All posts by Brush Man

With more art in America's National Parks than any other artist.
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Kauai Asian Cemetery – A Cautionary Tale

 

We just returned from a little winter field trip to warm up on Kauai. I really cannot remember when I posted anything other than my art on this blog, years probably, but these photos were taken while we watched astonishing events unfolding on the Mainland, and finding this little abandoned cemetery seems to tie it together – and not in a good way.

This is a beautiful place, but we quickly realized the stones told a tragic story. No stones in the ‘old’ cemetery section dated past 1942, the date when we, America, sent 120,000 Japanese to prison for just being Japanese, and few returned to their original homes after that madness was over. These are abandoned graves, meaning people are still here but the families don’t come to remember grand-dad’s fishing stories, or grand-mother’s wonderful meals. No one comes to spruce up the ground, bring flowers occasionally – it’s just abandoned. I’ve never thought that our actions against people might, in fact, reverberate to past generations.

And now, today, what are we doing? The same thing? It seems our tolerance for other cultures, different people, different ways has vanished. This big bronze sculpture is in Kaloa Town, a few miles to the east. This giant piece of art commemorates the truly joyful multiculturalism that was spawned as Hawaii developed. To meet labor demands, the cane companies went to Asia and brought in thousands of workers, the basis of Hawaii’s diverse and harmonious culture today. These people had to get along. And they get along now, and that’s the point. If we don’t learn to get along,  we are doomed to the vastly bigger threat of Climate Change that will probably finish us off as a civilization.

My thought: Don’t give up on Facebook, or that ‘other-race’ family down the street. Walk down, bang on the door and ask them how they are. Make a point of talking to people that aren’t like you in the grocery store. You might learn things aren’t as bad as we’re told they are!

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 stunning photography

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

Waysides, Wildlife

Discovery Bay – Snow Creek wayside panel

 

Some small changes but I think this is finished. At least the art is. This panel will live on the east side of Discovery Bay, just a few miles from Port Townsend. The North Olympic Salmon Coalition recently rearranged a lot of land here, took out a railroad bridge or two and moved a mountain of fill dirt. Two streams, Snow Creek and Salmon Creek now run free into the bay in a textbook example of how to successfully restore salmon habitat. I was proud to be a part of it.

Here’s the detail on the left side. If you check the photo below, you’ll see there was a very pronounced umber feel to the color, a Van Dyke brown, and even thou it was winter and the painting is summer, I used it. This also seemed to be the color of the water here, hinting at all the organic nutrients coming down this stream.

This is one of four of these I’ve been working on for this restoration group, and I really appreciated the freedom and also professionalism everyone has in the group, especially Dave Shreffler, who did the interpretive writing. Very tasty twists of phrases that looks easy but isn’t. This makes the 9th underwater restoration painting I’ve done in the Pacific Northwest, just in time for the next one coming soon. Stay tuned.

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 stunning photography

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

Waysides, Wildlife

Discovery Bay – Maynard Beach painting completed

 

These should enlarge if you click them.

Holidays or not, I spent some time this week finishing up this part of the North Olympic Salmon Coalition project for Discovery Bay. Last week I posted a partially finished painting of this and now here’s the final. I cut a piece out of the right corner, below, so you can see some details.

I’ve been working on various ways to show both above water and below water situations in the restoration paintings. This one is, if my count is right, the ninth painting showing this odd situation, and I really fudged reality in this one. If you look at the center lower part you’ll see the shoreline comes across into the water, but the scene is deep underwater. The water line above it is about as far off from reality as it gets – but it seems to work somehow.

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 stunning photography

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

New Painting Post

Maynard Beach habitat restoration painting

These all enlarge in your browser with a click. This is a half-way mark in the painting as it’ll look in the outdoor wayside installation.

And here’s the second sketch for the four wayside panels for North Olympic Salmon Coalition. Since the sketch completion, I went ahead with this painting and, as you can see, things have changed here and there. I’ve placed it in the design mockup to see how things fit – saves time so later I don’t have to repaint objects that are covered by text or other photos. It’s sort of a dance between the art and the words.

And here’s the real scene. Not the same, for sure, but I like the way the painting has a sort of pastel and soft feeling about it.

For Olympic Peninsula locals, if you park your vehicle opposite the Snug Harbor Cafe and walk towards Discovery Bay, you can see all this restoration. While  you’re there, imagine this as it was, a rocky railroad grade complete with bridges, culverts and creosote pilings and you’ll get the idea how amazingly better this is now. Two panel installations will be along here.

And if you’re still with me, in 1973, I came to this area for the first time. Right here I found an old abandoned mill stuck out over the water. It was still together, mostly, and I inquired about renting it for a gallery space. On Hwy 101, Olympic NP nearby, seemed right. I eventually ended up in Ferndale, CA for awhile, but this could have been my home. Instead, I now live 15 minutes away in what has become one of the most interesting towns in America! I believe we envision our paths as we go, and I was right – even if the result was in the future.

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 stunning photography

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

Murals, Waysides, Wildlife

Snow Creek Restoration wayside panel sketch

Finishing the year properly with a local project. A LOCAL PROJECT! Hear that, he said joyfully with some paintings for Discovery Bay, just southwest of Port Townsend, WA.

Here’s the sketch for this first one. But first some background. For the past couple of years, heavy equipment and a bunch of people have been pulling creosote posts, removing a couple of bridges, rerouting a water line, hauling off tons of rocks and trying to put nature back together after more than a century of messing things up by us. The idea was to recreate a friendly environment for salmon, and it’s looking good optimistic.

This painting will be on a wayside panel at Snow Creek, the same creek that our nearby Chimacum Creek chum salmon came from 15 years ago in another restoration – and that makes this project even more personal for me. It shows the creek meandering down under the sheltering alders and out into the estuary.  Port Townsend is down the bay and around the corner. There was a trestle and railroad grade crossing just to the left that is now completely gone, allowing two creeks to find their historic channels again. Drawing this, a landscape in transition, has been challenging, so we’ll see what transpires as two wild creeks relocate themselves. Either the painting will remain realistic or it might become completely outdated – either way, the story is accurate.

Here’s what Snow Creek looks like at the moment, carrying silt to build new shorelines and generally get back to normal. I’ll post the painting for this one soon. Thanks, Dave and the folks at the North Olympic Salmon Coalition for the pleasure of learning more about and then painting my own neighborhood.

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 stunning photography

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

New Painting Post

My 48 North Story for December

I admit there’s something fun in driving up to the mailbox and getting a magazine with my own stuff in it. Such it’s been now for a bunch of years with this project. Richard at the magazine, now Joe who has moved into Richard’s desk, and I’m still at it. In this current series I think I’m up to about 5 years of stories:

Here’s the story that went with it:

Harbor Porpoises – Can we think of this smart, inquisitive marine mammal as the mermaid of the Salish Sea? I’d like to think so. Appropriately, harbor porpoises are about the size of a woman, 5 feet and 120 lbs. – the smallest of the six species of porpoises. This little beauty is probably the most common cetacean in the Salish Sea and Phocoena phocoena is only found here in the inland waters of the Northwest. They live among us as if they were our neighbors, and, I guess they are! Once common here, harbor porpoises almost disappeared in the 1970’s, probably because of gill nets that drowned them and polluted harbors. More northerly populations survived, and now they’re back – big time. I’d like to think that, for a change, it’s something good we’ve done.

So where do we see these guys? Harbor porpoises generally tend to be solitary foragers, so a fin may appear, then vanish for a bit, then resurface in a graceful and fluid up-and-down arc. If two fins appear, suspect a mom and young – they can have one offspring a year throughout a 15-20-year lifespan, being pregnant and lactating at the same time. Occasionally a group can ‘herd’ fish into position for a meal, but that’s not common. Look for color differences in body parts. The flippers, dorsal fin, tail and back are dark. The question might be asked why are harbor porpoises back? It appears their increases are more than what the locals could naturally produce themselves, and given that they are “harbor” mammals, not an offshore species, they must be coming in from the north. Whatever the reason, it’s good news for nature-watching sailors.

Larry Eifert paints and writes about wild places. His work is in many national parks across America – and at larryeifert.com.

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 stunning photography

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

Waysides, Wildlife

Orcas Island’s West Beach wayside panel

A little side project that’s hopefully coming in on the truck today.  The Straits Foundation just finished a project on Orcas Island in the San Juans that will help fish, a lot! West Beach Creek was blocked by two old culverts, so out they came and a giant culvert the size of Texas went in to make fish passage easier. In fact, I doubt the fish will even realized they’re in a culvert at all. A fairly amazing change and a real credit to the land owner for making this all  happen.

So, here I came with small budget but a speedy paint brush. These two illustrations are separate paintings, pieced together on the panel. I also did the design, collaborated on the text and handled the fabrication in aluminum.  Another little piece of art on a beach, which makes NINE of these around Puget Sound and the Strait in the past two years.

And here is the final installation. Thanks again Lisa and Carolyn at the Northwest Straits Foundation in Bellingham, WA for allowing me to push some paint again for you.

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 stunning photography

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

Murals, Waysides, Wildlife

Waterman Shoreline Uplands Painting

 

Click the image to enlarge it in your browser. It needs a big screen.

A new painting this week for Waterman Shoreline Preserve on Whidbey Island just east of Port Townsend. This is for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust, a bunch of truly nice people to paint for. It will be one of two large wayside panels that go beside this abandoned road – now a public trail – like a little art gallery in the forest. The painting shows the rich habitat of birds and berries that jumble up along here, a very compressed “edge zone.”

Nature is most abundant along edges like meadow/forest, roadsides/forest, shorelines/forest – so it’s a painting that hopefully expresses that.  I’ll have the finished design ready soon to share.

During my long painting career I’ve sure sold my share of art to private collectors. I still get about five emails a month asking for details about paintings I sold decades ago.  Now, it seems, I’m more passionate about hanging some art outside where visitors can get up close and personal with my stuff – but also learn a bit about where they’re standing. At heart, I’m really just a painter of nature in all its glorious details.

I’m a happy painter because of it! Thanks, Ida, for being patient on this one – and the next.

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 stunning photography

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

New Painting Post

Crater Lake Institute website – A Side Project

I’ve posted about Crater Lake Institute before, but we reached a sort-of milestone the past couple of months and I wanted to share. As a side project unrelated to painting, I build and maintain the website for Crater Lake Institute, a non-profit that helps Crater Lake National Park located in southern Oregon. This is a great bunch of guys who used to work for the park and now supply an amazing resource, the best single web-based library about the park – and I’ve supplied art, publication services and lots of work building out this website to the organization.

Winter at Headquarters, photo by Ranger Dave Grimes, March 16, 2016

This past three months, we’ve now reached web visitation levels worthy of mention. We’ve been averaging over 600,000 hits and over 80,000 individual visitors per month. That’s a LOT of eyeballs – at least I think so. This past year we’ve partnered with REI Trails, NPSHistory.com and others to broaden our connections and I’m fairly proud of what’s happening with all of it. Thanks, Ron and everyone else at CLI for involving me. It’s been great fun and I sure know a lot about this amazing park because of it.

Watchman Peak at Sunrise, March 17, 2016 by Ranger Dave Grimes

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 stunning photography

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

New Published Story

One of Virginia’s Best is Now on Kindle

This week I hit the publish button on Kindle and Virginia Eifert now has six of her books on Amazon’s Kindle. Land of the Snowshoe Hare is 326 pages and was first published in 1960. It’s a collection of stories about a single bit of forest and water in northern Wisconsin. The book watches a year pass as she discovers and follows the critters and plants that live there – a delightful read, I think, but then she’s mom.

As with all these Kindle reprints, I’ve added support material. I found  and added a research notebook she put together in 1950 when she first began her study of this beautiful place, and there are photos, a journal about what she saw and where she went. Yes, I’m in the journal, too, seeing my first rainbow at age three over a swampy marsh with loons and overhanging pines.

Who’s Virginia? She published 20 books for Dodd Mead in New York as well as hundreds of essays and smaller publications for the Illinois State Museum, Audubon, Nature magazine and others.

Next up? I’m thinking about her ‘Essays on Nature’ that was first published by the museum after her death in 1966. Stay tuned, it’s a great read as all of them are. She was an early environmental force and friends with the likes of Rachael Carson. It’s no surprise how I turned out!

If you’d like a free sample to read, click here for Land of the Snowshoe Hare.

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 stunning photography

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