Monday, October 29.

The calendar orders have started to pick up a little, maybe people are thinking of Christmas ideas. here is todays shipment !!!

Last night it was Pumpkin carving. We had the Strayers over and with a little red wine got creative with the knives. Now I know there are people out there who really get into the face carving as I have seen by the pictures going around the Internet.  The problem is I don't want to spend six hours on a gourd that is destined to rot away after a week!

So our creation time is greatly reduced to about twenty minutes. Afterwards followed the dinner and more wine. 

Richard Boyer

Friday

Well Mockingbird Gallery sold another piece for me.  The 18x24 Rabbit Brush painting.

We are once again under clear blue skies. The storm moved on to Colorado and the light dusting on the grass has all melted away.

Today I finished off the wooden boat painting.  From the crit session last night I changed the color of the small rowboat to a reddish hull, giving it more interest in the composition. A little work to the water was also done, along with popping some of the highlights on the boats. Now it just needs to dry a bit and I can send it off to the Howard/Mandville Gallery next week. 

Richard Boyer

Wednesday

Today, under gloomy rain clouds I worked some more on the small 11x14 boat painting.  We have a front moving though the valley for the next several days and snow is now in the mountains. When it's all said and done we could end up with several feet at the upper elevations. God knows we need the water after last years drought, and to make matters worse they keep predicting a dry winter to come!

Now some of the ignorant politicians here in Utah will tell you it has nothing to do with global warming…right!!!

I basically worked on the foreground boats working wet into wet. Now it needs to dry a bit and so I can go back into it and punch certain areas up, like the side of the hulls.

Richard Boyer

Tuesday

I need to come up with a 30x40 painting for the May Gallery and figured why not try another figurative piece, another boat in the lilly pads painting.  It was a fun painting to do and a challenge with the water. This time I have my daughter in the back of the boat picking lilly flowers.  The foreground will be a variety of green leaves from the plant, along with a few bright colored flowers here and there.

This is the first stage, the block-in of the canvas. Making sure the canvas is covered and all the computational elements are addressed. So now everyone will say, "Well why then is the foreground all just one color?" …..because it's just the start "Grasshopper", all things will come in good time!

Hopefully I can keep the painting a little looser in style to add some excitement.

The calendar has been selling fairly well. A little over a week and I have sold over fifty of them. That being said, I would just like to say to order your today. I do have a finite amount and once they are gone, they will be gone forever!

Richard Boyer

Monday, Oct. 22

Jim Peterson at the Mockingbird Gallery sold this painting last weekend along with two smaller 12x16's.  I'm always so glad when a figurative painting sells.  They take so much time to do because of the challenging subject matter, that it really becomes a plus to the ego when you sell them.  So way to go Jim.

This piece I started this morning, it's just a small 11x14 of some boats in Stockholm.  So when I get it done I'll send it off to the Howard/Mandville miniature show next month.

Richard Boyer

Friday

Mockingbird Gallery gave me back this painting, so as usual I re-worked it this morning and added a small angled roof to the left side and a dirt path leading into the barn.  Its actually an old hay storage shed in Sweden. Now a days they wrap all the hay in plastic and just leave it outside all winter.  You end up with these large white marshmellow looking things in the landscape. Not the most romantic thing to paint!

I left the hay balls out and just worked on the age of the structure. So now its a new painting ready to be sent off again to another gallery.

Richard Boyer

Thursday

Jim at the Mockingbird Gallery sold this small plain air painting I did of Rabbit Brush and wanted to know if I could do a larger version of it. 

So I decided to try and do an 18x24 start to finish in one session.  This morning I stretched up the canvas and started painting from an image of the smaller work.  Well at 2:00 this afternoon I finished it off. Okay sorry, thinking back on yesterdays entry, it's not really finished quite yet.  I will be having the crit session tonight and I'm sure when the others have a little wine in them, things will be said. Maybe unpleasant things, things I don't want to hear….and I will tweak it some more tomorrow.

It's not really that bad and besides I'm use to it all.

Richard Boyer

Wednesday

People will always ask me, "Well how long does it take you to do a painting?"  My honest response would have to be thirty years.  Okay in reality I have been working on this for the past five days or so and I look at it and say to myself that its almost done. I could put it in a frame and send it off to the gallery, but it the back of my mind I know that it could be better.  So being the fanatic perfectionist I will set it aside to look at it over the next couple of days, take it to the critique session tomorrow and generally obsess over it until I can bring it up to the level to earn a signature.  

As other artists will say, it just need to be tweaked here and there.

Richard Boyer

Monday, October 8.

I have been working on this large 30x40 view of the town of Gordes in Provence.  It's in the morning light, so most of the town is still in shade with the sun just peeking around the side of the hill.  With all the architecture it seems to be taking a long time. I have found this to be the norm with french and italian mountain top villages. None of the buildings are square having been added onto throughout the last half millennium.  So each day I have been methodically plodding along to capture the feel of the early morning light on the roof-tops, which all seem to be pointing off in different directions. Once I get everything painted in then I can come back and orchestrate the light and shadow better.  The background hills I would like to fade out more to give a better scenes of light.

For the past several weeks I have been working on producing a calendar and found out rather quickly that it is not an easy undertaking.  Through a friend of mine I was introduced to a computer programmer who was able to put it all up on my web site.  I am very grateful for this, since my knowledge of HTML is just enough to get me into serious trouble.

So without further adieu I present my 2013 Calendar called Travels….and it's only $15. think of all your Christmas gifts coming up !!!

http://www.richardboyerart.com/Calendar.html/
Please check out my website and the images I have selected 

and order today

Richard 

Thursday

I have been working on this larger 30x40 painting of the mountain top village of Gordes in Provence for Southam gallery.  I took an older painting sanded it down and I’m in the process of just covering it over with the new subject.  When ever possible I will always try and recycle materials kind of like the “Borg” in Star Trek the next generation where they absorb and assimilate any foreign life form to use as their building block materials…”resistance is futile.” They use to always say.

I’ll have a picture of that soon. But today I worked on the 12x16 painting of Fall River Falls; this is the one that sold twice at the Mockingbird Gallery.  The person who didn’t get the original asked if I could do something like it again, which of course I agreed to.  I tried to keep it in that plein air fashion and do the piece quick with looser brush strokes, so hopefully the client will be happy with it. I would say it looks very similar to the original. I’ll take it to the crit session tonight and then send it of to the gallery next week.

Richard Boyer

Larry

Larry if you are out there I could use some help setting up my new calender on the website.  I will give you a painting for it !  I just need your email.

Richard

Tuesday

The drive back from Bend was long as usual, just glad to get out of the car after ten hours on the road.

The show went well for me. All in all five paintings sold including this figurative piece I sent last week.  this is the one rejected from the Oil Painters of America show, so I'm glad I can throw that back at them that it sold in under five days after it arrived at the gallery !

The woman that bought it has swedish ties and met me the opening night to get the full story about the painting.

Jim Peterson had a "put your name in the envelope" system, then at 8:00 he drew out the names.  When the duet settled he had sold 13 or 14 pieces.  

This 8x10 study sold for me, it was actually done the day of the show, just a quick morning study.

Also this 11x14 fly fishing painting

And this 12x16 piece, twice actually!  They pulled one couples name out of the envelop that had already left and this guy next to me gave a sigh, he too had his name in there.  So I told him I could do another version of the falls, he agreed and we ended up being both happy.  So I earned back my gas money on the trip plus some.

Richard Boyer