All posts by Brush Man

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

Fin Whales – My 48 North Story this Month

Here’s my story in 48 North magazine this month, available far and wide. I’ve been told people even get this in the boat stores in Hawaii. This story is about what was undoubtedly the biggest living creature that’s ever come so close to our little meadow here in Port Townsend!

This is the text:

In early September, the Puget Sound Express whale-watching boat crew spied a rare fin whale off Whidbey Island, the first one spotted in the Salish Sea in decades. The Fin is the second largest mammal on the planet and named for its slender, fin-backed shape. I honestly didn’t know much about them, so I did some reading – and this is such an interesting creature that I wanted to share what I found. These whales are gigantic, for sure, and can become almost 90 feet long and can weigh 165,000 pounds. How big is this? A single fin whale could produce 660,000 whale burgers, or enough for every person in Seattle with leftovers. Don’t worry, I’d be willing to bet most of us would order something else.

Like other whales, this one was hunted (and still is), and it’s reported that between 1905 and 1976, 725,000 were slaughtered in the Southern Hemisphere alone. Fins, or finbacks have been described as the greyhound of the sea for their slender body that is “built like a racing yacht … which can surpass the speed of the fastest ocean steamship.” What caught my eye was the somewhat hidden description of the Fin’s eating style. Being a baleen whale, it filters small fish and crustaceans, shrimp and krill by simply opening its mouth wide, lunging forward and taking in whatever is in front of it – and then straining out what’s unnecessary (including about half the ocean). But it’s not just a dainty mouth! My drawings tell it all, and by this technique, a fin can consume about 4,000 pounds of food each day, probably explaining how it can grow so large in the first place.

And just to make a size comparison, here’s my little boat sailing along with its typical line-clutter everywhere (a quick boat has lots of strings attached). An adult fin whale would be 5 times longer than the boat and eat 6 times more than it weighs.

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 Show at Gallery 9 – Saturday Throughout October

Polks-Eifert-right
18 foot mural about Florida, right side.

On Saturday, there’s a little show of mine opening in Port Townsend at Gallery 9. Thought I’d just pass it around. This is possibly the first gallery show I’ve ever put up where the main attraction isn’t for sale! One wall – one painting, and we were worried it would even fit.

Polks-Eifert-left
Left side of the painting. 18 feet x 4 feet.

ABOUT THE PAINTING (from the press release)

Port Townsend painter Larry Eifert has painted large-scale nature murals for parks, refuges and nature centers for many years. This 18-foot x 4-foot painting was commissioned for the Polks Nature Discovery Center in central Florida, and is painted on synthetic and tree-free paper. This is the original painting and was completed in 2013. It has never before been seen locally, and intertwines four separate ecosystems of Florida’s pine forests and cypress swamps. When completed, the painting was digitized, then enlarged 200% to 32 feet x 8 feet and printed on Dacron for its final installation.

If you’re local, we hope to see you there.

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

Shoreside Art for Fort Townsend State Park – Healthy Shorelines

Fort-Townsend-Healthy-Bluffs
Click to enlarge.

Behind the scenes here in the studio I’ve been working on two outdoor wayside exhibits for my local park, Fort Townsend State Park. I was commissioned before for a painting for this lovely place several years ago, an old-growth forest mural that’s installed on the green near the campground.  This time it’s the beach area of the park where they’re removing tons of rock and shortening the landing to make it more ecologically healthy. A few months ago I received the award to create two outdoor panels that will be installed when the heavy equipment leaves.

This panel tells the story of why all those giant boulders are being removed, that healthy shorelines are created by eroding bluffs and not rock walls. Erosion brings fresh sand and gravel to the beaches – rock walls stagnate the process – and young salmon like overhanging branches and leaves. This may not be the final version of the text, but it’s close to finished. It’s a difficult subject to try to illustrate – erosion, beachside house without retaining walls, logs on the beach and all the critters: guillemots, herring, crabs, seastars, kingfishers and the rest.

Here’s the real location where the panel will be installed: most of these boulders are leaving.

C360_2015-04-25-16-20-29-004

I have an interesting history with this park. It was the place I camped when I first came to Port Townsend in 1973, over 40 years ago. I remember it as one of the best campgrounds I’d ever seen – and it still is. I also remember the showers were the very first I ever had to pay for – 10 cents a shower. I was outraged! The costs have changed, but that wonderful campground is still there – but now I live right behind the park.

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

A Mural For The Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge

Click all images to enlarge them. At 38 feet, you’ll need to.

So – a new project is underway. This is for a new visitor center at the Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge in northwestern Tennessee near the Mississippi River. I’ll post the progress in weeks to come, but wanted to at least pass around the sketches for comments – which always help me – even the bad ones. This one means a lot to me because I spent time here as a kid with Virginia on one of her research field trips ( but more about that later).

This installation will be 38 feet long and 8 feet tall, but I’m painting it half-size at about 19 feet by 4 feet – still a big painting. We’ll scan the painting, then it’ll be printed like wallpaper on Dacron. This means the art can be vandalized or the visitor center even burn down and they still have an installation. Since they’re self-ensured, the government is like that. Makes it easier for me to paint, but the brushes get fairly tiny.

Click to enlarge in your browser

Cypress swamps and waterlilies on the left side. This lake was created by a huge earthquake in the early 1800’s when the Mississippi River ran backwards and filled up this bottomland subsidence. Today it’s full of ducks and geese, turtles, fish and muskrats – just my idea of fun. And next, here’s the right side: all red oak forest in a seasonal flooding area. The fun part will be that they want a fall scene, so the cypress will be yellow, red oaks a flaming red/yellow. Add to that a good blue sky and it’s should be flashy – or at least that’s the plan.

Click to enlarge in your browser

Stay tuned, there’s more to come.

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.

Posts about other stuff

“Thriller” -My Little Sculpture Project

Click to enlarge

My life is brim-full of four things: Nancy, painting, hiking and sailing. The Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival begins tomorrow  and through the weekend, and we’ve been in it many times with various boats. With a fresh coast of Doris Day-green deck paint, a friend thought I should post something about my on-going sculpture project, the smallest sailboat I’ve ever owned called “Thriller”, a 1959 Lightning #7108. If you’re in the festival, drop by and say hi. We should be along the outside of one of the lineal docks.

If you’re not heard of this festival, Port Townsend’s population triples this weekend when 300 classic boats come to town. It’s quiet a scene, with workshops, races, music and food – and a Sunday Sail-by with hundreds of boats from canoes to giant schooners.

Click to enlarge

This boat: amazing construction above and beyond what most Lightnings look like, Thriller was built by the Livingston Boat Shop in Northport, Michigan for the grandson of Kroehler Furniture Corporation owner – a rich-kid’s boat. It’s 56 years old. Much of the restoration was done by the previous owner in the Bay Area, but I’ve finishing it off, made the rig better and the hull ‘bright’. Almost all the wood is original, including the mahogany seats. With a stainless centerboard now (the original would have been cast iron) and rigged for single-handed sailing, my three-season routine is to spend a joyful couple of hours in late afternoon on Port Townsend Bay, joining the guillemots, auklets and seals exploring the best place I’ve ever sailed.

See you at the Festival!

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

New Painting Post

Curving Around The Little Tarn

Click to enlarge.

A new painting today. Seems like each Fall I go into this frenzy of painting alpine images, of trails and water, mountains and meadows – of places I wish I still was. There will be more, I promise. I really like the solid feel this trail has, as if summer dust is inches deep. With a summer like the one we’ve had, I sure needed to include dust. Nancy and I went up a trail a couple of weeks ago that wasn’t the most pleasant – too hot, too much weight, maybe too old for too hot and heavy – but I’m not complaining. It was paradise for both of us.

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 framed, my price before it gets to the gallery. 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. I have other frames.
Email us for details.

This is one of those ‘little tarns’ in the Olympic Mountains. A favorite of mine, because you can see the purity of its evolution, how the snow pocket to the right might have been another of these, or one in the process of being born. The little lake has a life that’s entire directed by the little rock ledge that creates a nice little waterfall. Eventually, the falls will erode the rock, the lake will vanish into a meadow.

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 rather amazing photographs

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

New Published Story

Our Lassen Book Goes Into a Third Printing Today

Thought I leave the crop marks and color bars on so you can see the process. Click to enlarge.

Today a newly revised and up-to-date book of ours was delivered to Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California. This is our third reprint of their most popular book, and it was fun to work on it again. To tell the truth, I haven’t even looked at it for a few seasons and when I came back to work on it again, I thought it was pretty good. I think there are about 100 paintings of mine scattered throughout, and it’s a very colorful publication. First published in a 2007, Nancy and I spent some fun times here learning about the park.

Click to enlarge. This is the back cover.

It wasn’t the first time with us and Lassen, as I’ve painted a large visitor center mural, did some site guides (the sort you carry along with you as you hike around) and a bunch of other projects. It’s been a long and joyful ride with this place – where I first learned to cross-country ski on the icy park road sometime in the late 70’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, Posts about other stuff

Washington State Public Art Roster gets ME

Necedah National Wildlife Refuge paintings, images that eventually became 138 lineal feet of public art. I used this as an example of what I do. Necedah NWR is in Wisconsin.

Click this image to enlarge in your browser.

Every three years lots of Northwest artists apply to get on the Washington State Public Art Roster, a fairly small pre-approved group of professional artists that will be tapped to create perminent installations in new public buildings throughout Washington State. Libraries, schools and all other institutions that use the 1% of the cost of building for art use this list, AND, a couple of days ago I received a letter saying I’d been accepted and am now on the list.

This is a rare event for me. My life has been filled with entering art shows or competitions that are always won by crazy or fairly amateurish non-objective or abstract work, and almost never by competent and skilled people who have spent years diligently homing their discipline. It’s just that I’m from a generation that came from another generation that believed the very nature of being professional meant knowing how to do it better than most others. In my pitch to the Washington State Art Commission, I stressed this, saying that making public art that viewers spend lots of time looking at is important, that it’s what public art is all about – at least for me.

How far it’s come for me. A painting I did for Carol Armstrong, over 50 years ago. I think it still looks okay.

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.

Interpretive Art, Nature Art, New Published Story

Caspian Tern – My 48-North Story for August 2015

This month’s sketchbook and published story in 48 North magazine is about Caspian Terns. These few summer weeks are the only times I see these birds while I’m sailing about Port Townsend Bay. Actually, I almost always hear them first, then spot these big guys, and since I try to paint what I see, this was an easy choice for August.

Here’s the story:

This is a sound I hear often on quiet summer sails. Kaaaaarr – like a smoker attempting to clear a raspy throat. I instantly know that sound, and always turn and look up to find the hacker. Then, here it comes, flying fast and high, head down studying the water for a vague shape that indicates dinner. Seeing this, I know two things: it’s summer, and the Caspian Terns are back! I watch as the fast and effortless white bird glides past. Then, fish spotted, it goes into a corkscrew spiral, then into a dive and fully submerges – out the tern comes and quickly takes off with young salmon in mouth (unlike similarly sized gulls that are unable to truly dive).

Most Caspian Terns in Washington nest at the Columbia River estuary, and after family duties are over, both young and parents spread out to spend the summer fishing along the coast and into the Salish Sea. Their numbers are expanding, mainly due to dredged materials that offer new nesting islands, and since terns have a fondness for young salmon – well, you see the problem. Dredge the Columbia River estuary and suddenly you get more birds, the birds eat the salmon, we’re spending millions trying to save salmon. Some Caspian Terns in Washington are medium-distance migrants, wintering on the coast of California, while others travel greater distances, wintering as far south as Colombia and Venezuela. But between now and October when these elegant birds head south, I’ll enjoy them here very much indeed.

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

Direct link to the article

Larry

Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. 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.

New Published Story, Posts about other stuff

Crater Lake Institute – a side project

I’ve not posted anything about this small side project, but it’s far enough along for me to brag a bit. For the past year, I’ve been rebuilding the Crater Lake Institute’s web presence. Currently, it stands at 3588 pages and counting. That’s right, 3588 pages.

Who and what? Crater Lake Institute is a group that works to enhance Crater Lake National Park, Oregon in many ways. They’ve collected more historic stuff about this park than anyone, bought equipment for the nationally-recognized Ski Patrol, commissioned over a dozen murals of my art for many places around the West, hosted rim-side interpretive walks, created publications about the park no one else has even considered doing. The board (that I now am on) is a bunch of retired NPS folks, amazing in their knowledge of this beautiful place.

I was approached to rebuild a very aging and almost dead website – but little did I realize how massive this thing was. In fact, it’s the largest digital and free collection of Crater Lake material anywhere. Huge sections are here on what to do in the park, Geology, Natural History, Oral Histories, Art, Weather, a giant collection of historic photos, stories, newspaper accounts going back into the 1800’s. I’ve also added my art here and there, sprinkled it with magic dust and – Oh, I could go on!

Because of this, the never-tiring park-painter has learned more about Crater Lake than probably any park I’ve ever worked on. Just ask me about the hand grenade death in the 80’s, the secret trails few park people even know about, the inside scoop on more stuff than my little brain can handle. And the best part is that I’ve gotten to know founder and board president Ron Mastrogiuseppe, fondly known as M13, one of the most genuine and interesting park people I’ve come across.

CLI-home-page-2
More of the front page

Thanks for reading this week.

Spend a moment and look at the site – then tell me what you think. http://craterlakeinstitute.com
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.