New Life for an Old Painting – Arcata Marsh, CA

June 9, 2014 Wilderness Walker

In the 1990’s I was commissioned to paint this wildlife mural for the City of Arcata, California’s marsh project. A fairly innovative idea at the time, they were using old log sorting ponds to purify their sewer water, using them for settling ponds. Of course, being Arcata which is mostly Humboldt State University, it involved wildlife, and lots of it – and so a visitor center was built and this painting is an exhibit there, but it’s inside the building.

Now, two decades later, they’re using the same image as their entrance sign at the gate, so I did a redesign last week and it’s at the fabricator now. This simply wouldn’t have been possible back when I first painted the image, but nowadays I can digitally create this huge sign, send it off over the cable – and soon this beautiful, 6′ x 6′ and 3/4″ thick, it’s going to be made out of something like Formica – with a life span longer than I’ll be alive.

Of course, this is all possible because I retained the copyrights to this painting, so when Denise at the Marsh wanted to do this project, she needed to come to me. It’s a way we working artists make a living. I only signed away the rights to one large painting – the first one I ever did for the National Park Service at Redwood National Park. It ended badly, with me having to actually buy my own posters from the parks’ bookstores and not even having a digital copy of it to put on my website. A cautionary tale, don’t you think?

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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