All posts by Wilderness Walker

New Painting Post

Sea Lions – My 48-North article for May

Geez: I turned in my monthly offering for June and realized I hadn’t posted my story for May. 

The page should enlarge for easier reading if you click on it. This story is about one of the other big carnivore-predators around the Pacific Northwest (besides us) – and how these big guys keep getting in the way. It’s the good, the bad and some ugly all rolled into 225 words. The photo below was the inspiration and reference I used for the initial illustration. This is the “Big Red Can” that’s just offshore at Port Townsend’s Point Hudson harbor entrance. I’ve seen more sea lions on this thing than I can count. I was sailing out there a couple of days ago and a very large male was ‘laying out’ on the top, just like my little watercolor shows. As I sailed past, he didn’t even wake up. I could almost hear him snoring – 1000 lbs of snoring. Check out the entire magazine online at: 48 North, I’m on page 33.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

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

New Painting Post

Theodore Roosevelt NP finally gets an Eifert

Now I ask you: how many artists can say they have public art on display in North Dakota?

 

 

I keep painting away at this – and sooner or later I hope to have some bit of my work in most every Western national park. Theodore Roosevelt National Park is in North Dakota, a fairly remote landscape of over 100 square miles in size and it’s just the sort of beautiful and relatively pristine place I love to paint. But because it IS remote, it’s not so well funded and commissioning an Eifert mural isn’t easy. So, it was nice to get a request from them to use some existing work, a large visitor center mural I did for Badlands National Park in South Dakota. The image seems to fit nicely for what they had in mind, and really could be North Dakota, and so this exhibit panel will be installed in the park this summer.

I’m always asked how the heck I got into the somewhat rarefied line of art, and so here it is in as few words as I can make it. 50 years ago I asked my mom the same thing. Who does someone publish 20 books and write a magazine for over 300 issues? When I was young, it simply all seemed overwhelming. Since my family made it abundantly clear that I was to be an artist, and an artist of nature, I had to figure out what to paint and how to sell it. I gravitated to national parks and wilderness areas simply because I thought, and still do, that these are by far the best places in America – the best of what’s left. I backpacked, climbed, sailed (to Alaska and Mexico), and through it all I painted what I saw. Then someone asked me why I painted and left? Why not keep the paintings where they were created and belonged, in the parks they were painted in? So, I did. And, so, decades later there are Eiferts in a whole BUNCH of parks, from Alaska to Florida, the Mojave Desert to Wisconsin, Mount Rainier to Yosemite. I get it now. It’s not an issue of creating a huge body of work, but creating them one at a time. One at a time. As Henri said: “It takes 1000 paintings to become a painter. So get to work.”

And I’m not going to stop until I drop dead!

 

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

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

New Painting Post

Meadow Fawns

Another of my recent “Meadow Herd”, this one was painted from a reference photo from a year ago – but both are still here. This week we’ve seen several females vanish from the backyard-bunch. I’m thinking they’ve found a quiet place to birth the next batch of fawns, and hopefully we’ll see the results soon. One was looking like a definite candidate for twins. The two in the painting are still in the meadow, grown but not willing to take on the big guys for space at the food dish. In fact, there’s a big buck with infant antlers that actively chases them away, snapping like a dog at their hind legs. Yesterday, another buck with budding antlers was eating from the dish while I held it, and that was maybe too close for my comfort zone. A big animal, and I kept remembering a story from Yosemite a few years ago where a buck actually killed someone. While they’re fun to have around, they ARE wild animals.

 

And here’s one of the twins a year later, taken just yesterday. Just growing out of its winter coat, he’s looking a tad shabby. Yes, that’s a backyard swing. It hangs on a big horizontal branch of a big-leaf maple that’s 30-feet up. Quite a swing-g-g-g-g-g.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $140 unframed.
A custom wood frame makes it a total of $170 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print. I can email you a photo of the frame if you’d like.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

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

New Painting Post

Point Wilson Commissioned Painting

(click the image and it’ll enlarge in our browser.)

Yes, I still occasionally still do commissions – if they’re fun and challenging., I’m most interesting in a life that’s stuck out there a bit, so I still look for challenges. One doesn’t have a past like mine, of climbing mountains and sailing to the Sea of Cortez and Alaska, of trying to make a living from my paintings and all the rest without realizing there should ALWAYS be challenges – and the bigger the better. We were talking with an old friend the other day: “what are you doing” “As little as possible” was her response. I mean, what the heck sort of life is THAT? If I EVER say that, just shoot me (metaphorically-speaking, since I don’t believe in guns).

So, I was approached by a very nice woman who’s a ‘lifer’ here in Port Townsend. She lives right in town in the same house she and her husband bought in the 1950’s! Many afternoons she heads for Point Wilson Lighthouse nearby for her exercise – goes down the beach in her blue sweats, around the light and up the hill. She showed me photos that her husband took many decades ago of the cypress trees on that hill, and, so, would I be interested in painting something that she could look at on days she doesn’t walk. Point Wilson, Mount Baker, Mount Shuksan, and maybe ME sailing in Sea Witch. I couldn’t resist.

Here’s my reference photo, five photos crammed together to help me figure it out. The mountains weren’t ‘out’ that day, but I had other references for that part. For the many that read my blog but aren’t Northwesterners, this spot is at the north end of Port Townsend in Fort Worden State Park. It’s where the waters of the Straits of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound converge – and has a mile-long sand beach on one side, a rocky cliff beach on the other. I’ve painted many images here. 24″ x 48″ acrylic on canvas.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

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

New Painting Post

River World – a new book by Virginia Eifert

“River World” was first published in 1959, and was called “an ambitious book – and – a thrilling kaleidoscope of nature.” I agree! This is the fourth of my mom’s 20+ books that I’ve scanned and is now available on Amazon Kindle (and soon to be on Barnes and Noble and Itunes as well). It took me awhile for this one, simply because I had so much fun reading it. I think Nancy got a bit tired of me saying things like “wow, listen to this! A possum sky!” It’s a book about the Mississippi River, written as if there were no people living along it – a pure nature book, and I could easily see she really relished writing this one. There’s a joy there that’s infectious. All chapter headings are Virginia’s ink drawings, too, and there’s a freshness in them that I think is very nice.

 

Here’s a sample I especially liked:  “I stand on the river shore with white cliffs behind me—the haze bridging the far distances across the Dardennes marshes of Missouri and up and down the river for endless miles—and I try to discover what creates this mystic, hushed atmosphere of the willow-goldened river. But the spell of autumn makes even such slight mental effort quite unnecessary. It is enough to live and feel the magic of the river.”

 

“For now the river world knows a breathless, timeless moment, a windless waiting for winter, until the violent breath of a north wind finally sweeps away these last remnants of Indian summer, sending willow leaves sailing away on the surging brown water. But today even the river seems slow, a smooth and shining lake with no visible current; the willows are very still, each leaf poised in a transient permanence against the sky.”

 


AND: SOUTH TO THE SEA

Most of Virginia’s personal notebooks and manuscripts are now in Western Illinois University or the Illinois State Museum, but in my own collection I found a binder that I had never read. It’s the basis for “River World”, I think, and so I scanned the pages and photos, and added this as a 56-page bonus. It’s quite amazing to read. In April of 1956, Virginia somehow talked her way aboard a towboat transporting over 2,000,000 gallons of gasoline (see photo below) and traveled 2100 miles down and back on the Mississippi. 17 days of living on a 1000-foot-long gas-bomb – and they allowed her to do it! The binder is filled with the nature she saw, food she ate,  people she met, life aboard this boat with engines the size of buses. There’s a tour of a giant oil refinery down in the Gulf, and at one point the tow looses steerage and plows into a willow bank, dropping tons of dirt and plants on the deck (a sample of which was still taped in the binder). It’s quite some story in its self, and I’m thinking of published just this part as a separate book.

 

The Cape Zephyr – a real Mississippi working boat that women just didn’t travel on.

 

And so many thanks to all of you who have already bought some of Virginia’s other books. River World is now available at Amazon.com here. Or just search for book # ASIN: B00CBM5TQA

Email us if you want to know more. The is my legacy, and I see more and more of my own journey through these books. They’re like mirrors – she did the Mississippi, I did Alaska and Mexico.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

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

New Painting Post

Old Buck

“Old Buck” is the fourth of my “Meadow Herd” paintings. This old guy has been here the longest of all our current dozen Columbian black-tailed deer. In fact, as I write this he’s here right below the back deck. This was painted from a reference photo I took last summer when he had his  horn-hat on, since currently there are only little knobs showing where this year’s antlers will be. I took the photo when he was all excited about a female prospect (who denied him and ran off into the forest seeming either laughing or in a panic to get away, or so it seemed) and I thought he had this look of pure softness, like he was pleading with her for acceptance. I’ve practiced this pose myself, by the way, but rarely need to resort to it!

These deer, Columbian black-tailed, are a subspecies of the more common western mule deer, and are smaller by far – but you’d never know it standing next to one. When a male puts his mule-shaped Roman nose out, he becomes a fairly daunting creature. That ‘look’ doesn’t happen until they’re a couple of years old, and when it does you can really see the genetic closeness to the ‘mulies’.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $120 unframed.

The custom wood frame makes it a total of $140 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

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

New Painting Post

More Paintings of Our Black-tails

Last week I posted a painting of one of our backyard Columbian Black-tailed Deer. Remember: Apple Please? This week I’m showing two more. (Sorry, but the little fawn above was taken quickly and isn’t available.)  A year ago we had two does that birthed three fawns. There was another mom that showed up occasionally with twins too, and one afternoon they were all here at once: three moms with FIVE fawns! It was crowded, but everyone seemed to get along Okay – but what do we know. The more I watch them, the more I see the social life of these guys seems very complex.

 

This painting is of the dominant doe that’s been here for years – the mother of the fawn above.  She has this look! See the way she just pierces you with that blank stare? She’s checks out the house, circles around it to find out where we are – which room we’re in, then comes right up to one of our big windows where she gives us the ‘stink eye’ for a handout. No movement, no blinking, no acting coy or cute, she just stares until you give in. Cats do this, we know (boy, do we know), but a 160 lb deer doing it is something else again. And Nancy gives in pretty quickly: “okay, okay, meet me at the back door” and it’s as if the deer understands completely. Back door it is!

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.

I have a nice gold frame on it for an upcoming  gallery show, which makes it a total of $160 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you want to take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

 

Thanks to everyone who have been buying my new Virginia Eifert Kindle books. Amazon doesn’t give me a list of buyers, but lots of people are rediscovering her work – including me. Three up, seventeen to go.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

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

New Painting Post

An Apple Please!

“Meadow Herd #2 – Second-year Buck”
8″ x 10″ acrylic on canvas. 

I’m currently working on a painting series of our “Meadow Herd” of 12 Columbian black-tailed deer – that’s right – 12! This one is of the sweet but persistent velvet-antlered buck that was birthed two years ago. He’s still here, along with a total of 11 others that seem to never stray far from the house. The other morning 9 were in the meadow at once. When we moved into the ‘Lodge’ back in the 90’s, hunting was still allowed in the ‘neighborhood’. The deer were here, too, but always moving, passing through, edgy. Early mornings, we’d sometimes hear gunshots down in the estuary and figure it was probably out-of-work ex-logger-types in a desperate situation and in need of protein for their families. Now there are no shooting zones here and in Port Townsend, and the deer are everywhere, calm, friendly, stopping traffic, creating gawking tourists who, at first, think they are mechanical yard ornaments (well, maybe they are).
Oh, and then there’s Nancy, happily feeding them apples, pears, buckets of oats mixed with molasses – right out the back door of the barn! The local feed store-guy told her that he sells dozens of 40 lb bags of the stuff each WEEK  to Port Townsend deer-feeders, and she’s one of them. What, you say? You’re FEEDING them? But she doesn’t see any difference between the chickadee feeder and a deer bowl – and I get models for paintings. (The photo below was taken a couple of days ago from the office window.)

 

It takes patience to live with wildlife on the Olympic Peninsula. We sometimes forget that this isn’t just a normal American suburban place – we forget that wildlife is more plentiful here than people. I mean, there are only 9,000 people living in Port Townsend – but there are over 5,000 elk on the peninsula.

 

We have bats in the shingles (I washed the roof and 7 flew off of just one pitch) and we hear them come and go each night. Squirrels continually prob any weak spot to get into the attic or crawlspace. I’ve counted almost 90 different species of birds and critters either on the ground or flying over the property. If you count the deer, snakes, chipmunks, weasels, bobcats, raccoon and the rest, I’m sure I see many more critters than people in my daily life – and for a life-long painter of nature, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Sure the roses get eaten, the bulbs are chewed on, the flowers chomped down to nubs, but we also have 200-lb. deer going nose-to-nose with our freaked-out cat on the inside of the window. It takes Nancy’s breath away when a full-blown bucks just stands there as she brings him a bucket of oats – as he snorts at her from 24″ away. It’s a very high Quality-of-Life thing that I can’t imagine NOT having.

And so, this ORIGINAL painting of “Meadow Herd #2 – Second-year Buck” is an acrylic on canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $125 unframed. The custom wood frame makes it a total of $145 and shipping for either adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print. And I’ll bet that one of you starts a collection of these – especially if you’re from Port Townsend. I have four finished with a fifth almost there.
Email us for details – and I can send you a photo of the frame.

 

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. We now have three of her books available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

James Pond Waterlilies

 

 James Pond Waterlilies

 24″ x 48″ acrylic painting on  hardboard.
(I put a 16″ image on the web, so click the painting and you’ll see it enlarged.)

This is one of those places that makes me happy to be alive – it gives me a sense of what I love about painting nature – the wonder of it all. From Mora Campground beside the famous Hoh River in Olympic National Park and about a mile from Rialto Beach, there’s a little trail going into the woods – and a small sign saying so – I’d seen in many times. I hiked it at 6:00 in the morning not knowing where it went – just started walking with hopes of maybe seeing some elk. It’s a loop trail, and half way along a spur goes off into the huckleberry thickets, and then right out onto a mossy log into this amazing and ethereal place. Obviously it was an ancient oxbow bend of the Hoh that was long ago cut off and evolved into a lily pond, but it just seemed like a staged set. The morning mist was just clearing, cool shadows still prevailed, but deepening color values (by the minute) foretold a bright day ahead. I sat here a long time, watching early morning dragonflies hawking for mosquitoes – watched a kingfisher dive for breakfast.

This was the view from the log.

And when I brought Nancy back an hour later, all was flat and sunny-day values – nice but nothing like the pastel and thick atmosphere I saw earlier. How far this little pond goes in either direction I don’t know, but I don’t think any other trails hit this quiet backwater.

This painting is offered for sale as of today. Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

Click here for Virginia Eifert’s website and see where all this started for me.

New Painting Post

Another book from Larry Eifert’s Mom – “Journeys in Green Places”

I have two more of Virginia Eifert’s books available on Amazon.com now, plus the author page at Amazon and on her own website. Sure takes some time to proof these books carefully – I’m hoping that I hear from you if there are any errors.

Journeys In Green Places was first published in 1963 and is illustrated with 40 photographs and 78 drawings and maps by Virginia. It’s nature writing at its best by one of the Midwest’s finest! Set in the Door Peninsula of Wisconsin—that narrow, tapering, ninety miles long finger of rock, sand and forest thrusting northward between Lake Michigan and Green Bay. Here are rugged bluffs, dunes, ridges, beaches, woods, and cherry orchards. It is a magical area for the naturalist, then and now, varied and unique, particularly in the Ridges sanctuary where the splendid wildflowers have drawn botanists from many parts of the world. The book is a vivid and passionate exploration of a beautiful landscape that was still entrusted to some of the original homesteaders and fishermen in the 60’s – and before tourists found this singular place.

I’ve added a lot of other stuff to the book, including some photos; above at the Clearing in the late 1950’s, and below she’s lecturing to a packed class (as usual). There’s a large section with a published diary of her first Clearing week (it’s an adult school in the woods on the peninsula) that shows a direct spark of creativity that finished a few years later in the Journeys book itself.

Yes, that’s me with the deer!

And on page 112 in the photo section of the original book, there’s a photo of me and a yearling white-tail. The caption reads: “Larry and the fawn, like the natural world around them, are prepared for winter and its challenges”. And here I am exactly 50 years later doing the same darned things – including pitching her books.

When I was a little older than the photo with the deer, I began to go with her when she gave Audubon programs, lectures or book signings. She’s sign – I’d handle the cash box. Checks and cash was all I did back then, but I’m sure it sunk in that this was a pretty fun way to make a living. She eventually traveled 6000 miles on river boats – mostly working tows and barges, poked around in muskeg bogs, hired guys to take her to Canadian bird rookeries and taught me to do the same.

You can see more – or buy Journeys in Green Places at Amazon by clicking here. And see her new author page  here. And see her website (not completely finished but it’s getting close) here at virginia.larryeifert.com. (There are currently almost 100 copies of Virginia’s books for sale on Amazon – 50 years after they’re out of print. Not a bad legacy for someone who has been gone since 1966.)

[AND, no, you don’t have to have a Kindle to read these, just an Amazon account to get it on your PC or Smartphone. Reading on your phone is pretty nice since you always have it.]

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.