All posts by Wilderness Walker

New Painting Post

Port Angeles and the Elwha River Wall

 

Not that I’m complaining, but just when IS summer play time? Well, not right now.

I’ve been working on three sizable projects at once. This one is my current midnight-panic-attack. It’s not my usual painterly-project, but interesting as always and I’ll be posting progress in the next few weeks (on the project, not my nighttime worries that it won’t be finished in time).

So… if you’ve read these posts over the past year, you’ll know I’ve created a bunch of art and interpretive panels for the Feiro Marine Life Center in Port Angeles, WA. This is the next phase of that, an outside 39-foot wall collage near the other installation. Opening date is September 17th when all sort of luminaries come to town for the kick-off of the Elwha Dam removal project, the nation’s largest dam removal and river restoration so far. I’ve been involved with this unfolding event in many ways over the past few years, and it’s exciting stuff for both Nancy and I. The very fact that they’re using art to interpret this visionary project is very forward-thinking.

My job this time is to create a dozen panels that tell the story of how the dams changed the region over the past century – and specially the town of Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula. Betsy and Deb are providing the fabulous text like they did on the other installations, while I’m doing the signage, computer design and handling the fabrication and installation. Like a giant jigsaw puzzle, this all has to fit together somehow. For once it’s not a mural or original art, but I’m learning lots about the region’s history at at the Clallam County Historical Society. I grew up watching my mom research history this same way, except that now I have a laptop and flatbed scanner. Times have changed.

I’ll post more as this gets closer and the details are filled in, but for now the photo shows where we are – in mockup stage.

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 New Puzzle Release – Elk Prairie

Elk Prairie Puzzle

Nancy and I are proud to announce a new puzzle – Elk Prairie, a 18″ x 24″ 500-piece jigsaw puzzle like our many others (almost 50 now). This one took awhile to produce, but we think it’s one of the best we’ve printed in years. It features the increasingly rare pocket prairie habitat of old-growth forests that are found from Northern California to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. This is home to Roosevelt elk, pileated woodpeckers, bears, bobcats and coyotes. Closer in the foreground, you’ll find snakes, toads, lizards and other plants and animals that make up this interesting ecosystem. It’s a crowded place.

As usual, the box back has all sorts of interesting interpretive stuff on it, and we think it’s a puzzle you’ll enjoy putting together as much as I enjoyed painting it. If you click the image, it should enlarge in your browser.

You can click through to the website and buy it here, or, you can just Email us for details and we can send it with an invoice to pay from.

Thanks for reading this week, and we hope you like the new puzzle.
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. She’s working on a new website that looks great.

New Painting Post

Fort Townsend Old-growth mural – almost in our backyard

 

 

(Lots going on in this sketch – this should enlarge if you click on it)

((Sorry to say, but my server has been playing some evil tricks with me. Hopefully the blog is back in business.))

I paint this stuff all over the country, from Alaska to the Great Smoky Mountains, but very rarely have I been able to accept a large mural commission within a mile or so of our home. Here’s the sketch almost ready for painting – and it’ll be fun for me.

Fort Townsend is an old army barracks that supposedly protected Port Townsend about 150 years ago. In reality, the town protected the fort, and so as time went on the property fell into the hands of the Washington State Parks – and now it’s one of the rarest lowland old-growth forests in Puget Sound. It’s dry country here 40 miles northwest of Seattle (yes, it’s true) and with only 18″ of rain annually, the trees don’t get very big. Because it’s never been logged and the ground has been undisturbed for about 8,000 years, some pretty rare plants grow here. You can find calypso orchids, candystick, gnome plant, pinedrops and spotted coralroot. These are all interesting plants that live off other plants – so they aren’t green, and this painting is all about showing that. Candystick looks just like its name. It’s a colorful stick like something you’d find at the candy store. To get this sketch going, I simply used my backyard plant and bird list for the pileated woodpecker, brown creeper and all the rest. The deer is from a photo from our front yard. The squirrel, chipmunk and most of the small birds could be drawn from life on our feeder every day.

When it’s finished, we’ll develop an exhibit in the park centered around the painting and its story, and each time we go there for a hike (and it’s often) I’ll feel like I’m a small part of this rare place. This project is being funded by a generous grant from the Friends of Fort Townsend (especially Ann and Nancy) and the Washington State Native Plant Society who know the value of art in education. Thanks to them for allowing me to show off  my backyard!

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

Cedar Falls Trail – A Picnic Table Painting

A traditional watercolor painting for today. We spent last week hiking on the east side of the North Cascades and each evening I painted on the picnic table in Site 38, Pearrygin Lake State Park. Like everyone else in the West, they’ve experienced record snowpack and with temperatures in the 80’s, the snow is wasting no time getting out of there. And with spring pushed into summer, the flowers were just amazing. All the alpine lakes are still iced up, but these lower trails along the rivers were stunning, with lupine, paintbrush, calypso orchids, chocolate lilies, mountain ash, balsamroot – all of it in bloom at once. So, back in camp I got out the paints to relive the same experience twice.

While on this trail, I did a short little soundscape recording. I’m trying to figure out a way to easily add sound clips to paintings of these blog trail paintings, so here goes.

If you’re reading this from an email, try this: Cedar-falls-soundscape

If you’re reading this on the internet blog, click this:  Cedar-Falls.amr

Pearrygin Lake is downslope of the North Cascades Highway and south of the Pasayton Wilderness, some of the wildest and most pristine country I know. With over a half million acres, the Pasayton is the northern terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s one of the few places in the Lower 48 where trailhead signs have notices for BOTH grizzlies and wolves. This one was on the South Fork of the Twisp River coming down from North Cascades National Park and caught our eyes. It states hunters need to make sure the dog-species they’re killing is a coyote instead of a wolf. So, why would anyone climb up these steep trails to pull the trigger on a coyote when they’re in most everyone’s backyards – but then hunting anything at all has always baffled me. Doesn’t it seem like we as the now-dominant and planet caretaker species should be beyond that sort of mayhem?

Thanks for reading this week. This painting isn’t for sale just yet. The memories are too good to let it go.
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 Torrent of Mud on Mount St. Helens

This is another in the series of wayside panels I recently finished for Mount St. Helens National Monument. Now, you’ll have to admit I’m not normally posting paintings of mudflows – and I can’t even remember ever doing one. The top bit of art tells the story of the giant mudflow that filled this valley 31 years ago during the eruption. The finished outdoor panel will be placed at the overlook boardwalk above the creek. Linda Repplinger and Susan Jurasz of Sea Reach Ltd, 146 NE Yamhill St. Sheridan Oregon did the layout and design.  Also involved in these panels were Peter Reedijk from Sea Reach and Charlie Crisafulli and several others from USDA Forest Service, Mount St Helens who added additional thoughts and comments on the accuracy of the images.

As it’s not easy to read here, this is the text for the panel written, I believe, by Rebecca Railey, Interpretive Planner at Mount St Helens National Monument: Lava Canyon’s beauty lay hidden for centuries beneath lush evergreen forests until the May 18, 1980 eruption. A surge of hot gas, ash and pumice boiled out of the crater and scoured nearly 30 feet of ice off St. Helens Shoestring Glacier. Water, ash and rock mixed, forming a thick slurry that raced down the mountain and into the Muddy River drainage. A 15 foot wall of mud and rock swept into Lava Canyon. In an instant, the mudflow’s boulders and abrasive ash battered, scoured and swept away the vibrant forest that cloaked this canyon, exposing its beautiful waterfalls and rock formations.

The photos below the painting show what it looks like today, but, as they say “a painting is worth 1000 words” and with only about space for a hundred of them – that’s why they commissioned me. In the process I learned a bunch about mudflows. This version had the mudflow too fluid, so I worked at making it more champagne-milk-shakey. Haven’t seen that final mock up, but only I and a couple of USFS science-guys would know the difference between milk-shakey and fluid-flowing. And since no one actually saw this happening, it’s only a guess anyway.

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

Hole-In-The-Wall at Rialto Beach

We were on the road to Moab, Utah for some business and sunny hiking on the slick-rock. Then – the updated weather report said it was going to be in the mid-90’s, and, not wanting to just be normal people, we turned right instead and went out to the cool, wild and always delightful Olympic Coast. Saved a grand in camping and gas, and how could this be any less amazing than where we were originally going? We’ll get to Utah sooner or later, just not this week. And being able to do these things really is what being an artist is all about.

While sitting on the beach between hikes I did a couple of watercolors. This one was on a partially overcast day, so I kept it to only two colors. This is low tide at Hole-In-the-Wall at Rialto Beach – rated #2 in Olympic National Park sights to see. There were only two other people on the beach!

We continued past this area, past the shipwreck stuff, the eagle’s nest and possible Quileute werewolves left over from the Twilight movies that were filmed here, and in about a mile we came to an amazing place. Most hikers on Rialto Beach only go as far as where the painting was created – a couple of miles through often very soft gravel. But if you go another mile around the next point (low tide only and you’d better plan your escape accordingly), you’ll come to a rocky flat tideland “meadow.” I can only call it a meadow because that’s what it appeared to be, like an absolutely flat (not inclining like a beach) alpine meadow below the high-tide line. (click the photo, it should enlarge so you can see it better) This place was an acre at least, and so full of sea life you couldn’t move without squashing a turban shell, or a turban filled with hermit crab. Eel grass and rockweed covered almost every surface which was interesting because eel grass is normally a sand-thing, certainly not on a rocky headland. We couldn’t count the number of seastars, limpets and mussels. Why this area is so rich we could only imagine. At high tide, it has to be only be a few feet deep, so maybe it’s the extra light, slightly warmer water, who knows – but it was hard Olympic bedrock that was flat. From Cabo to Homer, we’ve never seen anything like it in all our tramping around West Coast beaches.

The original watercolor and ink painting of Hole-in-the-Wall is 8″ x 10″ and $100 unframed.
The double mat with custom wood frame makes it a total of $125 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 – and you get the saltwater smudge on the bottom of the paper (not on the painting) for free.
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

Necedah Wildlife Refuge installation

 Last week, someone asked:“what happened to that last big mural you did in, where was it? Necedah Wisconsin?” And, as life often gets by me, I had to say “beats me, haven’t even seen a photo of the installation.” So, with an email and a little poking around on Flickr – here it is, or at least a part of it. You can only see about half of the 130 feet as it goes around the bend and off into the sunset. If you remember, these were the two paintings that were scanned and printed at 300% from the original, then hung like wall paper. I’d say it looks pretty good – at least in the photo.

Some people are shocked when they find out that I not only didn’t go to Necedah for research (too much snow – couldn’t have seen what I needed anyway), but that I didn’t go there to install it (someone else’s job). I’m not sure I liked that, but that’s the way these things go sometimes. No going for research was difficult and I certainly could have used a few hours on the ground with my camera. It’s the details I just can’t get from a few on-line photos, like how the ground looks, how plants grow out of it, how much downed branches and logs, how varied the plants are between sunny and shady areas – endless stuff you normally don’t notice. Sure, a species list helps, but how many, where do they live and which ones did I need to use? In the end, I just made it up from years of doing this stuff, and everyone seems to like it.

When I was growing up as a backroom brat in the Illinois State Museum where both my parents worked, Robert Larson was museum staff habitat diarama background painter (now there’s a business card title). He was a pretty famous dude – but to me he was just the tall guy that threw paint around. I’d go down there and watch him do his stuff and he painted amazingly artistic, huge yet realistic backgrounds for exhibits that looked so real you’d swear the wolf moved each time you saw the exhibit (turned out they had an extra wolf mount they switched out occasionally). Watching this guy paint was my only training for painting these big canvases, and here it is a half-century later and I’m still at it – so, he must have had the magic that so influences kids they are determined to spend the next 50 years trying to do the same thing.

The huge, really really huge difference is that Bob Larson could take a year to do the painting you see here – and I did it in 35 days!!

Here’s one of the paintings again in full view.

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

Migrating Dunlin – Taking a Break

 

 

We were out on one of the West End Olympic beaches the other day – Beach #2 maybe, and up in the wrack I spotted this little dunlin. It seemed okay, probably just taking a well-deserved rest. What was unusual for us was that it was in the finest breeding form, a suit of clothes we don’t normally get to see over on Puget Sound around Port Townsend – over there we see Fall southbound birds in dull-gray clothes. I’m guessing that it was about half way on the north-bound migratory journey from Mexico to the North Slope of Alaska. There were a couple other dunlin also on the beach, so we assumed this one was with that bunch, and the fact it wasn’t alone felt good to us.

I was struck by the enormity of the scene. Visualize giant and endless sets of waves on a rugged shoreline, piles of drift trees all the way up into the forest where winter storms had easily tossed them, millions upon millions of polished stones and bits of driftwood stretching into the distance in both directions – and this tiny 2-ounce hemispheric traveller that weighs the same as two first class letters was on its way from Mexico to the Arctic. Worthy of a painting? I thought so?

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $125 unframed.
We have nice custom wood frames for $25 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.

Clickhere to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography. She has some current posts of the same trip (ours, not the dunlin’s).

New Painting Post

Summer Getaway cover

I don’t post much of this publicity stuff, but this was a nice bit of press recently (and we just walked in the door from five days in San Diego). This is the cover for the Olympic Peninsula tourist magazine, the Getaway, probably the one most visitors gravitate to. I thought the Port Townsend Leader newspaper did a nice job of incorporating the title into the painting. It’s cropped pretty severely but still works fairly well.

That’s Port Townsend’s Fort Worden State Park, a popular place with 2+ miles of beaches, a college, poetry press, marine science center, woodworking school, 1200-set concert pavilion where there are music and writer weeklong summer workshops and over about 500 rooms and campsites. It’s one of the best things about this little town. The painting location is on the road going up the hill to the old gun emplacements, giant concrete structures that look like a deserted futuristic city from Blade Runner – and in the far left background is Mount Rainier – at exactly 100 miles away, it still looks that tall, I’m not kidding.

We have prints of this image (not cropped) that now seem popular since it’s appearance on the Getaway. Here’s the link.
OR 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. She has some very tasty posts on her blog.

New Painting Post

Barnes Creek Trail – an Ageless Moment

Another sweet old-growth trail painting today. How many of these trails have I been on? I think it’s some genetic throwback to a distant past that compels me to hike just one more of these trails, and then paint the darned thing later (it’s two for one – first the trail experience and then reliving that pleasure in a painting). This one starts on Lake Crescent in Olympic National Park, goes gently upslope following the creek past Merrymere Falls (pretty cool in itself) and onto the flanks of Mount Storm King. About two miles out, the trail goes over a little hump past some pretty impressive trees – which is where the inspiration for this painting occurred. Don’t go up there looking for it – these things are never even close to what they actually look like. There I was, waiting for Nancy to photograph some spring flowers – knees in the dirt, head in the ferns as usual. And while I stood there soaking in the forest, I just fell in love with the place – the gentle flow of the trail, the glow of light on a few leaves, the agelessness of it all.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $320 unframed.
A custom wood frame is about $25 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.