Category Archives: Posts about other stuff

Jigsaw Puzzles, Murals, Nancy Cherry Eifert, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Posts about other stuff, Wildlife

Eifert Painting on the Ferry

Yesterday we were coming home to Port Townsend on our little ferry. Parked on the car deck and walked up to confront one of my paintings in jigsaw puzzle form right on the table in front of us. Perfect, said Nancy and proceeded to put the thing together.  I mostly watched a gloriously calm sunset after a big blow in the morning that shut the boat down, but still added a few pieces to the effort. This is a painting I did for Mount Rainier National  Park years ago and is still installed there, the main attraction to the Ohanapecosh Visitor Center. It’s also still a puzzle – and who knows how many of these things are floating around the world. Thousands.

Now, I know it’s a bit of a stretch to say this is actually ‘public art’, but bear with me. I first figured out how to put my better National Park art on puzzles in the 1990’s, first with a company from Germany, then we did it ourselves through a great group called Impact Photographics. It takes a pile of doubt or at least a credit score. Various others have made puzzles, too, and I’m guessing we’ve published over 80 different images. Currently, Nautilus Puzzles from California is actually making them out of real laser-cut wood that cost as much as some of my early paintings did!

These days, we’re not as aggressive with this, but still supply them to parks and stores. We once found one in Hawaii at the Pahoa Farmer’s Market under a pile of used clothes and books.

I’m not here to advertise buying puzzles, but instead to just say that this sure has been a wide and complex life. I have painting projects going on right now about restoring Northwest salmon, a bison mural in South Dakota, a Florida project involving dolphins and octopus, nesting terns and sharks. I’m proud to say I’m sponsored by a great backpacking equipment company called Six Moon Designs that help get me out there in comfort, and by a truly wonderful partner. Nancy keeps it all running behind the scenes as well as on the road – or on the ferry.

I guess what this post is all about is for me to just say thanks to everyone for all of this. It takes an amazing number of consistently interested people to keep our little lifestyle going for all these decades. I wish I could give back, but with the next paintings in progress, maybe I am.

You can also see this post and all the rest coming up by simply adding your email to our list here – right side, down a bit.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

New Painting Post, New Published Story, Posts about other stuff

Mom’s New Book

Not so fast, a painting first: we’ve been in Hilo again for awhile and I did some opaque watercolors, some on location. This one maybe needs some explanation. It’s an old pahoehoe lava flow, so old it’s been bleached smooth and now reflects the tropical sun as almost white. Above it is a patch of Naukapa-kahakai. Come on, you can say it – just pronounce each vowel separately – there’s only three of them. We saw these little yellow-billed cardinals everywhere in the lowlands, and some were even on our porch each morning, feeding their non-red headed youngsters within arms-length of us. I’d call this a red-headed cardinal, but there’s another bird here named that. This painting isn’t for sale. I just don’t think it’s ‘presentable’ as it’s more a field sketch.

This happy and beautiful place, Hilo, the rainiest city in America (up to 15x what Port Townsend gets) shows, to us, what a healthy and diverse society is all about. Mixed race: 32%, Asian: 34%, Hawaiian: 14% and white: 17%. Let THAT sink in a moment. There simply doesn’t seem to be any social conflict here, just happy and kind people living life in one of the oldest cities in the country. Sure, it’s a very liberal place, but there’s more to it than that. We’ve been here many, many times, bought a house once that fell threw, keep coming back to enjoy the culture and beauty of an real American tropical rainforest and a town that is over 1000 years old.

Okay, here’s mom’s book, or at least she’s inside. Mom is not on the cover! As many of you know, Virginia Eifert, Illinois author, photographer, painter and poet somehow found time to make me. She died in 1966 at the top of her game and was one of Illinois’ best writers, publishing 20 novels and founding and writing the Illinois State Museum’s magazine for 326 issues. And now, here she is in a new book 53 years later. The woman has ‘legs’.

This book is a series of stories about the early environmentalists of America, and included are some good ones, some of Virginia’s friends. Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Mardy Murie and Sally Carrighar. Others include John Muir and Ernest Thompson Seton. Most interesting to me, Teal and Peterson didn’t make the cut, and those guys were above her at the time, Teal even hired her to be an ‘assistant’ for field classes. She’d  have loved this. The book will be on Kindle and Amazon, but hasn’t been released yet. Clifford Knapp was a naturalist and educator from the Midwest who died in 2017.

Thanks for reading this week. 

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Art, words and life from a former generation.

New Painting Post, Posts about other stuff, Waysides

Watercolors for Kennesaw Mountain NP in Georgia

I’ve haven’t posted here for awhile. Someone even emailed me to ask if I was Okay – yes, just busy with, wait for it, 9 projects and 54 paintings! No, I’m not the least bit freaked – it’s just life. These two paintings came along this past week and I thought they were nice. It’s not nature as usual, but these are two images that I might have painted in those Northern California years of the 80’s. 

Both these are paintings are watercolor and pencil and show two former homesteads at Kennesaw Mountain NP in Georgia. I’m painting 18 images for new wayside panels there. The log house was researched using one from New Salem State Park in Illinois where I grew up and the references were provided by Delaney Shriner, a childhood chum who still lives there. It’s a ‘dog-trot cabin, two separate houses with a porch connecting them, probably one of the first condos. I like this feeling of ‘oldness’ in how the pencil blends with the paint.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web. And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Murals, Posts about other stuff, Wildlife

Malheur National Wildlife Refuge site visit

We spent all last week out in the eastern Oregon high-desert country at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge south of Burns. Where’s that? 150 miles from the next nearest town. We were installing some temporary exhibits so the visitor center can at least reopen after the occupation by WHITE terrorists a year ago. What? An amazing collection of wildlife, historic ranches, huge vistas and almost 188,000 acres of public land. Oh, and the sandhill cranes and snow geese? This photo was a small section of one flock, and it was hanging out IN TOWN!Most photos by Nancy Cherry Eifert

Nancy and I took somewhere around 1000 reference and wildlife photos, her camera clicking more than mine. We’re supposed to be the local site team and were there with the Boss from Georgia who made things proper and friendly (actually, Rosie is as un-boss as it gets). As for the refuge, as Carey, the refuge contact said “WE NEED HELP” and so we’re giving it as best we can with art, photography, exhibits, waysides and a bunch of new signs to replace those shot up by cowboys – guys that evidently think guns and white privilege trump our heritage and access to public lands (pun intended).

If you don’t remember yet, this was the place that the Bundy armed militia took over a year ago and demanded the federal government return all land to the cowboys because their cowboy descendants had it first. Remember that? Of course the local tribe said something like “REALLY?” – but enough of that nonsense.

I feel a great privilege to be able to use our skills to help with this mess, which is basically a violation of my heritage. MY HERITAGE – notice the caps?  If i can even get this place half way fixed up so visitors have a good experience and learn something, I’ll feel successful.

This is inside the Sod House Ranch barn, an ancient structure that’s now cabled against the desert winds (see the cables?). Notice the full pinyon trunks for posts that were brought miles in wagons. It’s only open a few weeks a year but we had open access. There’s a heron and Canada goose rookery in the ranch house trees  (I never knew Canada geese nested in trees). Once part of the largest private ranch in the country, it’s part of the refuge. Nancy said she felt like  she was in a candy store.

I’ll share some more photos of this amazing place next post and on into the year as we get this thing together and the road from home to Malheur gets some Eifert tire rubber!

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web. And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Murals, Posts about other stuff

Wildlife – A new jigsaw puzzle coming soon

 

If you click the image, it should enlarge in your browser.

This is a new jigsaw puzzle coming soon. It’s a painting I did recently of the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust. As soon as we saw this finished image we realized it would make a pretty good puzzle, but the dimensions didn’t fit the required size. So, I’ve added some extras around the edges to make it more difficult. I think it’ll be a hit, but I’d love some comments before we send it in – hit reply and fire away.

And here’s the installation of the painting. It’s down a lovely old-growth trail and is a large wayside, 4′ x 6′, like an art gallery in the forest (as I like to say). To me, this is where I like my art shown – instead of in some stuffy gallery or on someone’s wall where no one notices it after a year. THIS location will mean my stuff will effect people for decades, or at least I hope so. This photo was taken a few months after assembly after a big winter storm knocked down the fir to the left, narrowly missing the wayside.  But no worries, the panel can be replaced – like the $5000 porcelain enamel panel (that was just the cost of the panel) that was hit straight on by a giant 4′ eucalyptus at the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge a week after putting it in. I  could have taken it personally, but the tree-people know I’m one of them!

Next week we’re heading for Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Eastern Oregon. Yup, that’s the one the Bundy Militia took over a year ago. It’s still closed for repairs and we’re involved in new exhibits, waysides and signs for all of it. We already have a series of temporary banners ready to go in the visitor center while we get all the others going. You’ll hear much more about this as we proceed.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web. And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Posts about other stuff

Kauai Asian Cemetery – A Cautionary Tale

 

We just returned from a little winter field trip to warm up on Kauai. I really cannot remember when I posted anything other than my art on this blog, years probably, but these photos were taken while we watched astonishing events unfolding on the Mainland, and finding this little abandoned cemetery seems to tie it together – and not in a good way.

This is a beautiful place, but we quickly realized the stones told a tragic story. No stones in the ‘old’ cemetery section dated past 1942, the date when we, America, sent 120,000 Japanese to prison for just being Japanese, and few returned to their original homes after that madness was over. These are abandoned graves, meaning people are still here but the families don’t come to remember grand-dad’s fishing stories, or grand-mother’s wonderful meals. No one comes to spruce up the ground, bring flowers occasionally – it’s just abandoned. I’ve never thought that our actions against people might, in fact, reverberate to past generations.

And now, today, what are we doing? The same thing? It seems our tolerance for other cultures, different people, different ways has vanished. This big bronze sculpture is in Kaloa Town, a few miles to the east. This giant piece of art commemorates the truly joyful multiculturalism that was spawned as Hawaii developed. To meet labor demands, the cane companies went to Asia and brought in thousands of workers, the basis of Hawaii’s diverse and harmonious culture today. These people had to get along. And they get along now, and that’s the point. If we don’t learn to get along,  we are doomed to the vastly bigger threat of Climate Change that will probably finish us off as a civilization.

My thought: Don’t give up on Facebook, or that ‘other-race’ family down the street. Walk down, bang on the door and ask them how they are. Make a point of talking to people that aren’t like you in the grocery store. You might learn things aren’t as bad as we’re told they are!

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web. And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Posts about other stuff

“Thriller” -My Little Sculpture Project

Click to enlarge

My life is brim-full of four things: Nancy, painting, hiking and sailing. The Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival begins tomorrow  and through the weekend, and we’ve been in it many times with various boats. With a fresh coast of Doris Day-green deck paint, a friend thought I should post something about my on-going sculpture project, the smallest sailboat I’ve ever owned called “Thriller”, a 1959 Lightning #7108. If you’re in the festival, drop by and say hi. We should be along the outside of one of the lineal docks.

If you’re not heard of this festival, Port Townsend’s population triples this weekend when 300 classic boats come to town. It’s quiet a scene, with workshops, races, music and food – and a Sunday Sail-by with hundreds of boats from canoes to giant schooners.

Click to enlarge

This boat: amazing construction above and beyond what most Lightnings look like, Thriller was built by the Livingston Boat Shop in Northport, Michigan for the grandson of Kroehler Furniture Corporation owner – a rich-kid’s boat. It’s 56 years old. Much of the restoration was done by the previous owner in the Bay Area, but I’ve finishing it off, made the rig better and the hull ‘bright’. Almost all the wood is original, including the mahogany seats. With a stainless centerboard now (the original would have been cast iron) and rigged for single-handed sailing, my three-season routine is to spend a joyful couple of hours in late afternoon on Port Townsend Bay, joining the guillemots, auklets and seals exploring the best place I’ve ever sailed.

See you at the Festival!

Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. I’m trying to expand my list. An email will work.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web. And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Murals, Posts about other stuff

Washington State Public Art Roster gets ME

Necedah National Wildlife Refuge paintings, images that eventually became 138 lineal feet of public art. I used this as an example of what I do. Necedah NWR is in Wisconsin.

Click this image to enlarge in your browser.

Every three years lots of Northwest artists apply to get on the Washington State Public Art Roster, a fairly small pre-approved group of professional artists that will be tapped to create perminent installations in new public buildings throughout Washington State. Libraries, schools and all other institutions that use the 1% of the cost of building for art use this list, AND, a couple of days ago I received a letter saying I’d been accepted and am now on the list.

This is a rare event for me. My life has been filled with entering art shows or competitions that are always won by crazy or fairly amateurish non-objective or abstract work, and almost never by competent and skilled people who have spent years diligently homing their discipline. It’s just that I’m from a generation that came from another generation that believed the very nature of being professional meant knowing how to do it better than most others. In my pitch to the Washington State Art Commission, I stressed this, saying that making public art that viewers spend lots of time looking at is important, that it’s what public art is all about – at least for me.

How far it’s come for me. A painting I did for Carol Armstrong, over 50 years ago. I think it still looks okay.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web. And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Published Story, Posts about other stuff

Crater Lake Institute – a side project

CLI-home-page
Front page of Crater Lake Institute’s website

I’ve not posted anything about this small side project, but it’s far enough along for me to brag a bit. For the past year, I’ve been rebuilding the Crater Lake Institute’s web presence. Currently, it stands at 3588 pages and counting. That’s right, 3588 pages.

Who and what? Crater Lake Institute is a group that works to enhance Crater Lake National Park, Oregon in many ways. They’ve collected more historic stuff about this park than anyone, bought equipment for the nationally-recognized Ski Patrol, commissioned over a dozen murals of my art for many places around the West, hosted rim-side interpretive walks, created publications about the park no one else has even considered doing. The board (that I now am on) is a bunch of retired NPS folks, amazing in their knowledge of this beautiful place.

I was approached to rebuild a very aging and almost dead website – but little did I realize how massive this thing was. In fact, it’s the largest digital and free collection of Crater Lake material anywhere. Huge sections are here on what to do in the park, Geology, Natural History, Oral Histories, Art, Weather, a giant collection of historic photos, stories, newspaper accounts going back into the 1800’s. I’ve also added my art here and there, sprinkled it with magic dust and – Oh, I could go on!

Because of this, the never-tiring park-painter has learned more about Crater Lake than probably any park I’ve ever worked on. Just ask me about the hand grenade death in the 80’s, the secret trails few park people even know about, the inside scoop on more stuff than my little brain can handle. And the best part is that I’ve gotten to know founder and board president Ron Mastrogiuseppe, fondly known as M13, one of the most genuine and interesting park people I’ve come across.

CLI-home-page-2
More of the front page

Thanks for reading this week.

Spend a moment and look at the site – then tell me what you think. http://craterlakeinstitute.com
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Posts about other stuff

Just A Small Piece of Art I Often See!

Trail-sign

I can’t even remember when I did this, but some years ago I designed the logo for the Olympic Discovery Trail. This trail more or less follows the old railroad grade from Port Townsend, 120 miles all the way across the north Olympic Peninsula to La Push on the outer coast. I donated the stylized art that featured some trees, mountains and a cresting wave – all the components of nature you might see on the trail.

The thing is, we see this little piece of art on many hikes and many places, especially in winter when we’re walking the low country. Walking along, I spy these little blue signs on posts or trees and it makes me feel a part of this place, a small and insignificant thing to be sure, but still a part of it. I make a living selling art, that’s for sure, but there are sometimes other rewards than painting for my bread and butter. This is one of them.

And there’s a bit more. Parts of this beautiful trail are also part of the 1200-mile Northwest National Scenic Trail that goes from Glacier National Park in Montana, through Port Townsend and on to La Push and Olympic National Park. It hooks into the Continental Trail, that amazingly-serious 3100-mile trail that goes from Canada to Mexico down the spine of the Rockies. I see hikers with full packs passing through town quite often in summer, and while most people in Port Townsend have other thoughts than a national scenic trail with my art along it, I have to say I’m proud of these little pieces of aluminum scattered along they way.

Larry-&-Me-Royal-Basin-Hike

Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. I’m trying to expand my list. An email will work.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.