What's on the Easel
Topic: Richard Boyer's Studio

What’s on the Easel

 

 

     Well I’m still having problems with their “edit” and “save changes” button……just deletes everything!  So now I do in word doc. and paste it over.

 

     We have a storm front moving through the valley today, so my studio is rather dark.  Some of the ski resorts have opened up and they are expecting another foot of snow up in the mountains

    

     I like to use natural north light, which of course make you very susceptible to the weather conditions, one dark rain cloud and everything comes to a grinding halt. 

 

 

     Today I worked more on the boats, mainly the hulls, getting them to sit in the water and to look believable.  The middle ground was also resolved more.

 

     Tonight we have the crit night, as I call it.  About ten years ago I started having a few art friends over to look at my paintings and critique them.  Usually with a little wine, this becomes relatively too easy.  My skin got thicker through this bashing process and I guess the art work got better.

     Fast forward to now and we are about eight all together critiquing each others work until midnight and bringing rather higher end wines to the occasion.

    It turns out that art is not the only thing we are critiquing. My wine for tonight will be a Grenache from the south of France.

 

 

Richard Boyer

http://richardboyerart.com/

Wednesday, 11 November 2009

 

What’s on the Easel

 

 

 

    With a coffee in my hand this morning I started working on a smaller 11x14 coastal painting that needed a few changes.  Southam Gallery, my local gallery here in Salt Lake City is having a show this weekend and they wanted a few more beach scenes.  They seem to do well with European subject matter.

 

 

    Well I had a white hat on the girl walking down to the shore and it just got lost against the background sand color.  She lost the hat and I gave her some flowing dark colored hair, which contrasts better against the lighter background. 

 

 

    After I finished off that one, I turned the radio on to X96, my local modern rock station and put yesterdays painting back up on the easel.  I worked on the sky and background trees, trying to finish that area off as best I could.  It’s more of a logistical process, since my foreground will be filled up with boats, masts and rigging, any changes to the background would be next to impossible.  I just have to be sure to keep the atmospheric quality in the background so it doesn’t compete with all the foreground boats.

 

    And by the way, this is the third time I am making this entry.  There seems to be a problem with Angelfire.com, the people hosting the blog site.  I tried to go in and edit something in this entry and clicked the “save changes” button, only to have it delete the entire entry……….this happed twice now!

    Yes, they do have a customer support center; it takes three days for a response!  If I lived in Seattle, most likely moss would be growing on me by the time the problem was addressed to.

 

 

Richard Boyer

http://richardboyerart.com/

Tuesday, 10 November 2009

What's on the Easel

 

 

This blog is being started as more or less a bet.  Two of my friends, Geoffrey and Nick claim that blogging can bring in business.

 

I say, nobody reads blogs!

So, let’s let the contest begin!

 

 Now with that said, what I can do is give a progress report on the painting that I am working on each day. Today I started a 30x40 piece on some boats up in Seattle

 

 

I started out with just a quick block in to figure out the basic composition. Using a medium sized brush, I will draw with a few lines the subject matter. There is really no point in getting too detailed with the drawing part of it, since it will be covered over with washes of thin paint. I tend to work more with shapes and masses than line drawings.

 

It’s still a little crude, but "c'est le vie"

 

 

 

 

Then I worked on trying to define some of the boats, and filling in the rest of the canvas with paint. Once again the lines are being obliterated by the fields of color I am laying down.  I like to have it all covered over in the first session, thereby thinking out all my composition problems.  The rest of the painting now I can relax on now, since my composition is all figured out.

 

Okay, I understand most people will be looking at this and saying “It’s still just a bunch of unfinished blobs of paint?”……what’s more important for me, is that I know how it will look in the end.

 

Richard Boyer 

http://richardboyerart.com/