All posts by Brush Man

With more art in America's National Parks than any other artist.
Commissioned paintings, Early Paintings, National Park Service, Waysides

Grove of Titans – Save the Redwoods League


The winding road of life sometimes loops back to the start. In the 1980’s, I was commissioned to paint a mural of Mill Creek in Redwood National Park near Crescent City, California. It was my first piece of public art for any national park, and it opened my eyes to what might be possible for my future. That project made me see the value in painting for a bigger cause than simply art for people’s walls. That idea has remained with me ever sense.

After that first effort, I was soon painting for other parks and some for The Save-the-Redwoods League in San Francisco, which, at that time, was the front line in trying to stop commercial logging of the last 2% of the Coastal Redwoods. That’s right, 2%! I painted a lot of redwoods in those years.

And now, some 40 years later, I was just asked to paint some more redwoods for Redwood National Park. When I did the first painting (seen at the bottom here), no one realized the importance of this area in the Mil Creek Valley of Jed Smith Redwoods State Park. Now we know it’s home to some of the tallest and biggest redwoods on the planet, the Grove of Titans. Save-the-Redwoods League has partnered with Redwood National Park to build a very impressive elevated boardwalk to save the shallow roots of the trees there, and these three new panels with my art will be on that boardwalk. It’s within a few hundred yards of the site of that first painting!

Here’s a reference photo of that grove, you can see similar elements in the big panel at the top. Thanks to the Save-the-Redwoods League for hiring me, and thanks to EDX Exhibits in Seattle for yet another chance to paint nature. Neither of these folks realized my history here, but I somehow got the job anyway! Thanks to Deborah at SRL and Beth and Michael at EDX. You guys are wonderful to work with.

Above is a photo of the Grove of Titans. You can see where I got the design for the larger forest panel.

And here’s the original painting of Mill Creek, a watercolor on a full sheet of mat board. I’ve certainly changed my style in 40 years.

And another painting from that same era of the Smith River that Mill Creek joins. I painted this for Six Rivers National Forest, my first Forest Service piece of art dated about the same time. It was painted for the Discovery Museum in Eureka, CA.

This was a very fun project for me, to go back to my park-roots and remember all these redwood paintings I did in some other life, hundreds of them – at that time, I was the struggling artist.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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.

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

Orcas Landing Waysides – San Juan Islands

This was the Orcas Landing in the San Juan Islands of Washington State a couple of years ago, cleaned up from when there were giant fuel tanks here. In the 1980’s I tied up at this dock, and did it again with another boat in the 1990’s. Now the tanks are gone, a new dock that’s not falling apart is there and, some of my art.

I received some photos of the final installation and it looks very good, so I thought I’d share it here. It took three years to get this figured out, but my part was just a small piece of it. If you’re waiting in line for the ferry, just walk down the ramp and enjoy the view.

I did two wayside panels here. One about the rich aquatic ecosystem right under the docks – a landscape few of us ever see.

And a panel about the tribal connections here.  For hundreds of years, the Tulalip tribe would use their canoes with a complicated cedar fiber net system to create an artificial reef to trap salmon. Reef fishing, it was called. Back in the 80’s, I saw some of this actually happening and I’ll bet I’m probably the only artist around that could paint reef fishing from memory. For the bottom part, I used artifact photos from the Burke Museum as references for the tools, and a photo of the planking of our own cedar-sided house as a background. I thought it worked pretty well to tell a complicated story. These two images enlarge if you click on them.

San Juan County removed the wooden decking, added seating and new metal and cement decking, a huge tribal mural painted on the nearby building and some really wonderful iron blacksmithing of bull kelp.

In my mind, this is exactly how public art should be approached. Not ‘art by committee’ where a group selects some strange design by low-bid, but working it out with a broad number of skilled individuals coming together to contribute what they each do best. Check out the seating and native plant garden. I’m proud to have been a part of this, and it sort of comes full-circle for me and my history here.

And here’s a story in the local paper on Orcas Island.

A new experience, three years in the making, awaits you at the ferry landing

This makes a grand total of 24 paintings now installed on Orcas Island as public art. I get around!

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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.

Backpacking, Hiking, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Wildlife

Back to the Beach

Some little paintings of my time there, inside that tent at sunset, and below, low tide watching sea otters herd the kids around the little bay. They’re simple paintings, but make good memories seeing them again here. 

I went back to a wilderness beach hike with my little Six Moon Designs tent and my paints. I had plenty of great nature to worship, including an amazing belly-up humpback whale and a Steller’s sealion, both washed up without much injury as far as I could tell. I’m telling you, it is thrilling to walk up to a 30-foot whale on a wilderness beach, a sort of primal experience I will remember for awhile. As I walked up to it, sounds seemed to become sort of diminished, as if I were walking into a quiet room. It was a long way from the water, as you can see in the photo – a minus tide put the waves very far away and the whale seemed oddly out of place.

Then this guy:Exactly above my tent in the top canopy of a Sitka spruce, this bald eagle started in at about 5:30 am, broadcasting its discontent at not seeing breakfast out in the ocean I guess – or, who knows what. Soon the ravens got involved – and it was all over for a sleep-in morning. The Starbucks was made early! Later, I watched this eagle spot a fish at least 300 yards out from where it sat on a treetop, taking a long glide off the branch and catch it! How could it see that far?

I just recently finished three large paintings for Redwood National Park through the Save-the-Redwoods League. In one, I painted the canopy fern mats that develop in ancient trees (not just redwoods) that come from centuries of needle litter building up on branches. These become pockets of leather ferns, huckleberrys and critters. The wandering salamander live generations in those mats, and marbled murrelets, an endangered sea bird, nest on them.

Walking out of the hike to the trailhead, I spotted this one on an ancient Sitka spruce, not far above my head. It had all the components, leather fern, black huckleberry and maybe some salamanders hidden away in the roots. It all seemed to tie together that my work is my play, my hiking is directly tied to my art. It’s just all one. A symbiosis, if you will, of cause and effect.  Symbiosis is interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association, typically to the advantage of both. Art and nature, I am who I am, therefore it seems I have to paint and write about it, hopefully to the benefit of nature.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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.

National Park Service, New Painting Post, People Paintings, Waysides

Lewis and Clark National Park – Installation

This is a long post, lots of photos, but I wanted to document this. In 2019, I was commissioned to do a series of paintings for the Dismal Nitch unit of Lewis and Clark National Park at the mouth of the Columbia River. Astoria is just across the river, the huge Megler Bridge is just to the west.  We were recently there and I took some photos of the installation, along with a big bronze sculpture that’s there as well.

This is the spot where the Corps of Discovery, fighting a stormy southerly with huge waves and rain, hunkered down for days. Aptly named, Dismal Nitch, it really is just that, a little nitch in the cliffs. Giant logs were banging together, they were almost out of food, soaked and cold. Their quest, the Pacific Ocean was almost in view, but here they were fighting for their lives.

This is an important place in America’s history, just before Lewis and Clark connected our country together, east and west, in early November of 1805.

Just prior to me in 2008, artists Gareth Curtiss and Bill Clearman installed this 6′ x 4′ bronze at the site, and I fell gratified to have my stuff in the same location. It’s a stunning bit of lost wax casting. My part of this was the design and illustrations of the wayside. Giving credit also to Rosene Creative from Georgia handled the top end of it, Faye Goolrick of Atlanta did the text and Eric Kittelberger from Cleveland did the final maps. It’s how these projects go, a nationwide effort.

To make this project even sweeter to me, in 1963, my mom published a book about Lewis and Clark and The Corp or Discovery for Dodd Mead in New York, 1962. It’s the story of the Corps and all the wildlife and botany they discovered – almost daily – on their three-year journey. And here I was, a half-century later, painting the same story.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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.

Backpacking, Backpacking, Hiking, New Painting Post

Boardwalk and Parkplace

There are trails, good, bad and even ugly, and then there are a few that quality as something more than just a trail. This one is just that, something considerably more. It’s not easy to hike, that boardwalk over the swampy stuff is something you have to pay attention to, and it goes on for miles. I’ve been there before, recently returned and realized I enjoyed it so much I just might go back again soon. I think it’s the variety, miles of old-growth Sitka spruce and red-cedar forest, more miles of wilderness beaches, a deep history lots of wildlife – it’s a package deal.

While there I did some art. Maybe that’s even tougher than hiking a split red-cedar boardwalk. Refining the essence of a place into a few quick pencil strokes isn’t the easiest process. It’s not what you draw, or paint, its what you DON’T paint. It’s just so easy to get clogged up, obsessed with all those tiny but glorious details – and there goes another hour, and another.

Here I am, painting the scene I’m sitting in – a selfie.

I hit it just right to see the northern spring migration of many. Terns, plovers, sandpipers, lots of ducks and ragged geese in lines, all coming up from the south at night, then pacing the beaches during the day to replenish energy. This bird, an American Golden Plover, was with his flock and destined for the far Alaskan Arctic to help raise a family. I had never seen this  spectacular bird in its spring breeding colors and realized how the mottled golden back might blend into these beaches perfectly, camo for safety against soaring eagles looking for a meal. They were stunning.

If you live on the Olympic Peninsula and hike like I do, you undoubtedly know this place. I’ll not name it here to protect what I can of what I consider the finest, most isolated wilderness stretch of Pacific Coast we have left in the lower 48. This was my camp, and not a single other person was in sight. That monster tree butt just past my Six Moon Lunar tent was meaningful. A tsunami would bring it right on top of me in the middle of the night and at least I wouldn’t have to worry if the zipper worked!

I want to thank Six Moon Designs, the fine ultralight gear company in the Portland area for helping with my equipment, and helping an older guy lighten his load. It makes it so I can continue with this passion, of making art and doing it out in the wilderness. I understand now that, if I’m lucky, I might be able to do this for years to come.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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.

People Paintings, Washington State Parks, Waysides, Wildlife

An Art Gallery Along the Trail

I may paint giant walls and entire park visitor center installations, but some of my favorite projects involve small and intimate encounters along a trail somewhere. Olmstead Place State Historic Park is near Ellensburg Washington just east of the Cascades and is an intact historic farm that clearly shows how tough if was to live here a century ago. Little trails, historic farm buildings, a historic garden and much more. It’s a small place, but in the past couple of years I’ve contributed quite a bit of art to telling its story. Laura Busby at the park recently sent me some installation photos, so I’m sharing them here.

Imagine, you’re walking along a pleasant riparian trail and you come across these:

It’s what I’m all about, I think. Helping people to stumble across an art installation in the woods and also learn a bit about this place, too. Perfect!

Here are most of the paintings as I last saw them, ready to be fabricated and installed.

This second set of panels are placed on the walking trail around the homestead. They’re slightly smaller and painted with watercolor and pencil.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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.

Published painting, Sailing, Wildlife

Humpback Whales

This art and the story at the bottom were published as my page in 48 North magazine a few months ago, December 2020. I just haven’t found time to publish it here, too.

I tend to put together real-life experiences with my art, and this was a perfect example. It means I get to experience something more than once. A few months before this, I was solo sailing out of the Port Townsend Boat Haven marina, got about 300 yards off shore and first heard it, like a giant woosh of a bus falling driving off a dock. Then a vivid smell of foul rotten fish, lots of it. I instantly knew what this was as we’d had the same experience when Nancy and I sailed in Mexico on another boat we owned for a time.

I turned in the cockpit, and an adult humpback breached again right in front of me on its way going down the waterfront. Let me say here that a humpback has flippers as long as my little 19′ Lightning, never mind the entire whale. Humpbacks, they weight about as much as 20 cars – me and my boat, about 1000lbs. But the whale had other things on its mind than me, and went on past with few seeing it, right down the waterfront full of tourists unaware that a viewing chance in a lifetime was only a few feet away.

Pre-sketches for the art. I was fixated with this humpback eye, a very human-like and soulful look. (I got this off the web, thankfully not in person.

Here’s the text for the story: Last month, a juvenile humpback whale was found on the beach at Marrowstone Island, probably hit by a freighter – so this is sort of a requiem to that whale, but also just to pay homage to a species that’s now returning to the Salish Sea after decades of being missing-in-action. After whaling was outlawed in the 1960’s, after there were only about 1000 humpbacks left along the entire West Coast, this critter has made a healthy comeback. Like the gray whale, these animals spend their summers in the north, then migrate south for the winter – and some are now stopping by the Salish Sea to visit us. They are interesting and smart creatures with complex social lives. They sing memorized songs, and the young quietly whisper these tunes as they’re learning them, possibly to avoid being heard by killer whales. They gather together to fish, blowing bubble clouds from beneath schools of small fish or krill to herd them together like a net – a net of bubbles.

These are big creatures, the size of a school bus and weighing up to 40 tons. That’s as much as 20 cars! It would take a 40’ boat slip to moor one adult. Their flippers can be 16 feet long, the longest arms of any creature and tails can be bigger yet. Interestingly, humpback’s heads are different than most whales, covered with round knobby-like structures. Each knob sports at least one stiff hair and it is thought this might be like a motion sensor, but no one really knows. With gray whales, minke and orcas here, the best way to i.d. a humpback isn’t the ‘hump’, which is not a hump at all but just the way they dive by arching their back, but the enormous flipper arm. If you see one of these whales, appreciate it for its amazing comeback from threat of extinction.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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, New Painting Post

Glacier Park sloppy mural details

I posted about this painting of Glacier National Park recently, and now I’ve scanned it for the next step in becoming the back of the park map. As I was scanning and then cleaning up the file in Photoshop, I was struck with how loose and abstract my stuff gets when you zoom in on it. Brush strokes, smudges, finger prints, cat hair, my hair (what’s left of it) is all in here, stuck down forever. I think it’s a good view of my painting process, so here are some samples I screen-grabbed as I went.

This first one is the ptarmigan chicks in the center foreground. Notice the while lines around the heads to help bring that out from the background. And the vague indication of the rocks that are only a few brush strokes building from dark to light.  Not detailed at all, none of it, but it still suffices to tell the story. Click on all these to see larger versions in your browser. It helps understand what I’m showing.

And here is the ram’s head on the painting’s right. In the closeup details on the second image, you can see it’s really just a gauzy overlay of white that makes for the final presentation, and you can see again that this entire animal was initially painted dark umber to begin with.

Lower left corner with the snowshoe hare and butterfly, it all works pretty well at this resolution, but blow it up so you can actually see the brush strokes and it’s pretty darned abstract.

And finally, the area around the elk, flowers and sedges, alpine landscape with the stream. It looks okay at this normal resolution.

But as I zoom in on it, the thing falls apart fairly quickly.

If I presented this in a gallery situation, would it work? Probably, because people will buy anything = witness the last presidency. But there’s not much fine detail here except some dabs and dashes of paint. What I’m trying to get across here is that big paintings are really just that, dabs and dashes. I get questions about my process and I’d have to say here that it’s all just dabbing and dashing, splashing paint on a flat surface and standing back every few minutes to see how it’s going. In the end, it’s a huge finished thing that looks okay, but every moment is just abstract art in each very tiny area – then repeat over and over.

What IS this, anyway? What an abstract or maybe even non-objective piece of art.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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, Sailing, Washington State Parks, Waysides, Wildlife

Sucia Island Marine Food Webs

There are 16 paintings here, all in layers!

This is my second effort for two wayside panels at Sucia Island in the San Juan Islands. See the other one here. This one is much more complex, many pieces of art all layered together to tell the story of forage fish, salmon and orca whales.

Here is the initial concept.

And here is the seventh version.

And below are the individual little paintings used to make this final composite.

Many Friends groups often use my final art for other uses. We put the art on posters, jigsaw puzzles, framed art they can use for fund-raising. Sorry to say, but obviously that can’t be the case with this one – but I thought the orca and salmon paintings were worthy of being stand-alone art.

I know lots of Northwest boaters read this blog since I also write a monthly page for 48 North, the Puget Sound boating magazine. Next time you’re anchored off Sucia Island, search out these two installations. They’ll be living their lives sitting beside Mud Bay. I will, too.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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, Sailing, Washington State Parks, Waysides, Wildlife

Sucia Island State Park wayside art

I’ve been busy with no time to post here – but now I’m back with some new stuff. I was commissioned to produce two outdoor free-standing installations on one of the most remote and remarkable islands in the Salish Sea, Sucia Island Marine State Park. This place holds great meaning and many memories for me – I’ve been here countless times. It’s along the US – Canadian boundary north of the San Juan Islands and it takes some time just to get there. There isn’t ferry service, only private boats come here – and maybe a giant barge for this project.

A small muddy bay once had a sand spit beach dividing off a productive and pristine salt marsh with the bay. Years ago, a road was built on the beach top and shoreline armoring with a culvert. This stopped salmon completely from entering the marsh at high tides, a good source of insect food.

With the direction of the Friends of the San Juans and many funders, they brought out heavy equipment on a barge and removed the culvert, cement armoring and put things right again. And, at the end, I got to paint it, twice. I’ll post the second panel soon.

Here’s the original first draft sketch – pretty close to what the end result was, don’t you think?  And below is the final sketch version with text in place and a few things added.

Below is the final art, ready to be put in the design. If this image looks serene, that’s the exact word I’d use for this ethereal place – maybe one of the very best in the Pacific Northwest.

So, doing this made  me remember the history I have here. Many paintings of mine were painted here. THREE boats of mine have been purchased, restored, countless hours spent making them run and be safe – and decades of time has been used to get me (as a painter of nature) to places like this. When Shannon and Tina requested a couple of boats in this painting to show human interaction here, I realized I could put my own experiences in the painting.

So, classic wooden boat memories, all of them, here is “October” in the 1980’s. Then “Rumpuckarori” in the 1990’s. And finally “Sea Witch” in the 2000’s.

This image of Sea Witch, below, was actually taken at anchor right here in Snoring Bay, straight out front in the painting. These three boats undoubtedly helped make me the painter and person I am today. “October” got me to Alaska the first time, and another not shown got me to Mexico. Nancy and I lived aboard “Rumpy” during some of the best times for both of us, and there Nancy is in the cockpit of “Sea Witch”, below.

Thanks to Tina and Shannon from the help in making these paintings interesting and fun memories for me.

If you’re reading this on social media, I, Larry Eifert, paints and sails the Pacific Northwest from Port Townsend. My large-scale murals can be seen in many national parks across America, and at larryeifert.com.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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.