Big paintings: that seems to be my life these days. No complaints!
I posted another painting from this project a few weeks ago – a giant 24-foot wall mural of Portland from three miles up for a new visitor center in Portland, Oregon. This one is this week’s effort and is a 9-foot wide painting for an interpretive panel in the same visitor center atop Powell Butte (shown perched atop the butte on the right side of the painting). This is actually the bottom 2/3 of the panel, which I edited to show better in this post. It goes up another few feet. Great design by Linda Repplinger of SeaReach in Sheridan, Oregon, don’t you think? (click the images and they should enlarge)
This was a sort of history painting and it was fun to figure out. Notice that over the top of the dairy farm in the middle rises Mount St. Helens before it blew in 1981. Mt. Rainier is farther away and behind it to the right. Thanks, Linda, for pointing out that it would be the ‘old’ mountain and not the sheared off one of today.
Left side: Native Americans lived in the Portland area for thousands of years, burning the forests and creating lush open grassland forests that sustained their culture. It was a garden – but it also demanded a bunch of work to keep it that way.
Middle: white guys arrived and realized this really was a garden, kicked out the very people that made it that way and put in dairy farms, roads and railways. Mount St. Helens was many decades from blowing it’s top.
Right side: today, the old railroad is now a bike/hike path, the old volcanic butte is now hollowed out (I’m not kidding) and holds a soon-to-be-finished 100 million gallon underground water cisterns the size of TWO football stadiums and covered over with dirt with a new visitor center perched on top – and a couple of Eifert paintings installed in it as well.
Amazing!
Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert
I’m currently in the middle of another project, that of digitizing all 20+ books from my mom’s out-of-print catalog. Virginia Eifert will soon rise again on Amazon.com, so stay tuned. It’s getting wild around here.
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