All posts by Wilderness Walker

New Painting Post

Polk Mural Progress Report

Here’s the sketch. I blogged about this a month ago. This is for the Polks Nature Center in central Florida.

 Painting Day 1 on September 13th: 4′ x 12′ piece of Yupo paper is tacked to the wall, primed and shows progress at the end of the first day of painting.

 Painting Day 3 on September 23, and the basic structure is in place, but now the park folks want some major changes on the left side. Sigh, but now’s the time for big alterations, not when the details are in.

Painting Day 6, sandy areas appear on the left and the horizon is smoothed out. Areas of the background in the center and upper right are tested for color and value, shadows and light. Some critters are blocked in so I can check sizes.

Painting Day 10 September 28, and the thing is taking shape. More critters are defined, trees on the left are gone, trees added in the middle, water is defined better, center part of the painting now shows upper canopy and trunks of the pines in place and ground details are starting to appear.

All these photos should enlarge so you can see them better. This is not being painted on a daily basis while my life progresses in other ways, meaning there were four days out at the Hoh Rain Forest, time spent while I’m replacing 400 feet of new cedar decking, and now we’re off to Point Reyes National Seashore this next week for a field trip. Oh, and I did four presketches for paintings for a Portland project.

Again I want to thank Union Bank in Port Townsend for continuing to give me studio space for these larger projects. I’d be really cramped in my little studio here in the meadow for this one.

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

The Porpoises vs The Dolphins

Football! So, that said, this has NOTHING TO DO WITH FOOTBALL. Just a short weekly post about nature.

Here’s my page for October’s edition of 48 North magazine. Sailing off Port Townsend, I often see fins darting about. Not shark fins but more dolphin fins. I know they’re porpoises, but almost everyone else thinks they’re dolphins – so, here’s my bit of interpretive education using art. Nancy says I just can’t let a single person go by me without going into a full-blown classroom session. I admit it, I’m a hand-fed product of Virginia and Herman after-all; she: nature writer, lecturer and he: museum education cureator. The other day at 6,000 feet on top of Hurricane Hill, a couple of hikers were watching a hawk. “Don’t know what it is, maybe a falcon or something” the guy said to his wife. “Northern Harrier, female. Used to be called Marsh Hawk, but they renamed it” I said as I passed them by. He didn’t hear me, so I said it two more times before they both got it. “You just CAN’T let it go, can you?” whispered Nancy. Probably not!

So, click on the porpoises and you can more easily read the text. My parents would have approved! Sure as pigs have wings, it’s not likely you’ll see a dolphin in the Salish Sea.

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

Florida Gets an Eifert Mural

 

And we’re off again! This time it’s a complex habitat wall mural for the Polks Nature Discovery Center in central Florida – and this is going to be FUN. The top drawing is the right side of the 24′ mural, and I wanted to show this first because it’s my favorite part. The scene transcends from the swampy seasonal flatlands pond on the right (above) into the center pine flatwoods with saw palmento and finally, on the left into a sandhill  pines area. There’s a lot going on here, with very juicy stuff to paint like wood storks, alligators and spoonbills. There’s even an orange-red corn snake wrapped around the cypress.

Make sure you click on this bottom image so you can see the entire thing.  As  you can see, I still  have some details to work out in the sandy areas in the lower left, but we’ll get there. I began painting this a few days ago at my “downtown” studio in Union Bank where I have enough space. My little studio here won’t cut it. This will be quick; there are a bunch of other big projects waiting in line – and besides, this is the fun stuff of my life!

 

The colors, atmospheric qualities, horizon line – this is all a very different place from where I live. The Northwest  is a very deep place for colors, almost like it swallows color into a dark hole. The darks are verging on black but the light values are brilliant colors. In fact, I’ve often thought that the Olympics have the darkest forests I’ve ever painted and this creates huge value contrasts with other colors. This Florida painting is just the opposite. There, the atmosphere is so saturated with moisture is softens everything. The sky is pale, the edges of distant forests are almost blurred as they’re filtered through all that wet air. This is probably the most important thing I have to figure out in painting big landscapes: what makes a place look and feel the way it does.

 

I’ll be posting progress reports as I go along with this one.  Get the massage table ready – turn up the hot-tub. I’m ready! This gator’s smiling about it too.

 

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

The Politics of Art for Restoring Nature

I was happy and proud to donate some art recently to the Crag Law Center in Portland, Oregon for their newsletter – and here’s the result. You can see the entire newsletter here with more of my art. Crag  has a staff of legal professionals that work with local and regional groups to battle against those well-heeled corporations we all love to hate. They also help community groups organize themselves in a more professional  manner, and work to promote fiscally-responsible environmental conservation – plus a whole lot more. In other words, if you were a little bird in trouble like the murrelet, these are the guys you’d want to have on your side – and they are. As an artist who has spent my life painting and learning about nature, these types of donations are high on my priority list.

 

The pitch: If we have a new president in two months who represents not us and the nature we’re here to conserve and protect, you’re going to see a lot more of this as we all desperately battle yet-again against the forces of evil: better known as the Republicans. Why Americans continue to vote for people who are against the very citizens who vote for them in is completely beyond me, but they do. So, it will take all we have to hold on to the small gains we’ve had during the past four years. Gains? Heck, we’re not even back to what we had and where we were before the last guy drove the country into a ditch.

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

Sunlight on the River Bend

An easel painting is for this week’s blog. Lots of big projects winding up here, details, details. Lots to keep track of. Then we were in Portland for two days doing some research on a new set of commissions and it just seemed to smell like fall with a hint of coolness in the air in the mornings. So, this bright little painting seemed appropriate.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $140 unframed.
The gold frame makes it a total of $165 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.

New Painting Post

Historic Photo Exhibit for Port Angeles WA

Historic, maybe because it took over a year to get this installed on the Port Angeles, Washington waterfront! I’m not complaining at all – because for me it was fun and meaningful. I learned a lot.

So, with a bit of funding from Olympic National Park and guidance and direction from the Feiro Marine Life Center – text by Deborah Moriarty and Betsy Wharton, photos from a bunch of dead photographers plus two that are still alive, and this all came together nicely.

While the only thing I PAINTED was those two little black bands on the wall, I spent some considerable time in the Port Angeles Historical Society with my flatbed scanner. Most of the photos were very old and only 8″x10″ or less. Technology went to work when I clicked the button, and what seemed like hours later I had some pretty amazingly scans. While that was going on, I had the rest of the collection to myself – oh boy! One of the scans was 8 feet long, and most were more than 36″ on the long side, so, that’s when the work began for me. Back in my studio, I spent many hours (I should underline MANY) going back and forth across these old scratched up images removing hairs, cuts, thumbprints (whose we’ll never know), tears, frayed edges, bug squashes – and in the end I think the results looked like they were taken last week with the highest quality camera.

(Here’s a tourist immediately enthralled by the quality and detail of these old images.) After fretting over the text, Deb and Betsy refined it to a very high degree of quality – and that’s from me who does this stuff daily. This is good – and they should be proud!

Oh, but I didn’t tell you the photo’s story. The Elwha Dams have now been torn down on the biggest river on the Olympic Peninsula. These dams have been here almost a century and provided electricity that made Port Angeles a real city, lighting houses, stores and powering mills. But with the dams the salmon runs ended, and so now with the dams gone, the salmon are IMMEDIATELY coming back. Only a few months after the lower dam’s removal, King Salmon are already back above the old dam site. This wheel I’m holding is the same wheel that first turned the power ON almost a century ago, and just a few months ago turned it OFF.

As an artist and naturalist my entire life, I feel so honored to have been apart of this event, the largest dam removal in American history. I consider it part of my legacy. For the dams, park and salmon, I’m nothing but a guy with some skills, but for me – I was there!

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

A Loon’s Story

This is to be published in next month’s 48 North magazine for my monthly contribution. Sitting at a campground picnic table the other morning I was meandering through a field guide and ran across some pretty tasty facts about loons – so, I concocted a story about them, then a few sketches, and here’s my page ready to go. The topper was that while sailing the other day I saw a nice adult out in the bay. These things sometimes just come together in a nice way.

A Loon’s Story

 

Hair-raising, bloodcurdling, magical have been used to describe the loon’s call. Often heard at dusk or dawn echoing across wild mountain lakes, I think a loon’s cry is one of true wilderness.

 

This loon spent the summer with his mate on a big lake in British Columbia, helping to raise their family of two on the almost-floating nest of grasses they carefully built. Then on a fishing trip into the deep mountains, he had clumsily landed on a small forest-lined lake and found he couldn’t take off – there just wasn’t enough ‘runway’ for the ancient design of his solid-boned body. After two weeks, an early fall gale aided his departure but by then his family had headed southwest – and so he did too. Now on salt water in the Salish Sea he was content to fish, sometimes diving to 300’, deeper than any other bird.

 

The loon will be here in our Salish Sea from September to May, when he’ll again head back to his corner of that same lake, defend it against other males and hopefully find a receptive female that will begin the process again. While not sporting their elegant iridescent black and white summer colors, these goose-sized birds are still spectacular to see. Keep your eyes open for them.

 

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

Wildflower Heaven

 

The past four days: Nancy and I did something we’ve never done. In our hurry to hike every high-country trail, climb to every lookout, paint or photograph every park, we’ve never just walked out there and plopped ourselves in the meadows and spent days just soaking it up like we lived there. It’s always such a hurry with us we never get to just sit and smell the Sitka valerian (very sour). So, that’s what we did – just walked out there and sat down at about the 6000′ feet level – and I’d say it was nothing short of heaven. John Muir said go to the mountains and get their good tidings. We did!

 

There’s this high rocky road, some say the highest in Washington State, that goes off from Hurricane Ridge in the Olympics and in 10 miles or so traverses the most glorious alpine landscape I think I know of. We heard murmurrings that after a seriously big snow winter, this week was the best flower show – but that was a serious understatement. I took three flower books – figured out most but some just weren’t listed. You see, the eastern Olympics are a place unlike any other. Isolated from the rest of the continent like an island in the sky, you can see Olympics-only marmots, chipmunks, violets, hairbells and lots of others, only found here. Red, pink, orange and purple were the meadows. Some, like the photo below looked like snow. Nancy sat herself down next to a marmot family’s communal den system and got some great closeup shots of marmot pups testing their restling skills, and I just went off and found flowers I still have no idea what they’re called.

 Avalanche Lilies

What’s the definition of heaven in this life? I’d say it would be sitting in the middle of this field of avalanche lilies – but I’m just an artist, painter of wild places and still can’t get enough of it. You: go, go now. They’re still there.

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

Glacier Bay National Park Forest Trail

 

 Seems like this took forever, but when I’m painting it in Port Townsend, sending the files to West Virginia, getting approvals from Alaska – well, it just takes some time.

So, this was a bit of a challange. Without seeing the darned place, my task was to paint a place in Glacier Bay National Park. I thought that would have been easy. But then there were three of them, and the first (left side) was to show it as it was when the glacier was receding (at the fastest recorded pace) just a century ago. This thing shrank 65 miles back up the valley in less than a century! You can see it in the distance. Then the middle panel shows the plants – mosses, wildflowers and willows colonizing the barren gravel, ground is greening up, even the islands in Bartlett Cove are covered with young trees. Finally, the right painting shows what it looks like today – a young forest with deep moss and mature trees. I had some photos taken last winter in deep snow as the only reference, plus a couple of Google Earth images, buy my real references were an entire lifetime of boulder-hopping glacier rubble. This is Melanie, Chief of Interpretation last spring showing me the eratic-specimen. She’s now guiding tours in the Antarctic – lucky woman. If you look, you’ll see two glacial erratic boulders in each of the three paintings to show that it’s one place in three time periods.

 

 I know some of you will ask if I also did the map. I’ve done my share of these, but the real heavily lifting with design and map fell to Chad Beale at Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia. So that makes this somewhat of a collaboration with Harpers Ferry Center (2300 miles from me) and Glacier Bay National Park (2800 miles from him).

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

One Tree Moment for Ballard Nature Center

I still have the color to add on the five little insets, but I think this project of interpretive art is looking so good right now I wanted to share it.

It’s a very small world! I was asked by Genesis Graphics in Escanaba, Michigan if I’d be interested in doing some watercolor and ink paintings for the Ballard Nature Center in Effingham, Illinois. (So, if we did a conference call, that would be a 4000-mile round trip triangle for the words to be heard by everyone involved.) I’ve had a long and fine relationship with the folks at Genesis, and they always let me just do my thing without a bunch of hoops to jump through. My reply on this idea was, “Oh, I know where Effingham, Illinois is. My formative years were spent  just a few miles to the west in Springfield. I learned my stuff in the Illinois State Museum where I was spoon-fed nature and art by the staff and my parents.” This was relayed to the Ballard folks and it turns out two of my mom’s books are in their visitor center library. What a small world, and very soon they’ll have two generations of Eifert work there.

I know everyone likes to see the ‘behind the scenes’ stuff, so to show you how far this design was refined, here’s the concept sketch.

 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.