I like this Chinook salmon painting but it’s going to change, so I thought I’d post it here so at least there’s a memory of it. What’s wrong with it, you ask, well, the National Park Service says it’s not fat enough! Welcome to MY life, and I guess I’d agree. They have some compelling reasons – so, back to the easel.

Here’s the entire fish. The final painting will go on one of seven waysides stands at the Dismal Nitch area beside the Columbia Estuary, part of Lewis and Clark National Historic Park. This is where ‘The Corps’, in 1804, spent a week hunkered down, starving, wet and miserable before a group of Chinook Indians paddled by and sold them some salmon. It’s a good story, and one I knew from my childhood when Virginia wrote a book about the wildlife and flora this bunch found and named, not to mention the Lewis River, Clark’s Fork and others. Now, here I am 50 years later painting exhibit art for the same place! The apples didn’t fall far from her tree, did they?

This painting of spawning salmon is one of over a dozen I’ve painted in the past couple of years, most for salmon restoration areas around the Salish Sea where I live. I’ve gotten much better at understanding these amazing fish and what they look like, how they live and suffer in their final days in fresh water. They feed us, they feed the riverside forest trees and all the creatures that live next to salmon streams. They’re not a gift to be taken lightly.

Thanks for reading this week – and the entire year for that matter.
Larry Eifert

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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.