This was only the third big habitat mural I ever painted, and I’m  hard-pressed to figure out the date it was finished. I’d say 1989, give or take, but it could be earlier. A printed copy of this painting lives in Arcata, California at the Arcata Marsh Interpretive Center. Its home is a sunny wall, and for that the reason we installed a copy of the painting and not the original. Now because of sun damage it’s about to have version #3 printed to replace #2.

So, this week I went into the giant lock box at the bank and fished through the hundreds of 8″ x 10″ transparencies (film they don’t even make any more) and brought this home for scanning. A decade ago was the last time we replaced this, and then we used that transparency and simply made a photo blowup. This time it’s all digital and will be printed on half-inch thick high-pressure laminate material similar to Formica. Thinking about this I was truly struck by the technical changes of this stuff in the past decade, and how artists really need to understand and keep up with it – or risk being left behind like so many other ‘industries’ – and I’ll be damned if they’re going to outsource ME to India!

When I painted this, the Arcata Marsh was a very new place, and it was difficult to imagine what it would become. Sitting on an old log processing pond at the upper end of Humboldt Bay, the idea was for the nearby sewer plant to run its almost clean water through a series of channels and let aquatic plants clean up the last of it. Birds would flock, animals would find homes, people would come to walk and view – and over the years it all came true. I’m happy to have been a part of the initial interpretation, and happy they continue to kept my painting as part of it.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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