Tuesday

As I hear from many an artist, finances tend to be the root of most marital arguments. Such was our topic last night as we painted away at Rick’s model session and sure enough it was the topic of my wife’s heated debate this morning. As a self supporting artist I don’t really have much to fall back on. That 250,000 a year career in Radiology never really panned out!!! Unfortunately this is the case with a lot of artists out there. As someone once said to me it’s a time to reflect upon your style and see where there are ways to improve it.

Today I worked on another couple of Amsterdam works. Here is the result !

Some of the windmills outside of Amsterdam 12x16
This 12x16 use to be one of the older entrances to Amsterdam. The clock tower had a gold ball on top so the boats could see it at night and thereby be guided into the right canal entrance. Now a days everything is just GPS !

Richard Boyer

Monday, Aug 30

Today I worked on small changes on a few pieces most of which aren’t worth mentioning. One painting I really re-worked was this one below. It’s a piece I did a few years ago, but have basically touched up everything. I took out a figure and worked on the horse and occupants in the carriage. Now maybe it’s a little better?

Richard Boyer

Sunday

Yesterday Victor and I decided to head up to the cabin and try a day of sailing. The wind was blowing fairly hard down here in the valley so we decided it would make for a good day out on the water. After the hour drive to get up there, grabbing a bit to eat at the local hamburger place in Kamas and then driving the boat to Jordanelle Reservoir, only to find out then that a trip back to the local hardware store in Kamas was required. Apparently the last person to use the boat lost a turnbuckle on the mast stay. Without it it’s impossible to sail, so we had to replace it.

At 2:30 we had the boat in the water and were off, our goal was to sail the three miles out the eastern arm of the reservoir to the main body of the man made lake. If anybody has tried sailing in a mountain reservoir before you will be able to relate to the adverse wind conditions that can exist. One minute a gale force roaring down a small side canyon, blasting the small boat up on its side and the next it’s deathly still with no wind at all.

We started off zigzagging our way down the arm of the mountainous channel. With the wind blowing from the west our progress seemed minimal. We could have walked along the shoreline quicker. Victor was at the helm and I was crouched down, so as not to be hit by the boom as I controlled the jib. The wind started to shift a little then coming in from different sides of the canyon and throwing us up on a steep roll at full speed and then leaving us at a snails pace. Every now and then we caught a southerly breeze, making it possible to sail in a straight line down the arm.

Finally at five in the evening we made it into the open water with four foot swells. Victor was ecstatic. Adventure on the high seas. We turned around there and sailed back in half the time with the wind at our backs. I think we finally made it home at eight in the evening, all very tired from a long day.

Richard Boyer

Thursday

I keep hearing more grim news about the economy, especially from my wife’s patients. Four out of the five she saw today had somebody in their family laid off from work. God knows the art market seems to be feeling the pinch, just how dry can a dust bowl be? History always repeats itself they say, the last big recession was the savings and loan crisis that happened back in the eighties. I remember for sale signs everywhere in Salt Lake, houses were selling for next to nothing.

That’s when I bought my first place here in Salt Lake, a real fixer-upper.

Today’s first piece was this one from below. I’ll see what they say at the crit session tonight. I’m not too keen on the umbrella colors.

Next was this canal scene. I added the boat coming down the water from a photo.

Richard Boyer

Wednesday

I worked on a few pieces today, first off this Amsterdam 14x11 below. It’s the Westerkerk, or West church on Prinsengracht. Inside is where Rembrandt was buried, or at least for a few years! That was until the family could no longer afford the church dues; the clergy then exhumed the body and gave it back to the family. Sounds like a Steven King horror movie.

One can make a reservation here to walk halfway up the tower, which is what we did one afternoon. The view was spectacular from up there looking over the town.

Most of this was done on location, but the boats had to be painting back in the studio this morning.

My next project was an older piece that I re-worked a little. I had the girls in bikinis and Southam Gallery didn’t like that idea. It’s a hard sale in Utah, they say! So I put long flowing dresses on both of them, now its PG rated for Salt Lake City.

Richard Boyer

Well I got this painting in the Oil Painters of America Regional show up in Jackson. I’ll send it off next month for their October show. Unfortunately the opening night is the same time I have my exhibition up at Howard/Mandville Gallery, so I won’t be able to make it to the OPA show.

Last night we had our model session again at Rick’s again. I’ve been experimenting with using some of Anders Zorn’s colors.

Everyone knows the self portrait piece he did, where he shows his pallet containing just cadmium red light, yellow ochre, titanium white and ivory black. Well I tried this piece below with the same colors; it’s a little hard without yellow and blue, but still for a figure just maybe it can be pulled off. It would have been richer with the addition of those two missing colors, but then again what would I be learning about the artist?

When you look up close at some of Zorn’s interior figure works you can see that he used a very limited pallet range and was able to create master pieces. Now of course he used more colors when needed, especially with water. I’ve looked in his Studio up at Mora, where they still have his pallet by the easel. When he died they found in his studio 243 tubes of paint, of which 17 were tubes of Cobalt blue. So, yes he did use blue !!!

Still its fun to try mixing the portrait with just a limited pallet!

Richard Boyer

Monday, Aug. 23

I worked a little more on the evening painting, adding some lights and detail to the upper portion of the work. Now maybe I can call it done.

We all went for a bike ride yesterday, loading up the mountain bikes on the back of the car and drive up to Little Dell Reservoir at the beginning of East Canyon. For those not from around here, it was once again up into the mountains. From there we biked along an old section of the pony express route. Utah is doted with old trails from days of yore. Traveling just west of here you can follow the old pony express trail, past the remains of outposts all the way to the Nevada border. In 1861 it took them ten days to deliver your letter from St. Louis to Sacramento, California.

We only did about two miles of it, what can I say; Lina, our daughter was with us and besides the skies were beginning to turn really dark and ugly. A front was moving in according to the weather forecast.

Lina had a birthday party to go to up in Park City so Karin took the car leaving me with no real option but to bike the ten or fifteen miles back down to Salt Lake City. The clouds were getting darker and I heard thunder rippling through the air. Within a short time I did the mild uphill climb to get to the top of Immigration Canyon from East Canyon and was ready for the long downhill. With the switchbacks at the top my bike was soon up to freeway speeds, as I blurred my way past the bikers struggling to climb up the opposite direction to the top. I tried to conserve the brake pads as much as possible maybe that had something to do with the acceleration problem! Hey, but it was fun!

At the last hairpin turn the road became less of a vertical fall line and some moderate peddling was needed. At the bottom I zigzagged along small roads and parking lots to keep my elevation over to the area we live in. There on my final decent through Federal Heights the skies opened up with a deluge of water, a few minutes later I was soaked head to foot with small hail hitting my face. “Why the rain couldn’t have held out for another fifteen minutes I’ll never know?” I arrived home looking like a drowned rat and decided a warm shower would help wash all the road grim off my back.

Richard Boyer