A new 18″ x 24″ poster – coming soon!
Click all these to enlarge them in your browser
Thousands upon thousands of the original poster “Events in the Life of a Coast Redwood” have gone out the door over the past twenty years. Originally commissioned as a museum exhibit for Redwood National and State Parks, the painting lives it’s life in Prairie Creek, just the best redwood forest I’ve ever known. There’s a lot of art and photography here in our studio, and many of these past images go out of print, out of our lives – but we felt this one deserved a continued present, so this week I redesigned it to look more like an old botanical poster someone might have created 200 years ago when redwoods hadn’t even been discovered by Europeans yet. You’ll see this in a month or so after the printer does his job.
The story of how this originally came to be is somewhat fun – at least for me. In the 1990’s I was living in Ferndale, Cal just north of one of the biggest redwood parks. I always tried to be a thorn in the side of a local timber-killing company, always looking for ways to counteract their lying press releases ranting on about how wonderful they were in eliminating the world’s tallest trees – our heritage being made into hot tubs. (My real thorn was the fact I had hired the wife of the CEO to work for me in my gallery, and he thought we were having an affair – used to sneak around in the alley watching her.) Anyway, that company put out a poster much like this – tree in the center, but instead of nature they showed little images of subjects like Joan of Arc, Hitler, the atom bomb, Christ on the cross – stuff completely unrelated to redwoods.
So, I was dared to challenge it with a poster of my own – and got Redwood National Park to pay for it, and off we went. My poster was meant to show the rich diversity in redwood forests, something the redwood choppers denied (we need to get rid of those old, stagnant forests), and put them in a context with humanity as well as ecological history (something they also denied the existence of). Fast forward: the company crashed, people are now out of work, I get mail thanking me for standing up for something few believed in at the time. Ah, it’s all in a day’s work for the naturalist-artist!
I’ll let you know when this is available in most large redwood parks – from Redwood National to Muir Woods – and on our website.
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.