Saturday

It’s show time tonight. The event where people come into the gallery put their name in an envelope under the work and at the end the winning name is called. You are then expected to pay for the piece. The gallery usually serves wine to make sure general public gets in the right mood!

I did two smaller 8x10 pieces today, one as payment for staying at the house and the other just for fun.

Tomorrow I drive back to Salt Lake City.  

Richard Boyer   

Friday

My head hurts, which is usually the case when you get a bunch of artists and gallery owner together.  I had to leave the house I was staying at since it was being rented out to somebody over the weekend.  So now I’m at one of the clients guesthouse from the gallery with the artist Steven Lee Adams.

Last night we invited several other painters and Jim Peterson over for libation until the wee hours of the morning talking about art. What a surprise!

Yesterday was the due date for all plein air paintings. Throughout the afternoon most artists were dropping off their works. Today they will be hung on the wall for the show tomorrow.

I did one last piece from Devil’s Lake with Craig Zuger on Wednesday. We set up along the shallow shoreline, which was frozen with a tin layer of ice. A sign that fall is coming to the Cascade Range.  The surface was like glass and one could see the bottom clearly out in the middle of the lake.  I felt with water that smooth, I had to put a duck in there to help break it up a little.

Richard Boyer

Thursday

I met up with most of the artists the other day at a spot along the Fall River south of Bend. Craig Zuger drove us to the remote location that I would have never found in a million years.  Driving through the fog – or smoke with the fires raging the way they are - Craig got lost….  A “Local” was lost, so yeah I would definitely be still driving around the dirt roads looking for life and civilization.  The fog as it turned out quickly burned away to brilliant sun.

This river seems to be popular with all the hard-core fly fishermen there.  Setting up next to them we heard all the tales of how good the area is, world famous by some. To me it was just another river….I kept that to myself, lest to offend the die-hards.

My first painting of the morning was the falls down river.  It looked like a nice spot to set up by the river and bask in the sun.  The other day it was cold in the shade by Sparks Lake, so this was a good change to feel warm again.

In the afternoon I worked on this one.  The guy in the painting told me he comes up here five times a week to fish with his dog.  He might have been what some people call extreme….

Richard Boyer

Tuesday

I’m in Bend, Oregon now, drove up on Saturday and staying in an empty house that should have been filled with traveling artists.  Several cancelled out so looks like I am the only one staying in the guest house, which I can’t really complain about, at least it is nice and quiet. 

Craig Zuger gave me a call the next morning and we headed out to Sparks Lake up in the Cascade Range.  We hiked out to a point overlooking the water with a view of the South Sister Mountain, set up in the shade and started painting.  It was then I got a garbled cell call from Jim Peterson at the gallery, I found out later that he was just checking in with us. But the call was breaking up, as is the case with all cell phones. My voice carried across the water and that’s when we heard…”Richard Boyer, is that you?”  It was the un-mistakable sound of Bart Walker yelling across the lake.  The reception between us was far better than the cell phone. He joined us and I finished off this 12x16.

After lunch we all turned a few degrees and did another painting.  I picked a view of Broken Top Mountain, the remnants of a cataclysmic volcanic explosion that wiped out a large area some time ago in geological history. Seems like any one of these peaks could follow the route of Mount Saint Helens and take out half the state.  I actually had to bushwhack farther out along the shoreline to get this viewpoint with the foreground.     

Richard Boyer

Friday

I have been painting up at the cabin again, not only on the canvas but also the living room wall.  It was time for a fresh coat of paint to cover up the dingy old stuff.  That meant patching all the holes and preparing the surface. Grant it I still feel the place needs to be torn down completely and re-build from the ground up; but that won’t happen until I win the lottery.

As for the real painting I decided to re-work some parts of the beach scene here.  The grass needed to be lighter and the water had to have an overhaul.  It just wasn’t there yet so I re-painted areas.  I also decided on some clouds in the sky, so now it feels done.  I guess it better be since I sent off the image to the Southam Gallery. They are having a show in mid October and requested a beach painting from me.

Tomorrow I will be driving to Bend, Oregon and the Mockingbird Gallery.  Jim Peterson is having a weeklong plein-air painting event where all his artists’ head up into the mountains and paint on location.  We have several days to finish the work and then we hand them into the gallery for a show.  It’s actually a fun event going out with other artists to paint and the area around the eastern side of the Cascade Range is beautiful.  All the rain clouds, you would expect along the northwest coast are held back by the mountains, so Bend is actually quite sunny and dry.

Richard Boyer

Thursday

Today I worked on the grasses and put some figures in near the umbrella, which of course will need some more work later on. Basically I need to live with it a bit and look at it a few days from now to see what else I can tweak.  Even the water and grasses could use a little more work. 

I do have the crit session tonight so I’ll show it and see what they all think.

Richard Boyer

Wednesday

I n a week I leave for Bend, Oregon; they are having a plein air event with all their artists.  So we will all be painting the landscape around the area for a show at the end of the week.  And hopefully I will be able to sell something to make the trip worthwhile, or at least to cover the gas costs.  These events are always fun, but you do want to have a few sold to pay for the trip in the end.

Southam Gallery will also be having a show when I get back and they wanted a nice 24x36 beach painting.  With that in mind I started this piece from southern Sweden and want to really play up the red umbrella. When I saw this it really popped out against the green grasses so I must have shot dozens of pictures.  Luckily the woman behind it didn’t notice – the Paparazzi at work shooting her umbrella!!

Richard Boyer

Hi Larry, Our old computer crashed and took your email. Could you resend it to me?

I got something to tell you.

Richard

Monday, September 10

My job was tearing down a garden house up at the cabin.  This garden house, I must add was built by somebody who had no knowledge about carpentry.  One obvious clue was that you could push on the structure and it would sway a bit.  In the inside he wrote on a board that it was built with 80% recycled materials, meaning that he glued together small scraps of wood and screwed them to the side to build the wall.  With nails it is quite easy to take something down, especially with a good-sized hammer.  Screws on the other hand you need to screw out with a drill bit, which takes forever when they are all stripped. I had some four-letter words to say about the incompetence of the builder on many an occasion.

Well I did manage to paint in the mornings.  The Howard/Mandville Gallery is having a miniature show later on in the fall and they wanted a small boat piece.  So I did this little one of some boats in Stockholm.

Richard Boyer