Copenhagen

Its old, but c'est la vie!

This is some fun footage when Victor and I went over to Copenhagen to get Lina in the beginning of July. We were visiting relatives in Southern Sweden.

Tuesday

I worked some more on the Amsterdam night scene; still have the trees and water to work on, before I can start fine tuning it all.

Tomorrow we leave for the short drive down to Green River with the scouts; we’ll do the car shuttle then down to a place called Mineral Bottom in Canyonlands National Park and then drive back to Green River State Park to camp. The following morning we can get an early start and be on the river before the heat of the day comes. Water canons are a must in this kind of situation. It can turn into a carnivore type of scene, where the older kids are obliterating the younger ones with a force resembling that of Niagara Falls. “Survival of the fittest”

We will pull out Sunday afternoon, so I’ll be back Monday night.

Richard Boyer

Monday Aug 9th

Yesterday we all drove up in the mountains to go crayfish collecting. We pilled in the car and drove east for about an hour and a half up to Strawberry Reservoir at 8000 feet above sea level. The water was cold and filled with the tiny crustaceans crawling around the rocky bottom not far from the shore. We brought two net traps along from Sweden and baited them with raw chicken legs. Within minutes they were crawling inside the cage and had to be emptied. Most were just tying a string around a chicken leg and throwing the thing into the water, within minutes the leg was covered in crawling crayfish. One just had to carefully pull it back to shore and put a net under the leg as you lifted it out of the water. They would then just drop off like ants and could be dumped into a larger holding bucket on shore.

There always has to be somebody in the group to go over the top! Two hours later our Swedish friend from Park City and Wanship showed up. Troy and Anette are avid scuba divers and brought all their equipment along, to add to the hunting competitiveness. Within minutes they were picking the largest ones off the bottom 20 feet down. Our group on the other hand had to go through a quality control selection committee, where the smaller ones were pardoned from execution and thrown back to the lake.

They were executed right there that afternoon. That was my job!

First two large pots of water are brought to boil, along with a bottle of porter beer, salt, sugar and the most important ingredient of all, crown dill. Crown dill is basically dill that is left unattended in the garden and sprouts flowery tops. Karin made sure in the spring to plant plenty of the stuff just for this occasion.

The crustaceans were first placed in a bucket of clean water to be given a bath, after that ten of the luck ones were picked out and placed in a colander. That’s when they handed it to me, my job was to say a few last words and drop them down into their deaths. The water would subside and within a minute boil again for ten minutes. They were then done and could be placed in a cooler with ice.

Here we are finishing off the porter beer that wasn't used !!!

Five hours later we had amassed a good amount for the annual Swedish crayfish party. Yes the party where everyone gathers around the table to slowly gorge themselves on the tasty creatures and wash it all down with song and bottles of Vodka and Aquavit. This has been known to leave some guests unable to walk afterwards.

Unfortunately I won’t be here for the dinner festival this weekend. I’m off doing a river trip with the boy scouts in the heat of southern Utah. : (

Richard Boyer

Friday

The crit went well last night. Trying to keep awake until twelve proved to be more of a challenge though. We just looked at the Amsterdam work from Rick and I and tried our best to explain to everyone that a real critique on 24 painting wouldn’t be necessary. We would be there all night and besides they are just fresh out of the box. I still need to plein air plus them, as Nick calls it. That’s when you work on them in the studio, finishing off those that got cut off short in the field. I can think of a few we got rained out on.

I started a larger 36x24 today. In the beginning of October I have a small show at the Howard/Mandville Gallery and they would like a few larger pieces. This is something I need to get done fairly soon, so they could use it for advertising. So I just blocked in a night scene with lights reflecting in the water. It’s a little sloppy and loose now, I was just trying to get all the compositional problems worked out and cover the canvas.

Richard Boyer

Thursday

The problem with flying east to west is always present around four in the afternoon, when you hit the proverbial wall and feel like dropping into a deep comatose sleep. Coffee seems to help wonders there.

I spent a large amount of time trying to transfer my jepg images from the mac over to the desktop windows. With large camera files the flash sticks just don’t seem to hold enough information to make it quick and easy. Slowly little by little I was able to move everything over to the other computer that I use in the studio.

Dave and Kay Strayer are holding the crit session tonight, so I finished off stretching the last Amsterdam paintings this afternoon and am ready to go for tonight. Maybe some red wine will stave off the time difference and I’ll last to twelve.

I put a picture of our garden on the blog from the spring and this is what it is looking like now.

The damn Quail ate all the lettuce unfortunately, somehow they managed to crawl under the netting and get to those delectable leaves. But the potatoes they couldn’t touch and look what a few plants have produced !!!

It’s going to be grilled salmon and potatoes tonight

Richard Boyer

Wednesday

We made it back to Utah yesterday, with a travel time over 24 hours door to door. It was miserable!

I’ve always tried to avoid J.F.K. airport like the plaque, but this time we were forced by the price to go through there. I have nothing against New Yorkers and really love the city, but the airport is like being in a third world country. I could have very easily compared it too something out of Africa, but decided not to voice my opinion there. After all they held the power to send my luggage off to Somalia. It is only now with suitcase in hand that I can safely say they are extremely unorganized and chaotic.

Like all international airports in the States, you must first collect your baggage and take them through customs. Usually this is a fairly easy task, where you collect your bags from the caracal, load them up on a cart and push it all a few hundred feet past some sleeping custom officers. You then hand them over to the airline reps on the other side where they are scanned and sent on to the final destination. At O’Hair airport this runs very smoothly.

At JFK in the International arrival area; every language in the world can be heard. So why would they have carts there to help people move their luggage two hundred feet that cost five dollars? What kind of a foreigner carries five dollars worth of quarters in his pocket? The ATM machine is on the other side of customs.

We walked passed the bored agents with suitcases dragging behind and straight out the front door to the street. We missed the small sign and hallway to the left for connecting flights. So did most of the travelers. Finally after pushing our way through what seemed like a lift line in Italy, the two airline agents checked our luggage the rest of the way.

Terminal two was where our connecting flight left from in six hours. We thought it best to eat something in terminal three, the larger of the two, which had more to offer. When we arrived the line was out the door and had no idea what the line was for. So we reluctantly thought it best to find the connecting corridor to terminal two. I asked one of the employees. His brash response was “What do I look like Information?”

We were told by somebody else to walk down the road and a cross to the next building. That was the way to terminal two. Here we are coming in from Sweden, a simply transfer to our next flight and we are all huffing it outside along a busy airport road, something was wrong with the system?

The line was standing still at the next terminal through the security check. One very lethargic employee was dreaming of some other place, while slowly checking passports against boarding cards. A glacier would have been advancing faster. After three hours later we were standing in front of our next gate.

We all walked back over to terminal three through the corridor, that we never found before and sat down in a restaurant. Karin and I both ordered the largest beer they served. We had another three hours to kill.

At ten thirty at night we touched down in Salt Lake City, all very dead tired and longing for a flat bed with plenty of legroom.

Today I have been stapling the Amsterdam paintings on stretcher bars.

Richard Boyer

We had Lottie over for dinner last night. She is an old friend of Karin’s going way back to middle school in Stockholm. I made a chicken and rice dish and we ate in the dungeon. The building here has a barrel vaulted stone cellar that was painted and fixed up with a wood floor and large table for entertaining guests. It ended up being a late night with the wine, so we didn’t get up until ten.

This morning we had coffee out front in the sun light. After a leisurely breakfast we walked around the waterfront. I took this shot of a large double mast sailboat, some well to do American visiting Stockholm. The length seemed to occupy much of the wharf on the backside of the National Museum. I guess some people have more money to burn than most…….you can tell I’m jealous !!!

We drove back to Osthammar this afternoon. Tomorrow is a packing day; we fly back to the States on Tuesday. Both Karin and I feel another week here would have been nice. It’s back to reality.

Richard Boyer