Thursday

I have been messing around with the cafe painting for a while now, changing the composition a few times as well. It needed more on the left side, so I introduced a table with a waiter. There was also a flower pot in the middle I took out so one can now look inside the group of people and cafe more. The shadows still bother me in the foreground, somehow I've got to make it more engaging to the viewer.

This little study I did in the morning, its an 11x14 of Stockholm for the show in Coos Bay, Oregon. I was told by one of the local artists there, Dutch Mostert to paint some smaller pieces if I want a chance at selling something.

The Howard/Mandville Gallery came through again with a few sales. Don't know what is going on there, they seem to been having a rash of sales lately. So I'm not going to complain about that!!!

 

This 24x36 called "Swedes & Danes" sold

and this small 12x16 I did plain air over in southern Sweden a few summers ago.

Richard Boyer

Friday

Yup I'm still working on the cafe painting….,seems to be taking longer than I want. So I put it aside for today and worked on small changes to other works from the crit session last night.

We had first a model session at Rick Graham's house from 6-9. He managed to talk one of his students into modeling for the evening, with cloths on of course!  With our small group she was actually very good at holding still in the same pose; most of us worked on her portrait.

This one from the coast of Oregon also needed a few tweaks. The comments were made that the lower half of the painting was laking something. So I added a hint of the coast down on the lower right and played up some of the waves. The horizon line where the water meets the sky I also blurred out with some atmospheric perspective.

The Erie Canal painting has also undergone some changes. that boat to the right has caused me some problems. first it was an under-sized boat pushing a barge, which looked a little strange. So I changed it out for a bigger boat with a few figures on it and now it looks better. The background was also hazed out with blues to give it that atmospheric feeling.

Richard Boyer

Tuesday

The people under the umbrellas was today's project. I wanted to keep them more or less undefined, so as not to draw too much attention to the individual figures. With the umbrellas bunched together and the planter boxes all around; the breakfast cafe becomes more of a unit in the middle of the street, so you look at the whole. Now I can play around with the light and shadows on the foreground, I'll see if I can come up with an interesting pattern to lead the eye into the painting.

Richard Boyer

Monday, May 19

Well I finally got the tomato and basil plants all in. the weather seems to be warming up, so hopefully they won't die on me like the squash I planted a few weeks ago. All those poor things were flattened during the last hail storm. The only thing left of those is a dried up stalk.

I started this on on Saturday. Its a 24x30 of a cafe in the town of Gault, Provence. The Howard/Mandville Gallery still has a frame for this size so I thought why not do a painting for them. They were looking for some more cafe scenes.

Richard Boyer

Wednesday

As it turns out we didn't go on the river trip, after looking at the weekend weather we figured it wouldn't be much fun in cold rain. A state-wide cold front was pushing through Utah with snow advisories on some of the roads in the southern part of the state.  The last thing you want is to be cold and wet on a raft.

I did finish off my 40x30 painting for the Howard/Mandville Gallery and actually sent it off yesterday to them. A few changes were done to the background; I took out a few stones from the arch and opened up the right side with a view to some distant mountains. I am attempting to make it more enjoyable to walk along, maybe linger at the edge and look over!

This 12x16 painting I did down in southern Utah went over to Southam Gallery, but not before a few changes. The tree to the right in sunlight I opened up a bit and the water was changed around some to lead the eye in more to the background.

This other 9x12 I also finished off and sent down to them. Here I changed around the bushes in the foreground and added a few figures under the arch to give scale. as one can see they are rather massive in size.

Yesterday I started another painting for the Coos Bay show in July, this 16x20 is of my daughter braving the cold waters along the coast in Oregon at sunset. There is still more to be done on it, but the paint is too thick in a few areas and needs to dry a little. Its a fun one to work on since I can be rather loose with the brush strokes on the water.

Richard Boyer

Thursday

Tomorrow Dave Strayer and I will leave on another river trip down the upper section of the San Juan river.  Its a short three day float, but filled with Anasazi ruins and rock art. One of the canyon there, Chinle is on the Navaho side and only accessible from this part of the river, nobody goes up there to explore because its so remote. So this could be really fun finding new cliff dwellings.

This was yesterdays 12x16 study of the Oregon coast, another painting for the Coos Bay show. The fog was burning off for the day.

Last week when we were down in Moab with all the Psych Majors, they went on to do this hike and I stayed back to work on this 12x16. Today in the studio I finished up and changed the foreground.  In reality it was too closed in with rocks and overgrowth, making it difficult for the viewer to look up the canyon.

Richard Boyer

Monday, May 5

I'm back from the desert. I have to say it was a lot of fun chatting with a bunch of research scientists about how people relax and disconnect from their daily stressed routine in nature. Much of the conversations were done over bottles of wine in the evening on the hotel porch overlooking Moab.

The last day we did a river run down the "Daily" section of the Colorado River. This being all part of their study on how to relax….hey I'm not going to complain!

Friday evening I decided to do a four panel study of the setting sun on Arches National Park. One of the researcher's, Adam Gazzaley was with to photograph the colors as well. He has been interested in the arts for a long time and had a good collection of nice photo shots over the years.  So we figured why not head back into the park to catch the sunset; I was beaten up pretty bad on the last two studies since the colors changed too fast with the remaining fifteen minutes of light.

Today I picked something easier and worked on a small 12x16 study of the coastline in Oregon; another painting for my show at Coos Bay in the summer.  It was a fun one to do and I really like the colors of the water.

Richard Boyer