Tag Archives: Streams

National Park Service, New Painting Post

Bounced Light – Sol Doc River

For those not from the Olympic Peninsula, the Sol Duc is one of the most beautiful rivers here, and I’ve painted it many times. In fact, if you drive the 17-mile park road from the gate to Sol Duc Falls Trailhead, you’ll pass 24 Eifert paintings along the way on turnout signs, exhibits and information kiosks. Like an art gallery in the old-growth.

This little painting is actually of the North Fork of the Sol Duc, a fantastic hike that goes up and over a ridge before dropping to a thigh-deep ice water crossing requiring boots and pants off. On the other side, it just doesn’t get any nicer, with plunge pools carved into bedrock and a meandering trail that plows up the canyon to the river’s source. Of course, in the dead of winter, this painting is just a nice memory of it, and that’s why I painted it.

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $149 framed as  you see it. Outside edge of the frame is about 12″ x 15″.
This custom frame has a triple liner and glass. Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

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

Murals, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

Snow Creek Wayside Panel Installed

I think I probably posted this painting as it was happening a few months ago, but a couple of weeks ago, the good folks with the North Olympic Salmon Coalition finally installed the last panel in this project. This one tells the story of restoring Snow Creek as it meanders down into Discovery Bay,  just a few miles from our studio, and how this valley is on the way to becoming a healthy stream for salmon. Lots of money, lots of time and people power, and a very beautiful place.

Here’s the best part for me: this is right beside Highway 20, the main road from our home to Olympic National Park and the big box town of Sequim. We leave home, drive over the pass beside Discovery Bay, down this hill and there this is, just waiting for me to hate it. (I hate all of them, no big deal). So, I get to drive right by my own stuff on the way to enjoying the pizza bite samples at Costco. What a kick!

In case you want to see how it looks without the frame, here’s the final fabricated panel on aluminum by Gopher in Minnesota. Great job – the best in the country.

Snow Creek Restoration, NOSC

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.

New Painting Post

2018-4 Olympics Spring Runoff – Harlequin Ducks

I’m back with new stuff! This new painting is 7″x 10″ acrylic on canvas. Framed as you see it, overall size is about 14″ x 17″. Without gallery commission, I’m offering it here for $195 framed plus some postage.

We see harlequin ducks here in Port Townsend all winter, hanging out along the waterfront and sleeping on rocks. Usually they’re mated couples, occasionally with a kid or two. In April, they head back up into the mountains, find a rushing river and set up shop for another summer in the Olympics.  They’re very colorful ducks, favorites of ours because of the wild places they live. We’ve watched them dive these wild rivers, jump right into seemingly bone-breaking currents, and in fact studies have found these ducks usually have many mended bones that have probably been crushed by slamming into underwater rocks.

This time of year, the streamside alders in the lowlands are just coming into leaf, but up on these mountain rivers, just a few miles inland, it still feels like winter – leaves and catkins are still bound tight against nighttime cold. I could paint wild places like this until I croak – which I plan on doing.

If you’d like this painting, please email me at larry@larryeifert.com. We have all sorts of payment options. No gallery commission, so this one is $195 framed as you see it.

Thanks for reading this week. I’ll have more soon.
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.

New Painting Post

Short Drop – a new painting

Sorry, it’s sold.

Short Drop, a painting that could be a million places in the Olympic Mountains and North Cascades. If you live in the Northwest, you know this place, and countless others like it. We hike favorite trails in winter, mainly because they’re tourist-free and often find these seasonal streams, but come summer there will be no such thing – many times not even looking like it ever had water flowing there.

But now when I stood there next to it? I could look at it for hours, listening to the Short Drop of falling water.

What do I get out of this? I like studying the situation, how the water leaves the ‘lip’ and begins its fall – that critical moment of drop. In these little waterfall paintings, that very spot almost always become the center-of-interest, the place on the canvas our eyes are drawn too like a magnet. It did for you, I hope, when you first looked at this. The rest of it, the foam, sticks and little leaves are all supporting characters helping that lead actor do its job.

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $149 framed. Outside edge of the frame is about 12″ x 15″.
This custom frame has a triple liner and glass. Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details if you’re interested. These little painting go quickly – just sayin’.

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

New Painting Post

Over the Log – a new painting

This was just a thoughtful moment for me, something like a nice dream one has before awakening – except I wasn’t asleep. Sitting at my easel, mind off thinking beyond the blank board in front of me. One of your bucks meandered past the window. Then in a very clear thought I saw myself sitting beside a nice little mountain stream, messy logs and limbs piled up from past high water, a salmon spawning pool behind it. I remember wondering where the ‘dipper’ was – and then – I just sat down to paint it. No reference photo, no sketch, just my memory of someplace that doesn’t exist. Or, maybe it does.

Five colors later, and here it is. I think the light is nice.

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $149 framed. Outside edge of the frame is about 12″ x 15″.
This custom frame has a triple liner and glass. Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

SOLD

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.

New Painting Post

Dipper on the North Fork Returns

North-Fork-Dipper
  • This is not a new painting, but this week we sold a large custom print of it. The painting itself is in our private collection, just because I liked it, and now I think I like it even more.  There’s a quality about the river’s transparency, of water-carved rocks glowing from within – and that reflected glow on the dipper. OR, maybe I like it because of the memory of the moment. That’s important now as spring slowly arrives here and I wish for warmer hiking days. We have 6″ high nettles up in our woods, daffs higher than that, the willows are out – and it surely is an early spring, but not earlier enough for us.
  • That moment: North Fork of the Sol Duc River in Olympic National Park. Hike up and over a little ridge, ford the river up to your crotch in blindingly-cold ice melt – and you’re on a truly glorious and empty trail for miles. In places there are huge water-carved boulders (where we saw this dipper dipping), and in August it’s a grand place for skinny dipping for sure. Thanks, Kevin, for buying the print so these memories could return.
  • I think this is why I’m just a painter of life’s memories. I can paint pretty good non-objective images and commissioned fictitious murals of some detail, but when I look back at all the paintings through the years, I get the best emotional charge from painting experiences from the times (good or bad) in my life. I think of the moment, the experience surrounding that moment, who I was with, what it smelled like, felt like, sounded like.

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

New Painting Post

American Dipper 5

Dipper-5-8x10

    American Dipper 5 is a new original painting, acrylic on board, 8″ x 10″ and $140 unframed. This is another in my on-going search for the perfect dipper waterfall.

A custom frame makes it a total of $170 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details. I can send a photo of the frames we have available.

       And then there’s this: We spent the last couple of weeks working around the eastern Cascades near Leavenworth, Washington and day-hiking below the Enchantments. Amazing giant mountains, warm days and fall colors at their peak. Nancy gained some very tasty images for an up-coming show – and I found new material for more dipper paintings.

Nancy-up-Snow-Lake-trail

 

     Here’s Nancy hiking almost straight up on Snow Lakes Trail above Icicle Creek – ALL the trails are straight up! Hiking into the light reminded me that, for us, this is as close to realizing the divine as we know. For Nancy and me, pristine wilderness, land unaffected by humans is religious, a medicine and tonic for the soul. It’s important to us in many ways, but mostly it serves as the realization that this will be here long after we’re gone. In a way, it’s a sense of immortality.

    We trailer camped in an almost-closed up KOA right in town, and Harry the Cat had a rather amazing experience one day. He had not the foggiest idea what these American turkeys were, but actually seemed like he wanted to become friends with them – even came out and rolled around on the ground in front of them. Any one of them could have laid him low, but I guess I’m happy to report that we’ve raised a ‘soft’ cat with some sense of morality – if not mortality. 

Harry-and-Turkeys

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

New Painting Post

The Gulls at Ruby Beach

Gulls-at-Ruby-Beach

“The Gulls at Ruby Beach” is a new acrylic painting on canvas, 20″ x 40″ and offered here for $1750 framed. Email us for details if you’re interested. Click it and you’ll see enlarged versions of both these images.

  Ruby Beach is usually a vibrant and wild Olympic National Park beach, but on occasion in late summer the ocean can be more like a calm lake – little surf and almost no wind. We were there to see a sunset and it felt like this. It felt like warm coffee. The headlands beyond the beach aren’t quiet as close as what I painted, but it just seemed like I needed to stack up the levels of receding shorelines and show some abstract textures to that area. And maybe some of you will notice the big missing sea stack on the left side. No, not on purpose, but if you stand just here on the trail down to the beach, that big rock is more to the left and out of view. I think it works.

Gulls-at-Ruby-Beach-framed

 

Here’s a photo of the painting and frame that’s included. If you don’t want the custom frame, we can do that too. This is the original painting, NOT a print.

And, if you’re interested, you might go over to my Facebook Fan page and like it. I post lots of trail albums and other art there. See the link below.

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

New Painting Post

American Dipper 4

Dipper-4

This ORIGINAL painting is  acrylic on linen canvas, 16″ x 20″ and $190 unframed.
This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

    Long ago, I saw some paintings of a South American rain forest. I have no idea who the artist was, but they were moody, dark, ethereal – and had this ‘feeling’ about them that a painter can only get if they’d actually been to a place like that. And it’s not just going there, but they would have to really get to know a place, not just how it looks, but WHY it looks the way it does.

    I think that way about this painting. If just feels like it really was. We’ve spent a spring and summer doing a lot of hiking, more than normal, and much of it has been beside these pure, ethereal and pristine Northwest rivers that are unlike any others I know. The water is often blue-gray because of ice melt far upstream, streamside moss and salmonberries are sculptured gardens of lush green and fresh life – never dusty and tired-looking. And that little dipper. It just keeps reappearing in these paintings, over and over, the symbol of wilderness and these Northwest waters.

    Last week Nancy and I backpacked into Royal Basin in the Olympics – the epitome of these types of landscapes. For over six miles we hiked beside the Dungeness River, then Royal Creek, never out of earshot of its roaring and rumbling as it dropped through the canyon. We broke the climb up into two sections and camped so near the creek that all night I thought I heard voices – well, I guess I did if you consider rushing water to have a voice. The river-talkers were almost too loud at times.

River-camp

Towards the top, Royal Lake appeared, encircled by some of the highest peaks in the Olympics – and we were the only ones camping here. Somehow, this dipper painting needed to be posted afterwards. So I did!

Royal-Lake-and-Mt-Fricaba

Thanks for reading this week. There’s an album of these trip hikes on my Facebook fan page.
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.

New Painting Post

Dipper Bobbing – Dungeness River

American Dippers cannot seem to just stand there, but have to constantly bob up and down. This one was at the bottom of the bob.

I just have this thing for American Dippers and clear, rushing little waterfalls. So here’s another painting of my favorite little bird, mainly because we’ve seen many of them on our recent summer hikes. Dippers were also John Muir’s favorite bird. He said it was because they only live along the cleanest mountain streams and represented what’s best about American wilderness. They never stray from rushing water. Given a river bend, dippers will fly the long route around instead of short-cutting across the neck. They build nests of moss and twigs behind waterfalls, so the chicks are wet from birth. Now here’s the best part: dippers feed by jumping into the water, sometimes barely above freezing, and with wings open for balance, they just walk around underwater kicking over stones looking for aquatic insects to eat. It’s as if they’re oblivious to the fact it’s water at all. They can jump into a huge current, and then appear someplace completely different, at home just ‘ambling around’ underwater. Pop, they’ll just jump out of a pool and sit for a moment on a log, just like this painting shows, seemingly without a drop of water on them. In fact, come to think of it, I’ve never seen a dipper actually shake off water.

 Here’s where I saw this little guy, the Dungeness River up in the Buckhorn Wilderness, featured today on the Wild Olympics website and just 20 miles from home. It’s the second steepest river in America, falling 7700 feet in just 28 miles.

 

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $145 unframed.
This custom frame (sorry, color seems a bit off in the photo) with a linen liner makes it a total of $180 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print. I have other frames of various styles too.
Email us for details.

Sorry, but it’s sold.

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