All posts by Brush Man

With more art in America's National Parks than any other artist.
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.

Murals, Wildlife

Progress on Cache River National Wildlife Refuge Mural

Just a progress report – a snapshot of how this current effort is going. Okay, I think. It needs to get much messier, more foliage, downed stuff, details in the critters, but it takes time to throw paint on 12 feet of mud, trees and leaves.

I’m finding this a very unusual ecosystem to paint, different than anything I’ve worked on before – and that’s saying something. Seasonal flooding in the Mississippi floodplain of Arkansas means a very difficult situation for plants to exist. Critters can just move with the water’s ups-and-downs, but plants are a different deal – they can’t leave. So, lots of water-tolerant trees and vines that can get above it all. One grape, for instance, can’t climb, so it’s starts life by grabbing onto a small shrubby tree and just waiting, going up with the tree as it grows towards the canopy. Crazy, because this is a closed-canopy forest so  how long might that plant wait to get there? Other vines climb like crazy and in the old days of old-growth, they must have been ancient thick things the size of my arm.

Here’s one of my references taken by Eric, my go-to guy for photos and the refuge dendrologist. Am I getting the colors close to right?

And finally, here’s my progress as it’ll look in this section of the visitor center. There is also some text on both sides and bottom, but this shows it’s overall placement so I can tell what’s going on. Stay tuned for more, more mud, brown water, muddy trees and all.

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

Cache River National Wildlife Refuge mural progress

This project is charging ahead in my studio and I realized I hadn’t posted anything about it. It’s a 151″-wide painting for the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas. Yes, I’ve been here. No, not for a long time. My mom did a project here many years ago about the ivory-billed woodpecker for Audubon magazine, the last place the birds was seen back in the 1950’s and the last place it was recently seen – I’d like to think maybe extinction isn’t as easy. This painting will show a seasonal stream partially flooding, low-land swampy forests of bald-cypress and tupelo, poison ivy and muscatel vines, snakes and spring warblers – and a bunch of critters that live here. It’ll also have some critters that DON’T live here, like woods bison, red wolves and maybe a bear. Two epochs in one painting, hummm!

Commissioned by Rosene Creative from Georgia who is doing the rest of the exhibits, I’m loving the chance to paint a forest amazingly different from the one I live in. Thanks to Eric at the refuge who’s been sending me a trove of photos I think I’m getting it.

And here’s the sketch. If you click on it, it’ll open in your browser.

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

Mount Rainier Carbon River painting complete

 

Click the image to see it larger in your browser.

Finished up my Carbon River painting and sent the final file for approval. I think it’s close. This is my second large painting for that amazing place, and I think it’s better than the first installed at Ohanapecosh. It sure is more complex. Things changed as it progressed, and I’m appreciative of the park folks, especially Kristyn, who trusted me enough to give the freedom to alter approved content.

And here’s Nancy on the trail where the painting was sited, an old cedar boardwalk through the skunk cabbage. The thing about Northwest rain forests – they’re really messy, I mean amazingly messy – and crowded. Nothing tidy lives here when you have a zillion plants all competing for space, branches laying all over, broken and decaying trees, shrubs, ferns, mushrooms and the rest.  I hope I got that feeling for crowded biomass! This painting will now be scanned and an entire exhibit, both digital and 2-dimensional will be built around it for the Carbon River Ranger Station. Come see it next summer.

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.