All posts by Brush Man

With more art in America's National Parks than any other artist.
Commissioned paintings, US Fish Wildlife Service, Waysides

Nesting Black Tern

I’m back in the studio working on some paintings for Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Eastern Oregon. Seems like this project has taken years, and it has – like THREE years. But who cares if I get to paint fun stuff like black terns. This painting goes on a big wayside there – I’ll show the design later when I get more completed. 

Malheur is an amazing place at certain times of the year. Spring and Fall, it’s a key focus point for most of the migrants on the Pacific Flyway – they all come together before spreading out for the rest of their journeys. Nancy Cherry Eifert took the photo below of snow geese, and you can easily tell how these big birds got their name. It really does look like a blizzard of birds, doesn’t it? And this was just a small portion of just one group. March was when this was taken, in case you want to go.

If you remember, Malheur was where the Bundy Standoff took place three years ago. I feel a small bit of pride they’re using art to fix the damage done there, and hope the rest of this project will show people this place isn’t just about the absurdity of giving public land, OUR land, to thugs.

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.

Commissioned paintings, Murals, National Park Service, Wildlife

Wind Cave NP Site Visit

What’s this big guy doing on our hood? Attacking a brand new rental car – starting with licking the bumper and then advancing to the really fun stuff. Damage! See that foot-long horn (one of a pair) on top of a 2,000lb creature with the manners of a child? I loved every minute of it.

Here we were at Wind Cave National Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota. We’ve been on a site visit, researching, photographing and sketching for a new and really interesting project. Wind Cave has one of the most amazing caves we’ve ever been in, 150-some miles of it, and also super high-quality mixed grass prairie up top with hundreds of bison, elk, pronghorn, deer and prairie dogs. A feast for our eyes.

This is pre-sketch drawing number 8, placed in the design grid on the back of their new map guide. 750,000 people come here each year and this will be the handout they all take home.
And this is drawing number 1, beginning with some vague notion of underground vs. above ground prairie and Black Hills. Compare this to the top one and it shows how things progress and evolve in my head as I do these things on location – no studio time, no time to think, just draw – and then I have to present this as a program to park staff at the end.
Nervous? I used to be but it’s just life on some higher level now.
National Park Service staff and me, left, at the highest point in the park. We were discussing how often this location gets struck by lightning, which was happening. Photo by Nancy, who took hundreds of others. Melinda, next to me, came from the East Coast to help on this.

Stay tuned as this painting develops. It will be about 5′ x 4′ and be filled with many more critters, flowers and details – especially in the cave where some of the most interesting hang from the ceiling (no, not bats). If you follow me, you’ll see the entire progression from this messy beginning to a finished ‘thing’. 

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.

Stay tuned as this painting develops. It will be about 5′ x 4′ and be filled with many more critters, flowers and details – especially in the cave where some of the most interesting hang from the ceiling (no, not bats). If you follow me, you’ll see the entire progression from this messy beginning to a finished ‘thing’. 

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, Waysides, Wildlife

Rosario Tide Pools

I just polished these three outdoor wayside panels for Washington State Parks. Soon they’ll be installed at Rosario Beach, Deception Pass State Park near Anacortes, right on the beach at one of the most heavily-explored tide pool areas in Washington. The three paintings tell the stories of how the tide works to create this amazingly rich ecosystem, how people messed it all up with boots and flip-flops – and finally how to walk here without screwing it up again.

I want to show you the third panel, the one about their rope path. These tide pools were decimated by thousands of feet, but the park stretched a yellow rope out to the best pools and signs (like this one) tell people to ‘Follow the Ropes”. It worked, amazingly enough, and the tide pool life returned – crabs and anemones, kelp and sculpins. It was such an easy idea, and now the place is returning to normal. Seeing this is one of the many reasons I still get a charge out of painting art for public places.

These panels are 36″ x 24″ and will be made of high-pressure laminate and probably last longer than I will.

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.

Commissioned paintings, Murals, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

Lime Kiln and Orca Whales

I received some installation photos for my Lime Kiln Point Lighthouse paintings. Everyone seems to like them, so I thought I’d share it all here for the record. I painted these last winter for Washington State Parks with EDX Exhibits in Seattle. Installation and these photos were by Marius at Doty Signs in Seattle.

This lighthouse is THE place to watch orca whales up close in the wild. There’s possibly no place on Earth you can get closer to wild whales without getting on a boat, and in summer, people line the shoreline here to watch the killer whale families feeding on salmon right in front of them. This is a big deal since the southern population of orcas is endangered and it’s not looking good for a recovery. It’s a thrilling experience to see them, and I’m proud to say my stuff now explains what people are looking at. Plus, there are one or two really nice looking pieces of art!

This is sort of a big deal for me, too, as new rules don’t allow boats to approach these endangered animals, leaving Lime Kiln as the best viewing in the Northwest. It’s also a place I know well, since I had “October”, my 40-foot sloop tied in nearby Friday Harbor in the ’80s – my ‘painting platform’ as I sailed from San Diego to Alaska and most places in between. I have history here. Nancy and I, decades later aboard our 45′ floating home ‘Rumpy’ came by here one afternoon and watched in amazement as an entire orca family slowly swam directly beneath our boat (engine off). One of the big males was bigger than our boat, but they minded their manners and didn’t touch us.

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.

Commissioned paintings, Murals

Hoh Rainforest Visitor Center

We were out in the rainy Hoh Rainforest, commissioned to take installation photos by the project designer in Washington D.C. Nancy took some very tasty images and I thought I’d share them here. This project ended last summer, but no good photos existed of it, and project artists, designers and builders need these for examples to show for future adventures. This old guy just happened by for one of the shots. That’s a see-through painting of Mount Olympus on the right, a complex collection of forest floor paintings on the tabletop – and beyond is the real thing.

Look out the windows past the art and this is the view. Big Sitka spruce is what this beautiful place is all about. I feel fortunate to have my art here, an installation that will be enjoyed long after I’m gone from walking these trails.

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, 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