe they’ll feel everything needs to be moved over to the right an inch or two……it wouldn’t be the first time

I made a plane reservation today for the Oil Painters of America show up in Coeur d’Alene; actually I’ll fly into Spokane, Washington which is forty miles away. I just need to find how to get into town from the airport. It’s going to be a short trip, the night before we will be at my son’s graduation ceremony, then I fly out the next morning and need to be back again the following evening for his graduation dinner/party. But I think it will be good to get up there for the show and meet some of the other artist.

Richard Boyer

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Wednesday


I started this one today; it’s from Midsummer last year at our place. We had a small dinner party with dancing around the May pole. Yes, it’s a Swedish thing!” In the afternoon the women collected up small branches of greenery and wrapped them around a wooden cross, usually a lot of string will help with this process.

In Sweden one would use the small birch tree sprouts that seem to grow up every where. Here is Utah, a semi arid environment; we don’t have wild trees growing all over to cut down. It’s more of a midnight “Lets steal something from the neighbor’s tree and hope they don’t notice” type of ordeal. Once the cross is covered with leaves, flowers ( also obtained by the same method ) are then tied on top and two rings also adorned with flowers are hung from either side of the cross bar. When done it is stood up right in the middle of the yard and everyone holds hands and dances around it to celebrate the arrival of spring. Usually some form of alcohol is involved!

The girls in my painting are in the process of attaching the flowers to the pole and were nicely back light, so I would really like to capture that colorful glow.

Richard Boyer

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Tuesday


The snow melted yesterday and it’s back to some warmer weather now. That rain which came down during the “Riverdance” performance Saturday evening changed over to snow in the night. Sunday we woke up to a few inches covering the ground. A depressing sight; most people will admit that snow is the last thing you want to see in spring, its time to bring on the warm weather! Unfortunately looking through the paper this morning showed only rain and snow for the forecast throughout the rest of the week

We gathered at Rick’s place last night to paint another figure, Nandi was her name and Rick figured a little traditional head dress would make for something more interesting. It did help to add some color and interest to the piece. Here is my result.

Richard Boyer

Monday, April 4, 2011

Monday, April 4

Over the weekend we all went to see “Riverdance” playing up at Kingsbury Hall on the University of Utah campus. It was pouring down rain, so being indoors at a theatre was a perfect idea; the only problem being the long walk to and from the place. Like most University events, parking is always a problem and in fact you might consider yourself lucky to find a spot within a quarter mile.

I remember seeing the original “Riverdance” eons ago on a public television station, back when Michael Flatley was running the show. The performance was stunning and kept are interest for the entire hour and a half program. This time it was not the original cast and somehow it showed; it lacked the power that I was expecting. As Karin put it, “It’s just a lot of tap dancing!”

So as they do on facebook, I would give it a thumbs down!

Richard Boyer

Monday, April 4

Over the weekend we all went to see “Riverdance” playing up at Kingsbury Hall on the University of Utah campus. It was pouring down rain, so being indoors at a theatre was a perfect idea; the only problem being the long walk to and from the place. Like most University events, parking is always a problem and in fact you might consider yourself lucky to find a spot within a quarter mile.

I remember seeing the original “Riverdance” eons ago on a public television station, back when Michael Flatley was running the show. The performance was stunning and kept are interest for the entire hour and a half program. This time it was not the original cast and somehow it showed; it lacked the power that I was expecting. As Karin put it, “It’s just a lot of tap dancing!”

So as they do on facebook, I would give it a thumbs down!

Richard Boyer

Friday, April 1, 2011

Friday

It was a light crit session last night. I only had one piece, Robert had three, Jeff, Sid and Carlie also had just one each. So as a result we were done early and as usual with wine the conversations began to drift. In this case a little on the religious side or as Bill Maher puts it “Religilious”.

I did present my pony piece here, and worked on the long list of criticizes this morning. The animal need mainly more contrast; my daughter with the apple in hand also needed some touching up. It could still use a little work with the apples on the ground, but that will have to wait until Monday.

The recession seems to be abating a bit now, well at least for me anyways. In the past few weeks the May Gallery has sold four works and Southam Gallery three. Now I know that I shouldn’t get my hopes up, next month or months might just be dry as a dust bowl. It seems to be the roller coaster life style of the typical artist.

Let’s just hope it continues in the right direction!

Richard Boyer