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A new painting for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust project at the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve. In case you missed the last several posts of this, here’s the last painting before this. I think I’m about 75% to completion on this new one. It speaks to the windy extreme weather on the bluff tops of Whidbey Island, Washington, how that weather shapes these 350-year-old trees, how the forest changes farther inland, how, one gnarly branch at a time, it’s slowly grown here over centuries. A rare forest indeed.

Great changes occurred in this design, logs moved, an entire underground section vanished – it was evolution right before my eyes. 

You can see some of the design changes in the lower right of this third photo. Compare this with the newest photo at the top.

Dark shapes help me focus on overall design. I sometimes stand back 25 feet to look at these 4′ paintings.

And here it is initially laid out, sky and ground, warm and cool. A free and fanciful non-objective painting just waiting to be hung in an art gallery somewhere. But these paintings don’t exist anymore. After I photographed it at each stage, it’s as if I’m then throwing away the image – because soon after it’s gone for ever under the progression to the next stage.

And here’s the original sketch showing the underground sections that are now gone from the painting.

By next week, I’ll have this finished up for a show-and-tell. Thanks for the interest in these images of the progression of a complex painting. Fun for me to see too.

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.