All posts by Brush Man

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

A Little Splash of Yellow

This past year has been one for us to lose some friends. And so,  to help us remember that life, nature, and friends are fleeting, I  present the little splash of yellow happiness. This Wilson’s Warble is the very one that has gave us joy this past summer. This little guy spent a lot of time around our pond and little waterfall feature, obviously gleaning insects, but also working on his almost-daily bath. He was a joy to watch – so here’s a little painting about the experience – and that IS what I do, experience nature and then try to show that meaningful time to others.



This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $149 framed. Outside edge of the frame is about 12″ x 15″.
This custom frame has a triple liner and glass. Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details of you’re interested.

SOLD

Thanks for reading this week, now get out and get some ‘nature’ yourself.
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.

New Painting Post

Bewicks Wren – Klamath Plum – a new painting

I have a small bit of time from larger projects and it has allowed me to get some smaller paintings put together. This format, about the size of a book, has always been a favorite of mine. It allows me to see the entire painting in one glance, amazingly different than a big mural – and here’s the first one – a Bewick’s Wren in some of our wild Klamath plum down the lane.  I’m offering it in this custom frame, but we have others if you’d like a change. Don’t hesitate; these don’t stay around long.

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $149 framed. Outside edge of the frame is about 12″ x 15″.
This custom frame has a triple liner and glass. Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

SOLD

Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. I’m trying to expand my list. An email will work.
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.

Murals

My Reelfoot Painting Is Almost Wrapped Up

These all enlarge with a click. This image represents 7 shots pieced together of my Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge painting – the image I just sent out for review. I’m still tightening up the critters, shadows and getting goof-ups off the paper, but we’re close. It’s been a fun process creating something from nothing – well, not ‘nothing’, but a white sheet of tree-free Yupo is almost nothing. I greatly appreciate both the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Tennessee and Malone Design in Georgia for allowing me pretty much free reign on this project. It’s been a great experience, as always, to create an entire place almost life-size. It’s not an exact place, of course, but a mix of all the best things about this wildlife refuge.

Being just east of the Mississippi, there is a lot of moisture in the air, so I tried to make it feel that way – heavily laden with humidity. This is a fall scene, cypress going brown, maples and oaks in full color and lots of leaves on the ground as winter is coming on. Did I get it?
Just so you know, those gray squares are where exterior objects will land, a big interpretive panel for the large rectangle, two railings along the bottom. The final installation will measure 36 feet x 8 feet, or almost 300 square feet.

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

New Painting Post

A Completely Different Look and Update for Virginia’s Website

Riverton-Camp-1929 at age 18 teaching at summer nature camp. She never finished high school, but went on to win national book awards.
Virginia Eifert’s new website is up now.

Many of you know that I was led into my life of nature and art by my parents, but especially my mom, Illinois author of 20 books and editor of a magazine that’s still going after more than 75 years.

Collecting mushrooms for dinner. While she wrote a book on mushrooms, she almost poisoned the entire family with a wrong identification.

I still get fan mail for her, one just a few weeks ago, but I never seem to have enough time to add more of her massive collection of work on her website. Recently however, I toggled my painting of that big mural with updating her web ‘look’ and added some new albums- and it just went live at Virginia Eifert.com

I  hope the look and feel of it is now better suited for use as a reference site, showing her life in some of the thousands of photos I still  have here. Much of her work, is, as it should be, stored at Western Illinois University and the Illinois State Museum, but I have lots of it to share, more personal exploits of her adventures instead of the professional stuff.

Viriginia’s books are also being recreated for Kindle and Nook, and the next should be ready for her 105th birthday this coming January, “Land of the Snowshoe Hare” which is one of her best.  I am also a product of Virginia in mind, body and soul. If I’ve been an artist for over 40  years, it’s because of Virginia, who fed me a complete diet of nature, art and science for the brief time she was here.

Publicity shot for the Illinois State Museum, who hired her at age 28 to create the museum magazine and series of books still in print today. She wrote 326 issues of the Living Museum until her death.

This from the website front page:

VIRGINIA EIFERT

AMERICAN AUTHOR AND ARTIST, PHOTOGRAPHER AND NATURALIST
1911 – 1966

A GIFTED NATURALIST WHO LEFT BEHIND A GREAT LEGACY OF WORK – VIRGINIA TOUCHED MANY LIVES IN MANY WAYS. 

MEMORIAL COLLECTIONS OF HER WORK ARE IN WESTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY AND THE ILLINOIS STATE MUSEUM.

THE PURPOSE OF THIS WEBSITE IS NOT TO SHOWCASE VIRGINIA’S KNOWN WORKS, HER MANY BOOKS AND THE FAME THAT STILL GARNERS FAN MAIL 50 YEARS AFTER HER DEATH, BUT TO SHOW HER PERSONAL LIFE, HER ROOTS OF HOW SHE ACHIEVED WHAT SHE DID.

Front Ridge of the Rockies, early 1960’s.

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

Murals

Reelfoot Refuge – Section Test

Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge, Tennessee

Still moving along with this 36-foot mural installation, painting during the holidays – and finally delivered a digitized section of the painting for a test. This section is almost 8 feet high x 5 feet wide and is fairly finished – I think. A couple more critters to add, some cypress upgrades, fix some of the cutgrass, but it’s basically there.

Below, you can see just where this section is on the full painting, right in the middle so I can make sure colors are proper going both ways. It’s a process I used to fret about, send out for costly 8″x 10″ transparencies and scanning, but now days we do it all here. It’s nice living with a photographer with some very good equipment, and, I’ve done this big stuff for so long, I sleep soundly.

Years ago, Nancy and I painted a 90 x 14-foot outside wall for Twentynine Palms California, then painted another one the same size. When we arrived for the second wall, they told us this complex and highly-detailed mural, scaffholding and scorching afternoon sun had its big unveiling scheduled just 17 days from then! Nancy whispered something to the effect that we were in very deep do-do. I didn’t sleep during most of it, but we finished in time for a nice hike in nearby Joshua Tree National Park – and now I don’t worry about it.

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

Murals

Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge – progress #6

Reelfoot-progress-6-fullweb

I’ve put fairly large images on the server, so please click these to see larger versions. Somehow cramming 36 feet into a couple of screen-inches just doesn’t cut it.

I pieced seven shots together to make these, and left the perspective in place so it’s just like what you’d see if you stood in front of it – just like I see this each day when I come to the studio, turn on the heat and lights and mix paint! I’m getting there, critters are now appearing, the foreground is settling in properly, birds flying in migrating flocks. Someone asked me what the empty space is on the left – it’s 24 sq feet of interpretive panel, something I just have to put up with sometimes. Someone also asked me if I enjoyed the challenge of figuring all this out. Yes, very much!

Reelfoot-progress-6-left Reelfoot-progress-6-right

Hope you like the way it’s coming along. I do (I think!).

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

New Published Story

My 48 North Magazine Story for the Month – A Dancing Gull

2015-11-Dancing-Gull

After watching a little song-and-dance on the beach, I wrote this for my monthly page in 48 North magazine. You can read it online at their website too.

Here’s the text for the story:

A recent beach walk showed us something we’d never seen. Meandering along a sandy stretch that had just a gentle bit of wave action, we joined a glaucous-winged gull (the most common gull in the Salish Sea) who was walking here too. It seemed to know exactly what it was doing – looking for something right where the little waves were breaking. Soon it stopped, turned to face the incoming water and started doing a little dance. Dabble, dabble, dabble it went for about 20 seconds, turning slightly but keeping it up. As each wave came in, the gull used the rushing water to prance ever deeper into the sand – and then it looked down – and began to grab the mole crabs and other small burrowing crustaceans it had forced to the surface in the wash zone.

Mole crabs like to bury themselves right at the tide line where food is abundant. They sense when the tide is receding and slowly follow it out, a few feet at a time. This young gull had learned the crab’s ritual and realized that just a little dance, up and down, left and right – and lunch would magically appear. We watched it long enough to realize that it was nothing but normal for this smart bird, and then wondered why all the other gulls didn’t do this too. Maybe it was evolution happening right before our eyes. Most of the time, watching nature isn’t seeing a giant whale surface or an eagle dive on a salmon, but it’s the small rewards of seeing daily lives of creatures that share our world that is normal – if you’ve smart enough to see them.

I took a couple of phone videos of this little guy dancing along at the surf line. Click to see one here on YouTube.  Sorry, it’s a bit shakey in the wind but you can still see the little guy dancing away while Nancy does commentary.

Thanks for reading this week. My big mural is coming along just fine. Next post I’ll show you how it’s going.
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 here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Murals

Stage Three on My Reelfoot Mural for Tennessee

Reelfoot-progress-3

 

Stage Three out of how many I’m not sure – maybe 10 or 20!

A little farther along the trail this week with my Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge painting. This thing is so long I’ve chopped it into two parts shown below – and all three enlarge in your browser for a better view. I’m still sort of working of all over the place, trying to figure out what their fall foliage would be like, yet trying not to overwhelm it with too much color.  It’s one thing to see it here, quite another to imagine it 38 feet long!

This week I learned about flooded corn stubble, how cypress browns in the fall, how the cypress ‘knees’ look when they grow – these are the cypress’ way to breath air when their trunks are underwater.Reelfoot-progress-3-left

 

It looks so different here on the screen than when compared with the giant thing taking shape from one end of my studio to the other. A couple of critters  have now appeared, but not in detail. Got to get those trees figured out first.Reelfoot-progress-3-right

More cowbell – we need more cowbell!

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

Murals, New Painting Post

Progress Report on Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge mural

Reelfoot-progress-2
All images click to open in your browser, and I hope you do. I put fairly large files up so you can see details.

Here is some progress on my 18 foot painting for Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge. The painting will be printed and installed at 38 feet x 8 feet. I’m getting there – still focused on setting the tone of the fall colors. The fall foliage-thing is something of a mystery, since it changes. In one way, it’s all correct at some point since leaves change a little at a time. But, too yellow, too brown, too red – who really knows?

entire-progress-2-left

Here’s the left side, cypress in the lake and swampy stuff in the foreground.

entire-progress-2-right

And there’s the right side going into seasonally-flooded hardwood forest, red oak, some cypress, some red maple – and then out into flooded corn fields that will be all stubble in fall with lots of ducks flying around.

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

Murals

My Reelfoot NWR Mural Begins to Come Together

Progress Report:

I blogged about the sketch for tho weeks ago, and now paint is flying.  The photo above is part is the far-left side that will be 8 feet tall –  but it’s still lacking details. I took this to make sure the colors (that change almost daily in fall) are what everyone wants. It’s getting there. If you stood next to this in the final installation, your head would be about at the bottom of the cypress branches.

Progress – seemingly to be painfully slow at this stage. I just stick to it and tend to paint all over the place to get a feeling of how it’ll all mesh together. A little here, a little there, then fill in the holes to connect it all. Installed, this thing  will be two adjoining walls with a corner for a total of 38 feet, but painting it is still just one inch at a time. I greatly enjoy making my brain stress to the max trying to make it all work. LNE-2Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge is in northwestern Tennessee, close to the Mississippi River and a place created when a huge earthquake formed a series of shallow lakes. Cypress and other bottomland forest species followed, making for a very picturesque place, especially in fall when the cypress needles turn yellow and red.

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