Tuesday

I'm a signature member of ASMA ( American Society of Marine Artists ) and they are doing a show in Coos Bay, Oregon that I need to partake in. That being said, this morning I started on a 24x36 with water in mind. They wouldn't be trilled about a cafe piece done several hundred miles from the coast!

Here is the first stage - the block-in.

Last summer when we went camping on the Oregon coastline, I shot these two women riding horses along the beach and thought it would be a nice subject matter. This will be one of those pieces where you wish you had the knowledge of horses like James Reynolds. I'll admit, I am not much of a horse painter, but never the less I'm up for the challenge !


I'll really need to spend some time of the horses to get them looking alright, but I think the contrast of browns against the blues of the ocean will really be good. Crit is this Thursday, so lets see how much I can get done on it !

Richard Boyer

Monday, April 19

Here is a painting I worked on today. I threw the boats in there as an after thought. Not quite sure if I want to keep them as is or not. Tomorrow I can look at it with a fresh eye and see.

So today I had my day in traffic court. Way back in February one cloudy day I was driving back from Alta with Victor and Lina in the car. Just minding my own business following a line of traffic zipping down the hill, through the light and keeping their speed along the flat section of road.

My heart skipped a beat when I saw him, just parked there by the gravel pit. He pulled out behind me since I was the last in the long line. The light turned red ahead of us and he just waited there behind me, no lights flashing. I wondered if maybe, just perhaps he was going to let it slide. Yeah right! The light turned green and traffic moved forwards. Thats when the flashing red and blue lights came on behind me. I pulled over and asked what was wrong?

He looked at me with a concerned expression "You really don't know buddy, you were going fifteen over!"

Yeah, I was guilty as hell, no point arguing with a radar gun. But still I was hoping that ignorance would at least make him go easy on me..........that didn't get me far. He just asked how the skiing was and told me to sign the ticket on the doted line and if I so desired, I could appear before the court to get it off my driving record. I had a ticket from last year and figured that would be just the right excuse for the insurance company to raise the rate!

Today was the judgment day. I could have paid the $90 fine and be done with it all, but then I figure that it might be worth the effort to see if I could get it reduced. I found out that was just never going to happen. They had about twelve individuals, all sitting and waiting in a small court room. Everybody there for the same reason...speeders!

The woman in charge, or acting judge walked over to the blackboard and explained to all present that they had three choices. "Not Guilty", which meant making a court date in the summer and most likely would result in you paying ten times the amount of the fine.........that seemed like a no win situation to me.

"Guilty", meant you just pay the fine, some other court fee and it would all go on your record. Why you would ever, show up there for that option is beyond me. Unless you enjoy paying an extra court fee. I was already given the choice of just sending the payment in my mail.

Their third option was something in between, which basically stated that you had to get your ass in there for their traffic school. I went for that, since they offer it on-line. The fee was basically twice what the ticket was, but I figure at least the insurance company can't raise any anything if they don't know about it.

Richard Boyer

Friday

The crit went well last night. I presented four works and had some small changes to do on all of them.
This is why these paintings can take a long time to really get to the point where you can say"Alright its done, lets send it off!"

First up was a small change to the back of the main fishing boat. Rick Graham thought it was a little too busy, so I put more of it in shade and unified some of the values. All in all a quick ten minute fix.


Next up was the cafe piece, they thought the umbrellas still were not light enough from the sunlight and that the background building wasn't straight. So I lightened up the tops of the umbrellas and fixed the perspective on the building.


I then moved on to this one, which needed a little more modeling on the figures. Also some of the background plants needed to be knocked down in value. The woman on the right was also lacking a kneecap, so I darkened up the plan change there.


On the last one I started to burn out. Carlie made the comment that she couldn't tell what season it was, since the background was orange it looked like fall. I took it from the Grand Gulch so that orange color was actually the color of the sandstone cliff from behind, but with all the trees in front that got lost. The solution was just to get rid of the orange and green it out more. I added more leaves and changed the course of the creek a little. The figure still needs work, but I'll deal with that on Monday.

Richard Boyer

Thursday

I decided to try a smaller 12x16 painting from Grand Gulch, the backpacking individuals I took out and put a woman in dress there instead. Gives it more of a romantic feel than some child weighed down with a forty pound pack on his back. None of the leaves were out when we were down there, so I lied a bit and added some in.

We're having the crit session tonight at my place so I can show it to them then and get some feedback. When its done I'll most likely send it down to the Santa Fe Gallery, they have a lot of older pieces that I need to trade out. In fact there is a box filled with older paintings on its way back to me as we speak.

I finally got the taxes all done last night and electronically filed them..at least the federal. Turbo tax wanted twenty five dollars to send the State tax in..........sounds like a joke to me, I'll just put a damn stamp on an envelop and send it in myself !!!

As is usually the case I need to pay the State but get something back from Federal.

Richard Boyer

Tuesday, April 13

We woke up to more snow on the ground again this morning, will Spring ever get here?

I worked on the same old cafe piece and added some yellow flowers down at the bottom and again in the middle flower pot. I think it looks a little better with the color instead of solid green. Maybe the green was a little too heavy for that area.


I then pulled out an older piece I got back from Jim at the Mockingbird Gallery and started to play around with that.


Its the small town of Coustellet, just west a bit from Goult, where we stayed in Provence. Every Tuesday this town becomes a parking lot jammed with cars, as all the locals bring out their goods to sell. This painting is of a couple who's main business was the growing of Garlic. They originally had only white umbrellas and a white table cloth, which I painted and wondered why nobody was reacting to it.......maybe just a little too much white. I know Sargent could get away with it, but me........noooo !!!!

The table cloth I also changed to a reddish color, but it may be a little off in the pink direction, so I'm not to happy with that. I'll look at it again tomorrow!

Now it's time to start the taxes !

Richard Boyer

Saturday

We are now back at Recapture Lodge. It was a long hike out of the canyon, basically straight up and then across three miles of barren desert road. Off on the horizon line we saw the faint glimmer of the car windshields. They never seemed to get closer as we marched forward along the dusty footpath, memorized by the rhythmic pounding of boots in the sand a few yards in front, eyes fixated on the soft sand that curled up around the heel as it thumped down in military style. The weight of the packs gave the feel of being in some army training camp. After a solid hour we arrived at Strayers car, all exhausted from four days of abuse on our joints. We still had an hours drive to get my car at the end of Bullet Canyon. Dave and I took all the packs and left water with the rest as we did the shuttle. The thought of a shower and washing off four days of sunscreen and sand from our bodies back at the hotel was a welcomed anticipation.

We tried for an early start that morning, but our tents were all set up in the shadow of a cliff. Nobody seemed to eager to get up with cold dew still on the ground. I was the first up and boiled some water with the small stove to get things started. This campsite lacked a good water source, in fact for the past mile or so the stream had disappeared underground and wouldn’t reappear until Polly’s Island, where we were to head up. The night before we found two very small puddles at the edge of the gravel riverbed. With mosquito larva floating on top, we made sure the water filter intake was well into the water. Not much was left when we finally had all the water bottles filled for the days hike.

We had Big Man pictograph and one of the canyons only Kokopelli’s to see. The first one was two large figures high up the canyon wall. One could only guess why they were put there?

Richard Boyer

Friday

Last day before the long slog out of the canyon. Actually we have around five miles to cover, which isn’t that bad. No water froze last night; in fact with the anticipation of another cold night, I had on all the long underwear. After a few minutes of sweating in the sleeping bag I was stripping everything off again. The night was a lot warmer and by the following morning the temperatures had screamed back up to the mid 70’s, making it almost too hot to hike with heavy packs on.

Not long into the hike we ran into our first ruin. A two level structure with a fireplace inside, a real fixer-upper! There we found large pottery shards and plenty of corncobs. We spent maybe an hour there looking at the pictographs of all the hand prints; it kind of tells you that the site was most likely used for several generations.

We zigzagged our way across the stream farther on down the Grand Gulch. Scrambling up and down step sandy embankments through the narrow walled canyon. Sometimes the trail would just vanish, leaving us to bushwhack through groves of willows and tamarisk bushes.

Soon we were at another ruin looking at several hundred-hand prints and a large cactus field out frond, a clear sign that it had been used by many families over several generations. Our campsite for tonight had a view of it from across the stream bed. The water had dried up at this location, so we went off in search of small puddles to filter for our evening drinking water and freeze dried dinners.

Richard Boyer