I left this fairly large on the server, so if you click on it, it should enlarge so you can see details.

I finished the Polks Nature Center mural for Lakeland, Florida this week. Soon this 8′ x 24′ mural will be plastered on the wall in central Florida. I think it worked out pretty well. I posted sketches and  progress reports before, but if you forgot how it began last month, here’s the right side of the sketch. As you can see, trees changed, critters moved, came, left. The gater arrived below the white crane, the pelicans vanished. The tiny cypress got much bigger and cypress knees grew. Sandhill cranes arrived and began to take off from the swamp. Nature’s like that, don’t you think?  Always changing, never static.

 The real challange here was that I wasn’t on location to really get how this place looks and ‘feels’. Understand that it’s all a made-up scene, but I need to realize how the atmosphere looks, how merky it becomes with all that humidity, how the sky is often leaden blue and not like Western dry skies or even my local Olympic Peninsula crispness. And that water color? A mix of leaden sky and murky swamp. I hope I got it right!

I really enjoy making the big paintings into my own little world, but I have good references to how it works. This morning I was having breakfast and abstractly looking out at our gigantic five-stemmed maple – and suddenly part of it moved. That part of the trunk I was looking straight at was our local barred owl, sitting patiently waiting for a meal to walk by down below. Then a red squirrel came up the trunk and started harassing the big guy. Amazing. Then, like this big mural’s progress, a moment later they both left – and I wondered if I’d seen it at all.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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