All posts by Brush Man

With more art in America's National Parks than any other artist.
New Painting Post, New Published Story, Posts about other stuff

Mom’s New Book

Not so fast, a painting first: we’ve been in Hilo again for awhile and I did some opaque watercolors, some on location. This one maybe needs some explanation. It’s an old pahoehoe lava flow, so old it’s been bleached smooth and now reflects the tropical sun as almost white. Above it is a patch of Naukapa-kahakai. Come on, you can say it – just pronounce each vowel separately – there’s only three of them. We saw these little yellow-billed cardinals everywhere in the lowlands, and some were even on our porch each morning, feeding their non-red headed youngsters within arms-length of us. I’d call this a red-headed cardinal, but there’s another bird here named that. This painting isn’t for sale. I just don’t think it’s ‘presentable’ as it’s more a field sketch.

This happy and beautiful place, Hilo, the rainiest city in America (up to 15x what Port Townsend gets) shows, to us, what a healthy and diverse society is all about. Mixed race: 32%, Asian: 34%, Hawaiian: 14% and white: 17%. Let THAT sink in a moment. There simply doesn’t seem to be any social conflict here, just happy and kind people living life in one of the oldest cities in the country. Sure, it’s a very liberal place, but there’s more to it than that. We’ve been here many, many times, bought a house once that fell threw, keep coming back to enjoy the culture and beauty of an real American tropical rainforest and a town that is over 1000 years old.

Okay, here’s mom’s book, or at least she’s inside. Mom is not on the cover! As many of you know, Virginia Eifert, Illinois author, photographer, painter and poet somehow found time to make me. She died in 1966 at the top of her game and was one of Illinois’ best writers, publishing 20 novels and founding and writing the Illinois State Museum’s magazine for 326 issues. And now, here she is in a new book 53 years later. The woman has ‘legs’.

This book is a series of stories about the early environmentalists of America, and included are some good ones, some of Virginia’s friends. Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Mardy Murie and Sally Carrighar. Others include John Muir and Ernest Thompson Seton. Most interesting to me, Teal and Peterson didn’t make the cut, and those guys were above her at the time, Teal even hired her to be an ‘assistant’ for field classes. She’d  have loved this. The book will be on Kindle and Amazon, but hasn’t been released yet. Clifford Knapp was a naturalist and educator from the Midwest who died in 2017.

Thanks for reading this week. 

Larry Eifert

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 stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Art, words and life from a former generation.

New Painting Post

Ethereal Water

I paint moving water as often I possible. I find it immensely challenging, confusing and yet interesting to paint a constantly changing abstract ‘thing’ that, in itself, is colorless and lifeless. Yet wild water is so alive you can’t keep track of it, and reducing it to two dimensions is tricky. When it happens in a painting is more luck than anything. No reference photos for this painting, I just went for it in the studio. This board was primed with Mars Red and you can see that dark dried-blood color peeking through the other colors, providing a solid warmth behind all the rest of it. It’s a powerful color that requires some careful use.

I did say I didn’t use a reference, but the spark for this painting came from this photo I took while on the Tunnel Creek Trail in the Olympics. Can you see it? Not really? I can see water running over a log, green bounced light – and then I built a painting around it like a songwriter makes a song.

Here’s how it ended up with a frame and mat, and sitting on my studio deck.

This painting is sold. It’s framed like it shows here and the outside measurements are about 20″ x 24″. The acrylic painting is on board and is 10″x 14″. I only say this about the measurements because I’ve been getting requests for commissions for paintings SIMILAR to ones that have sold from this blog. Happy to try it if it interests me. Let us know if you’re interested by emailing me at larry@larryeifert.com. 

Thanks for reading this week. 

Larry Eifert

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 stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Art, words and life from a former generation.

New Painting Post, Wildlife

Pileated Woodpecker

A big flash of red, black and white – one of the most striking birds in North America.  We see these guys often here in our forest on the northeast side of the Olympic Peninsula – two were actually on our tray feeder not long ago and they dwarfed the chickadees that fled as they landed.

To me, pileated woodpeckers represent my vision of old-growth forests and a time when there was much more of that around here. These are complex conifers, moss and ferns growing high on the trunks, a tangle of branches and twigs that took centuries to grow. I’ve tried to express that in this painting, as if we’re looking up a the tree, seeing a flash of bird and the feeling of bigness. Painting with some abstract qualities also helps, I think, and gives it a messy feeling – just the way nature is.

Most woodpeckers, but especially this one, drill holes in trees to find insects or create nesting sites for themselves. The holes then provide homes for many others, both birds and animals. These are truly important creatures for the health of a forest. You won’t find them in tree farms, just like you won’t find an elk in a cornfield.

This painting is now for sale. It’s framed and the outside measurements are about 20″ x 24″ matted and under glass for $295 total. The acrylic painting is on board and is 10″x14″, the glass is 16″x20″. We have this frame on it now, but others are available. Shipping is a bit more. Let me know if you’re interested at larry@larryeifert.com. 

Sorry, it’s now sold.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

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 stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

New Painting Post, Wildlife

Spotted Sandpiper

I’ve been painting imaginary scrapes of landscapes for a long time. I find it very rewarding to take a moment in time and build a little painting around it, a memory for me of ‘being there’. This one is actually a streamside rock pile up the Big Quilcene River on the Olympic Peninsula, Olympic National Forest. I remember, it was raining, had glistening rocks, lots of varieties of color and texture, a few bits of wood as well. It was near the old log bridge at Bark Shanty. These are cold waters, so I primed the board with Mars Red to give it all a warm cast. 

The spotted sandpiper is the same, a nice memory for me of bumping into this little guy on a hike. They’re around most Western mountain streams throughout the summer, but head south to Argentina when the snow flies. You might normally think of sandpipers as birds that flock for safety, but this one is always singular. They poke around stream and lake shores, banks and beaches for lunch and have a curious habit of teetering up and down as if it’s lost its balance.

The first time I ever saw a spotted sandpiper was in the High Sierra. I was walking along a meadow bank beside the river above Tuolumne Meadows a few miles south of the campground. What a place! And here was a sandpiper, just meandering along and minding its own business as if I didn’t exist. It spent time, and so did I. Those memories make for good paintings, no matter if it’s decades later. 

This painting is now for sale. It’s framed and the outside measurements are about 24″ x 20″ matted and under glass for $1295 total. Shipping is a bit more. Let me know if you’re interested at larry@larryeifert.com. 

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

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 stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

New Painting Post, Wildlife

American Dipper

American dipper working the Upper Dungeness – but it could be any clean mountain stream hereabouts. A little space between projects, so I painted my favorite bird – John Muir’s favorite bird too. No secret why, this little bird lives where Muir felt most at home, and I do too – next to  a clear rushing and wild bit of water in the high country. Dippers are so connected to this singular habitat that they’ll fly around a stream bend instead short-cutting across a meadow. ‘Dine in’ for a dipper means diving into a waterfall and walking around underwater, kicking stones around and eating insects. 

Painting moving water is always a joy for me, but also has some mental anguish. It’s not easy to define what it looks like – something that is more a feeling than a fact. There is lots of bounced light, reflecting off the sky, nearby trees, sunny patches of moss that is getting direct sunlight. It’s not what I see, but more what I think I feel that is important. Did I get it on this one? I’m never sure.

I realized at the beginning that this would be a gray and green painting, cool colors. So, I started it by priming the board with Mars Red, a very brilliant purplish-red that you can see hints of all over the painting. Look carefully, you’ll see what I mean. It warmed the entire painting up a lot.

This painting is still for sale as of January 31, 2019. It’s framed as you see it here, outside measurements are about 20″ x 24″ and is $295 total, with shipping a bit extra. Email me at larry@larryeifert.com if you’re interested. 

Sorry, this painting sold a few hours after posting.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

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 stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website

New Painting Post

Wet Winter Road

A new easel painting appeared between a couple of larger park projects. I continue to happily paint all these big public art pieces but it helps to create a bit of of whimsy on a smaller, looser scale. So, here’s a happy little place, at least for me. 

This painting is already sold, sorry. Just a show-and-tell here.

This painting was a collaboration with Nancy. We’ve never done this before, even after 25 years of working together on giant walls and making a living selling our individual efforts. We painted this together, each of us doing some, then the other moving forward and fixing the other’s deadends. I think it resulted in a refined and well thought-out painting. We might even try it again. Maybe next time I can get her to sign her name.

Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about color values and painting low winter light. It’s far more interesting than painting anything in summer – absolutely anything. It takes some time and thought to keep the image slanted over into a monochrome pallet of similar values, mix each with a bit of all the rest, and save the center-of-interest for the only intense place to blast away with slightly more color.

There are lots of layers in this painting, as you can see, but they’re all on a level of dullness to not get excited about. The road beckons the viewer to join us in a walk up the road, dodging puddles, to discover what’s just over the ridge.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

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 stunning photography

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Murals, New Painting Post, Wildlife

El Malpais mural

El Malpais National Monument mural painting completed

I finished my El Malpais National Monument mural a few days ago. Of course they don’t know about it yet because the park staff is shutdown, but I thought I’d post it here to let everyone else know that artists don’t get sent home – we ARE home. Park staff isn’t getting paid, and neither am I.

Enough of that! The progressive steps of this painting are shown below, from the concept sketch created on location in Grants New Mexico, to the refined sketch and finally the painted version on top. Scroll to the bottom to see the chronological progression in reverse. 

This painting shows the rather amazing and pristine high desert plateau landscape right on the Continental Divide in central New Mexico. This giant park has over 400 lava caves, ancient pueblo ruins, sandstone cliffs, vast lava flows, cinder cones and some of the oldest Douglas-fir trees on the planet. The painting shows most of these components, and also several cave entrances, bats emerging for the evening, a ringtail watching them pass. There are two tinajas, or waterpockets with frogs and others coming to drink after a hot day in the desert. This part is on sandstone, like the background cliffs. There are ancient junipers that were probably here 1000 years ago when the pueblo was occupied, and lots of pot shards are littering the ground. We saw all this, and much more I couldn’t get in while on our site visit last spring. 

The design for the park’s map brochure.

This painting will be going to the main visitor center in Grants, but a larger copy with also be produced for an exhibit there. The real reason for this, however, is that it’s going on the back of the new park map brochure, so each year over 100,000 people get to take it home with them – along with this painting of mine. This part of the project is being produced by the excellent staff at the National Park Service’s Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia. They always do great things with my paintings. I know the production will be top-notch.

Super-refined sketch prior to painting. This one was drawn in the studio here in Port Townsend and was the final draft before painting.
Refined sketch number seven, also drawn on location.
ELMA sketch #7

Above is the initial sketch photographed for big screen presentation at the park. I did this on the pavement at the hotel in Grants New Mexico, then loaded into my laptop and piped it onto the big screen for the park to see and comment on while I listened and wrote comments. This is sketch #7, the final one attempted and it was heartily approved. Even the superintendent was there, which is a rarity for me.

This was drawn on location, along with half a dozen others, but wasn’t a specific place. It has all the ‘elements of El Malpais, but doesn’t hold faithful to any ‘stand here and see this’ location. I think I nailed it pretty well.

El Malpais means Badlands – they sure are.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

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 stunning photography

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Ginkgo Petrified Forest

Gingko Petrified Forest Museum

Earlier this year I completed a bunch of paintings for Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park near the Columbia River east of Seattle. In many ways, the project took me back to my kid-life when both my parents worked for the Illinois State Museum. I remember being with them and finding ginkgo leaf fossils in northern Illinois, and now here I was painting them for exhibits in a very old and remote museum in Washington State. This building was built by the CCCs in the late 1930s and is just a very beautiful and classic example of those epic times. With the place closed when we were there, the only sounds we heard out on these ash slopes were the wind through to trees and crunch of our footsteps on the trails. The ginkgo and other tree fossils are big, like full-grown old-growth. You can even count the rings showing how old they were when the volcano buried them.

New Front Door – Gingko Petrified Forest State Park
Gingko Petrified Forest State Park
Gingko Petrified Forest State Park – complicated maps turned out pretty well.
All my paintings ringing the exhibit room.

These paintings tell a super-complicated story of how this place came to be in its present state. Countless lava flows, mud flows, ash drops and Ice-Age floods involved trees from another time. They all were stuck in this mess and became fossilized. The trick, for me, was to figure out how to compress giant geologic events or Climate Change into smallish, understandable paintings. Some of these needed maps, some needed a few extra words of explanation, but somehow I think it all works. It was a fun project for me, different than what I normally paint.

All images enlarge with  a click. Not all the paintings are shown – thought I’d save you from too much geology.

Thanks for reading this week – and the entire year for that matter. This  year, especially, has been an amazing ride of art being created in public places.
Larry Eifert

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 stunning photography

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Commissioned paintings, New Painting Post

Ozette Loop Trail

Ozette Loop Trail, a boardwalk journey into the green tunnel. Yes, I paint private commissions that interest me – and this one did.

This is a recent commission that traveled across the country. The lovely question: “My daughter and I came to the Northwest to visit family and we hiked the Ozette Loop. Could you paint something to help us remember our fantastic trip?” – or something like that. Anyway, I wanted to share the painting here because, while it certainly IS the Ozette Loop, as anyone who has hiked that world-class trail will agree, it’s actually what I THOUGHT that 6 MILES of boardwalk feels like. It just goes on and on through the green wall of ancient old-growth, cedar, spruce and alder. Sometimes it’s a hand-split cedar boardwalk, sometimes it’s new stuff, sometimes you think you’ll fall through and sometimes even plastic Trex appears momentarily (how COULD they have done that?).

Nancy Cherry Eifert paying attention. One wrong step and a busted knee at least.

There are places where this path is really old, like the section in the photo. You need to watch it carefully, not gaze around at the canopy overhead. It’s a leg-breaker awaiting. Sometimes it’s gravel, but not so much considering it’s 3 miles on each of two sides of the triangle. The middle side, of course, is 3 miles of wilderness beach, boulder and gravel walking down the coast – and the real reason most of us go there. That part feels amazingly remote but it’s really too good to share. It’s a place stories come from. It’s a place to camp, sit beside a beach fire and watch the sea otters play in the shallows. Maybe another hike’s in order next summer.

Thanks go to Jennifer and her family in Connecticut. I got to make a painting for you – and me.

All images enlarge with  a click. Yes, I paint commissions.

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

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 stunning photography

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Published Story

Tidepool Sculpin – My 48 North story for September 2018

Never got around to posting this in the midst of a bunch of much bigger paintings, but this was my September magazine page for 48 North magazine.  It’s late to post here, but I always want to leave a record of my stuff to keep track of it all.

Sculpins: a quick little color study of these tiny fish that live in rocky tidepools in the Northwest. There are many reasons to make these little guys (smaller than your thumb) featured here, but my favorite is the rather homebody lifestyle they have. Simply put, they like where they live and never stray far. Sure, they can live out of the water through an entire tidal change, and sure, they check out other pools as far away as a football field, but they always return home, and to the same pool!

Here’s a closeup of the little guy, loose pencil and watercolor. I don’t give myself much time on these and I like the process because it’s so very different than many of my bigger projects that are tight and detailed. Compare this with the 500 square feet of Hoh Rain Forest paintings I was doing at the same time I did this little sculpin and you can imagine the relief of starting and finishing something in the same session. Ahhh.

And here is the text that went with it in 48 North magazine:

Go ashore – poke around tidepools, and chances are good you’ll find this little sculpin. It might take a bit of looking, because their habit of secrecy means staying put, not moving a fin and waiting for you to pass by. Superbly camouflaged, these small 3.5” fish settle to the tide pool bottom and blend in so well with sand, crushed shells and bits of seaweed they just disappear. Put your hand over the water and, like a flash, they shoot forward to a safer place. It’s still the same tidepool, so just watch them flash, settle, and then have a good look. As the tide returns, sculpins could move about to other areas, but they have a home pool and rarely stray far. If moved, say 300 feet to another tidepool, they return to their original pool, not unlike salmon returning to spawn to their home stream.

There are five sculpin species here and all are carnivores, hunting small crustaceans and seaworms. In turn, they are hunted by all sorts of predators from herons to otters, so sharp spines that take the place of scales are protection as they live in a confined space with no escape. Sculpins occasionally get stranded out of water at low tide, beneath seaweed or under rock ledges. Not to worry. These fish can breathe air until the water returns a few hours later. Other fish can do this, too, and it begs the comparison to when fish crawled out of the water for good and took to the land in an evolutional move that eventually became us. Think about that next time you see one of these little fish. Is that you, grand dad?

This is the tidepool where I did much of the research for this story, Beach 4 at Olympic National Park. It’s one of our favorites for a low-tide poking around.

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

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 stunning photography

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.