All posts by Wilderness Walker

New Painting Post

It’s Not a Seagull – It’s a Gull

You heard it here first!. Due to random and across the board federal cuts by Tea Party conservatives who were sent to Congress to shake things up and shut the country down, the word Seagull now no longer exists and has been shortened to the word ‘gull’, therefore saving three letters or 42% of the name. Read it and weep.

What a sad state of affairs, but I’m just saying I saw this coming, and, so, wrote and illustrated a story about this tragedy for my monthly 48-North magazine page. This seems to fit into the current scheme of America, of cutting things that didn’t need cutting just because they already existed. But you know how it goes these days. I read last week that the House of Representatives is conducting hearings to finally, I mean FINALLY determine if meteors exist or not, so this seagull-thing seems trivial when compared to that problem. Just to let you know, there was no solid decision on the meteor-thing.

One the other hand, it is Nancy’s birthday week and yesterday we went on a delightful 5-mile old-growth forest hike in 50+ degree weather and both felt joyful to be alive and healthy (I mean, let the gulls sort out their own issues). She wrote a really nice blog about photographing owls (backyard and otherwise) that you can see here.  (nancycherryeifert.com/wordpress)

This week: I finally have the Point Reyes mural finished and two more of Virginia’s book up, but the gulls were far more important – don’t you agree?

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.

New Painting Post

Closing In – Point Reyes National Seashore

I’m about 80% finished with my current painting for Point Reyes National Seashore. I blogged about the start two weeks ago, and now I’m closing in on completion. There are still many details that need tightening up, filling in, straightening out, smoothing over, brightened or softened, fixed, repainted, moved – but I still call that ‘closing in.’ You can see it’s not finished by the black holes, unpainted treetops, critters just blocked out.

The original painting is going in the Bear Valley Visitor Center at the park, northwest of San Francisco, but it’s also going to be used on their new park map. One entire side of it is the park map, I get the other side. I needed to see how it’s all going to fit that critical space, so Jane at Harper’s Ferry Center in West Virginia (the National Park Service’s interpretive center) popped my painting into the design. The red lines are fold lines.

And here’s that first post so you can see how it’s been developing. The painting is 48″ x 63″. I sort of hit it all over the place to develop a ‘feeling’, which is much different than getting it just ‘painted’. When I look at this progress photo today, I think it’s a bit of history – something no one will ever see again (because it’s painted over). We were at Point Reyes last October for the field research, and it was really flat, dried-up and burnt out colors of nature was getting ready for winter. But Point Reyes has a singular lush greenness that I find very rare and beautiful, and that I’ve brought into the distance. I can’t use the word “unique” because that would mean that no other place on the planet is like it, but let’s just say it’s a ‘singular’ place. It’s a very beautiful landscape to paint.

Thanks for reading this week. I have one more of Virginia’s books up, and a third is almost there. I’ll tell you about them next week unless another painting gets in the way.
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.

New Painting Post

Feather Dusters – A Worm’s Tale

This is my monthly page in 48 North magazine for February, 2013. You can browse the entire magazine online at the link.

So, we were at the Seattle Aquarium recently and Nancy was photographing the young sea otter, Sequi (she’s shot an entire sequence of the baby for over a year now). I was down in the tide pool room, poking around at the shrubbery in the open tanks – a real crowd of critters. I was reminded of some paintings I did for Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska last year. A ranger at the park, Chad Soiseth (hope I remembered how to spell your last name, Chad), sent me some reference shots of tube worms to paint from, and they were amazingly larger than the 4-6″ locals here in the Salish Sea. At the aquarium,  most people were looking at the star fish and anemones, but there I was, of course, sticking my finger in the tube worms. It just seemed to be a painting waiting to happen, and so it did. The sequence was: kids poking starfish, then poking anemones, but no one cares about these cool worms. So, maybe I should paint THOSE guys for my monthly page – and so it went.

I truly believe, and thanks to my family,  have always believed, that the job of an artist or writer is to not only to create good, competent and skillful work, but to push the viewer to a sense of wonder about something bigger, something larger than just the thing you made. Viewers should be taken to someplace that expands their world, not just ends at the viewing process. It’s not enough to just express myself on paper or canvas, but I try to figure out a way to make people say “wow, I never realized THAT, and maybe I should begin to care and wonder more than I do.”

And the subject doesn’t have to be physically ‘big’. Even a 6″ tube worm will do if the viewer has either never seen it before or seen it in quiet this way – or for that matter, even realized they didn’t care to even look. I sometimes reach too far in my complexity and forget most Americans are pretty clueless about nature, and so I have to reel myself in and go back to some basics. It would have been easy to paint and write about starfish, which everyone knows something about. But a feather duster tube worm?

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.

New Painting Post

Point Reyes National Seashore mural progress

I spent the week working away on this large painting for Point Reyes National Seashore near San Francisco. Back in October, I posted the field trip and concept here, and the final sketch here, and now I’m working on the final painting. This isn’t a huge one this time, 48″ x 63″, but it’s big enough that I had to move it to my downtown Port Townsend studio above Union Bank.

So you don’t have to go back into the old posts (unless you want the real details), here’s the concept sketch again.

You can see the basic idea is there but it’s sure refined into another thing completely.

This is a very fun painting for me, not only because Point Reyes is a singularly beautiful and rare place, but because I have work installed in many other parks in that San Francisco North Bay area – and this is just about my last non-Eifert-art location. Muir Woods (9), Sam Taylor State Park (36), Angel Island, Muir Beach, Muir Headlands, Golden Gate National Recreation Area and some others all have Eifertst for interpretive exhibits and installations, and it’s fun for me to imagine all those little art galleries in the woods and ocean overlooks. Sam Taylor State Park has two trails that have a dozen or so panels each, so a walk in the woods is like hiking through a little art exhibit.

It’s also a real honor to be commissioned, yet again, by my favorite bunch of people, the National Park Service. Best to work with, highest standards of excellence, working for a noble cause and I just plain love going to these amazing places over and over for decades. I hope it never ends.

Thanks for reading this week. I’ve now had this weekly blog going for over 250 posts – that’s a lot of art in over 5 years.
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.

New Painting Post

Larry’s Mom’s Books Now Back in Print

I feel extremely happy to say: Announcing, for the first time since the late-1960’s, this book is back in print and available on Amazon as a Kindle Book. Soon it will also be on Barnes and Noble as well as Itunes. 

Recent Back Story: I got an email from a relative who lives in Canada of the famous explorer Louis Jolliet. He had purchased all the old copies of my mom’s book about Jolliet he could find, and would I consider republishing it as an Kindle Edition? He, himself, was even willing to help do it, and produced the initial scans to kick-start me into action. That got me all excited and it now appears I’m doing the entire catalog of 20+ books, plus using my paintings for new covers for all except a couple of them that the likes of Thomas Hart Benton and others illustrated.

Who was Virginia? Here’s the original jacket back, now over 50 years old:


Virginia S. Eifert may have lived her entire life in Springfield,Illinois, but her passion was traveling and learning about North America’s natural and human history on a much broader scale. Born in 1911, she was ill through much of high school and never attained a high school diploma. Instead, she began journaling, learning nature on an intimate level, then developing a ‘nature news’ publication that she distributed around her neighborhood. At 17, she was asked to write a column in this same style for one of the largest newspapers in Illinois, and by the time she was 19 she was asked to create, write, illustrate and edit a monthly magazine for the Illinois State Museum. She continued with this effort for 326 issues until 1966 and her early tragic death at age 56. It seemed Virginia knew she had little time – and let none of it pass unproductively. At the museum she also published a series of natural history booklets and wrote for many nationally distributed nature magazines such as Audubon and Nature.

In 1954, she published her first major book for a New York publisher, Dodd Mead, and went on to write 19 more, winning several national awards in the process.

 

Oh, and while she was doing all this, she somehow found the time and health to have me, her side-kick for my first 18 years. http://virginia.larryeifert.com for more information. Her vivid use of a life inspires me even today.

 

Who was Louis Jolliet? This from the jacket bio:

“This vivid biography is of the great American woodsman and explorer, Louis Jolliet, is presented in the many aspects of his remarkable life, and skillfully told by the award-winning  Mid-western author, Virginia S. Eifert. Two memorial collections of Eifert’s work attest to the brilliance of her writing skills, and that is not lost in this book. It reads like a grand adventure, which in real life it certainly was. First published in 1961 and illustrated with maps of Jolliet’s world, it is now back in print here after the 50th anniversary of its first edition.”

 

You can see it here on Amazon. It’s quite a fun read, and seems like it’d be a great movie.

 Go to Amazon and buy this Kindle Book for only $9.99

 

(or there’s also a used paperback copy for $137.38 from an Amazon used bookstore!!)

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.

New Painting Post

24′-wide Digital Scan of My Portland Mural

 I wrote about this painting when it was about 80% completed on November 18th, 2012. Here’s the finished version, and now, thanks to Carl Beebe at ColorOne in Seattle (a very cool guy who’s been in his business as long as I’ve been in mine), the final scan is now finished and now ready to be printed and installed on the wall of the new Powell Butte Visitor Center in Portland, Oregon.

Short explanation: that sheared-off section on top is where the ceiling goes – and the brown box on the bottom is a 30″ tall cabinet. Chick on the picture and it should enlarge so you can see some details, such as downtown (a really challenging mess of buildings) and how the heck you go about painting suburbia from 16,000 feet, or 3 miles up. If you live in Portland, tell me if I got your street in the right place and your house color is correct.

And here it is in the building design plan. It covers one entire end of the place.

This is a fairly new way of creating wall murals. For decades I would go on location and work for weeks at painting it right on the wall. A lot of work, a lot of expense in travel time, room and board. Now, with the advent of really good color scanners and high-end digital printing, this has all changed. It allows me to paint these things in smaller sizes, like 50% of the final size so that it gets it down to a painting I don’t have to live on a ladder to create. I have a die-sublimation sample next to me here on a piece of polyester cloth that is a sample of one of these, and they tell me it can actually be tossed in the washing machine and slapped back on the wall. Amazing technology – and so many light-years from the old way of creating art that I sometimes wonder if I’ve lived too long. On the other hand, because I have these old-time painting skills, a little drawing ability and a high degree of computer skills, I seem to continue to get these amazing jobs.

Thanks for reading this week. And thanks everyone for keeping us going on a long and most-interesting path – and this one was sure that! Now it’s up to the amazing designers, Linda and Peter at SeaReach in Sheridan Oregon to finish it off.

Check out what Carl does at: coloroneinc.com. Linda and Peter are at seareach.com.

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. I now have some more giclee prints in the web store.

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

New Painting Post

Another Painting for Powell Butte, Portland Oregon

Big paintings: that seems to be my life these days. No complaints!

 

I posted another painting from this project a few weeks ago – a giant 24-foot wall mural of Portland from three miles up for a new visitor center in Portland, Oregon. This one is this week’s effort and is a 9-foot wide painting for an interpretive panel in the same visitor center atop Powell Butte (shown perched atop the butte on the right side of the painting). This is actually the bottom 2/3 of the panel, which I edited to show better in this post. It goes up another few feet. Great design by Linda Repplinger of SeaReach in Sheridan, Oregon, don’t you think? (click the images and they should enlarge)

This was a sort of history painting and it was fun to figure out. Notice that over the top of the dairy farm in the middle rises Mount St. Helens before it blew in 1981. Mt. Rainier is farther away and behind it to the right. Thanks, Linda, for pointing out that it would be the ‘old’ mountain and not the sheared off one of today.

 

Left side: Native Americans lived in the Portland area for thousands of years, burning the forests and creating lush open grassland forests that sustained their culture. It was a garden – but it also demanded a bunch of work to keep it that way.

 

Middle: white guys arrived and realized this really was a garden, kicked out the very people that made it that way and put in dairy farms, roads and railways. Mount St. Helens was many decades from blowing it’s top.

 

Right side: today, the old railroad is now a bike/hike path, the old volcanic butte is now hollowed out (I’m not kidding) and holds a soon-to-be-finished 100 million gallon underground water cisterns the size of TWO football stadiums and covered over with dirt with a new visitor center perched on top – and a couple of Eifert paintings installed in it as well.

Amazing!

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

I’m currently in the middle of another project, that of digitizing all 20+ books from my mom’s out-of-print catalog. Virginia Eifert will soon rise again on Amazon.com, so stay tuned. It’s getting wild around here.

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.

New Painting Post

The Amazing Giant Pacific Octopus

Click the illustration and it should enlarge in your browser so you can read it better.

This is my January 2013 sketchbook page in 48-North magazine. A diver in Seattle recently hauled one of these critters ashore and it caused a big uproar, mainly because it happened right at a seaside city park. There are two much-beloved octopi-adults in the Seattle Aquarium, and the fact this diver-guy took one home for dinner didn’t sit very well with always-nice and extremely liberal Seattle.

So, with that swirling around the local news, I thought I’d do a little illustration and essay about these critters that I THOUGHT I knew about. Little did I know! It was a pity I only had 200 words of text because the giant Pacific octopus is about the craziest animal I’ve ever read about – and that’s saying a lot because I’ve spent my life doing this stuff. To me, it’s enough that they only have two bones in their entire body, but their sex life appears to be the stuff of legends.

As if the essay and sketch page above isn’t interesting enough, like the 14-FOOT arm span or shark and clam dinners, there was even better stuff I had to leave out. Such as: during mating, the male releases a ‘sperm bag’ that’s 3 FEET long, which he then approaches the female with and using one of its 7-foot long arms gently inserts it into her. He gets to do this several times with multiple partners if he’s lucky, but basically that’s it for him – and he dies soon after. When the female gives birth to the 100,000 little octos, they’re all attached to a long ‘rope’ that she ‘hangs up’ in her den. She then fastidiously and constantly grooms this until the kids hatch, where upon she dies as well. Oh, and I could go on, but as my editor said, “I can hardly wait to see the illustration … or not!”

I’m telling you, I never get tired of learning about this stuff, but this time it left my mouth slightly slacked.

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.

New Painting Post

Paintings From Paradise

 

For the last few weeks, Nancy and I have been in San Jose and Cabo San Lucas, then a some nice days in San Diego visiting family on our way home. Of course I couldn’t let a good day at the beach go by, so I painted a few watercolors of those times with my little Prang travel kit. Above, there’s Nancy coming along the beach with Cabo’s  inner harbor right behind her. The last time we saw this place was in 2005 when we sailed Ave Maria, our 50-ketch (just the two of us – 38,000 lbs of boat – two tired sailors) into the harbor midway through a very good adventure (here’s the link to THAT story).

And here’s Nancy again going to where she is most comfortable, swimming in a tropical ocean. These are both “5 x 7” on Arches paper.  At one point on this one, I had an 8-yr old Mexican kid come by and watch me. Not a peep, not a change of expression, just cautious amazement – and then he went on  his way without a word. I like Mexico a lot!

 

And below is another one, more of a trip log, of that girl-I-share-life with, book in hand, shoes off in the sand and using a boulder for part of her towel.  This one is 7″x 7″. These paintings are such great ways to remember a trip. By seeing these paintings later, I’ll vividly remember each rock, the color of that golden sand, the frigate birds whirling overhead and maybe also recall the green Ridley sea turtles that we saw hatching out on the same beach just a few hundred yards to the left.

 

And here’s the amazing part. Good friends, and I mean GOOD friends invited us to share this cliff-top house right on the hill above Cabo overlooking the invisible line that marks the Pacific Ocean and Sea of Cortez. It was quite a place. Our bedroom was the room behind the chairs – really! But what the photo doesn’t show is that the edge of that pool drops straight down probably 3-400 feet to the ocean. REALLY! It was a thrill to swim up to that edge and look over, to look DOWN at the backs of the frigate birds and pelicans as they went by. I don’t ever remember sleeping in a room so far out on a cliff that had both the morning sun rising and evening sunset streaming into opposite windows. Besides this, the ceilings of most rooms had custom handmade arched parabolic brick ceilings that amplified the sound like we were all ‘miced up’, an obvious needed addition because the sound of the crashing waves below was sometimes deafening. There were times we thought we felt the place shake.

 

Thanks for reading this week. I’ll be back on my normal blogging schedule from now on. Thanks for the kindness from everyone this Solstice Season.
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.

New Painting Post

Low Water – High Contrast

I get a charge out of finding little back corners in nature, dark places that look as if they’ve been created from a painting, sort of reverse art. This was one of those places. North Fork of the Nooksack River, a wild and crazy place during a storm, but as the sun set here in late summer a few months ago, it was as soft and ‘painterly’ as they come. And in a few minutes the sun was gone, color was gone, light was gone and it was as if this scene never happened.

 

When I was growing up and probably like some of you, my parents read all those classic adventure novels to me each night. I fell asleep listening to tales about the Last of the Mohicans,  the black spot in Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer and Huck – all illustrated by my hero NC Wyeth. I remember I would always sit on the left side of the book so I could study the cover art when it tilted a bit. That was 60 years go and I still try to paint like that guy. Father of Andrew Wyeth, American painter of even bigger renown, he was a large man that left a huge legacy. Wyeth’s style featured deep shadows, moody warm ocher light that, at least to me, always looked like the canvas was glowing from within – like there was a light bulb behind it. And those shadows – well, let’s just say there were wild critters lurking in every one, even if you couldn’t see them. The colors in this painting come straight from NC’s pallet, and of the 8 or so colors I use (that’s about it, total – just call me cheap), all were his too. If you don’t know about NC, Google him and see where I came from – or at least where my pallet came from.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $160 unframed.
We have custom wood frames that would make it a total of $185 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.