All posts by Wilderness Walker

Early Paintings, Nature Art, New Published Story, Posts about other stuff

Anna’s Hummingbirds and the December Deep Freeze

This is an older painting of mine, and the rhododendrons certainly in bloom, but I felt compelled to write about this week’s freeze and the little birds in our meadow.

From coast to coast, I know we’ve all had amazing weather this past week. The southern storms drove a giant blast of Canadian air down and west over the Cascades, and here we’ve had record lows for a week. Temps haven’t gotten out of the twenties, with nights down into the lower teens, weather we just don’t ever get in Puget Sound. None of us have clothes for this stuff. And while we’ve all been suffering, that can’t be anything compared to what our two wintering-over Anna’s hummingbirds must be experiencing. For all my decades around the Northwest, I’ve never seen hummers here in winter, but last year we had one stay all season, and we’ve heard we’re not alone with this. We put out a feeder when we spotted him, but it wasn’t because of the sugar water that he was here, because we put it out AFTER we spotted him. This year we have an adult and a juvie, and we were ready with a feeder (and a 150w flood lamp on it 24 hours a day after the freeze hit). So far it’s working.

I wrote about hummers a few years ago, and learned that they have ways to cope with this cold stuff. They have normal body temps of about 105-108F, with a sitting heart rate of about 250 beats per minute. However, at night they sleep normally, or, they can go into a turbid state where they actually drop their body temp to between 30 and 65 degrees (depending on need), and drop their metabolic rate to one-fifteenth of normal. In this way, they can maybe make it through a very long night of 15 degrees.

Before nightfall, they make one extra smart move. They find and remember where breakfast is going to be. Then, in the morning it takes upwards of an hour to fully wake up before flying. This requires a huge energy drain on this thumb-sized bird, and if that feeder is frozen when it gets to it, the bird is in big trouble (like a car on empty that gets to the gas station and the pumps are locked).

Temperatures are warming up now, but we’ve felt a great privilege to keep tabs on these two intrepid birds this week. Snow and hummingbirds just don’t go together, but if this is a sign of Climate Change, I’m happy with it.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff. We’re still shipping Christmas puzzles.

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Comments are good. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

Murals

Welcome to Sol Duc Valley

Since this wayside panel is being printed this month, I thought I’d pass it on here. I published another one of these back on November 8th, and you can see it here. For this project, I painted 21 paintings for 3 panels at Olympic National Park’s Sol Duc Valley entry kiosk. With the others last year, that makes 24 images you can see while driving the 17 miles from national park gate to road’s end where a trail leads to this grand waterfall – Sol Duc Falls. At 4′ x 6′, these are pretty large panels.

So what? Well, I like to call these efforts “public art galleries in our parks”, and I now have hundreds of these things in parks, preserves and wildlife refuges around the West. You’re hiking or driving along, and suddenly there’s a piece of art and a small story to tell you, or interpret, what you’re seeing. It’s just a great way to experience a beautiful place, and, I hope, to heighten your experience beyond what nature is providing (if that’s possible). These panels don’t use the original art itself, but are always fabricated out of fiberglass, stainless steel or a Formica product, so they’ll probably last longer than I will. I’d like to image someone coming along decades from now and stumbling over one of these things – and having it enhance their day.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email group – or just ‘talk’ with us.

New Painting Post

Red-breasted Nuthatch

If you click the image, it should enlarge. If it doesn’t click here for the web blog.
SOLD. Sorry to say, I sold this before I could get it up here. Thought I’d send it out anyway. I think it’s a nice little painting.

These little birds are constant neighbors here. I’ll bet we have at least five families around our meadow. We watch them from our dining room windows working the feeder, daintily picking at the suet cake and carrying away one sunflower seed at a time up to the safety of the nearest branch. Their voices are so thin and sweet as to sometimes sound like fluttering leaves. These guys normally feed by circling down tree trunks as in the painting, gleaning insects from bark crevices. They then fly over to another tree and start again. We have another bird here, the brown creeper, that fills just the opposite niche. It circles up the trunk, catching bugs the nuthatches miss.

 Did I ever say I take commissions? Lots of them. If you liked this one, I won’t do it again, but it’s always a treat for me to try a subject in a different way. This painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and we offered it for $140 unframed. The gold frame makes it a total of $180 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week. Nuthatches: It feels like I’ve just painted a family member here.
Larry Eifert

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing. She has some interesting new work from the Seattle Day of the Dead Festival on her blog.

I recently put up a web page of many of my murals. I think there’s about 50 of them here. Check it out.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

New Painting Post

Ancient Bristlecone Pines mural

Finally, I got this puppy finished up. It was quite a handful with lots of other work coming and going through the studio. If you click on the image, it should enlarge. If not, go here to the blog.

This is destined for The Crater Lake Institute, that, through the years, has commissioned me for many of these types of paintings. Next summer we’ll have products like puzzles available, but there’s lots of design work to do before that happens.

When I sent out the sketch for this awhile ago, I received lots of mail about where to see these trees and just how to do a painting like this. The 3′ x 5′ painting is on hardboard so I had a smooth surface to begin with. I primed it with dry-brush latex to rough it up slightly, making for good textural effects. These are worked up from the back forward, so the foreground flowers are the last to go in, and there’s lots of hidden stuff in that foreground. I recently put up a page on the main website with a page of murals. There’s currently about 50 for you to see, so check it out here.

SO: Where can you see these bristlecones (that DO have bristled cones)? Well, you’re not going to this time of year, but if you’re looking for a great trip next summer, check out the bristlecones east of Bishop CA in the Whites or at Great Basin National Park way out near Ely Nevada, or Brice Canyon National Park in Utah. They’re high-elevation trees – at 10,000 feet or so on dry windswept ridgetops in limestone, a place where nothing else can easily grow. It’s worth a trip to walk beneath the oldest trees on the planet, some dated to almost 5,000 years of age. Even the downed branches are beyond my comprehension – some have been dated back 9,000 years from the present. To put that into context, the woolly mammoth was still around then!

Here’s the original pencil sketch:

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing. There’s some good new stuff here on her blog about the Day of the Dead Celebration in Seattle.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us. If you know someone else that might enjoy this, let us know. Our list is growing.

New Painting Post

Riverside Red Alders

I’m still whacking away on the bristlecone painting for Crater Lake Institute, but here’s something I did yesterday just for the pleasure of it. If you click the image, it should enlarge. If not, just go to the blog. I have more of these, but my web server has been ‘migrating’, so the blog has been shut down this week. Just what ‘migrating’ means, I’m not sure, but I wish I was doing some of that myself. Avalanche warnings are up in the mountains already.

For those reading from other parts of the planet besides the Northwest, red alder is a common lowland tree found in moist Northwest stream-side forests. They often appear after logging to revitalize trashed-out land and conveniently add nitrogen to the soil by ‘fixing’ it from the air. Our woods are full of them, so I know the tree well. In fact, there’s currently a red-alder log in the fire as I write this. It’s a very beautiful tree to paint because of the gray and brown, speckled patchwork trunk patterns. There are other alders, but this one has a sure identifier. The edges of each leaf curl under slightly right along the edges – a little fact that most field guides don’t tell you.

This original acrylic painting is varnished on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
The gold frame makes it a total of $180 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing on her blog and website. Pretty interesting stuff on the blog.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

New Painting Post

First Serious Snow – Olympics

Click the image to see a larger version.

Boy, we’ve had some weather lately. Going into town yesterday, the eastern Olympics showed their best with fresh snow. Strong westerly winds were blowing it off Mount Townsend in great banners, and the clouds were alive. Mile-high Hurricane Ridge was supposed to have gotten 18″, and you can see this for yourselves here at the park web cam mounted on the visitor center roof. The camera lens is currently 90% plastered with snow and you could barely see anything. At night, even on a cloudy evening, you can still see the unearthly glow of the snow, but seeing it on a normal clear day (without the snow on the lens), the view of Mt. Olympus is stunning. The little thumbnail next to the web cam is what you’d see in the summer. This is only about 45 air miles from here and we go there often. And with the web cam, now so can you. Check back to see it ‘unclogged’.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $420 unframed.
The gold frame makes it a total of $445 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original, NOT a print.
Email us for details. Sorry, this painting is sold.

To check availability of the other small originals I’ve blogged about the past few weeks, check the blog here.

Thanks for reading this time.
Larry Eifert

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

Murals

New Olympic National Park exhibits


Sol Duc Valley Visitor’s Map Kiosk

To best view this image, you need to click and enlarge it.

Seems like somewhat of a milestone here. This is one of three new outdoor wayside exhibits just “sent to press” for Olympic National Park. I’ll post the other two soon. They’re very large, actually the biggest I think I’ve done, at 48″ x 72″, and are being produced with the fiberglass embedment process. For those reader that don’t know this stuff, that’s when a print gets covered with fiberglass layers until it’s about 1/8″ thick. If we’re lucky, it’ll last 25 years. These three will soon be installed in the gateway kiosk area of Olympic’s Sol Duc River road and will somewhat match the other three I now have out there. I did the art and initial design, but the almost-countless hours of graphic design were done by Janet Scharf, who’s on park staff.

These panel paintings allow me to occasionally insert ourselves in the work. For instance, that’s Nancy sitting by the fire, with out VW camper behind. She originally had shorts on, but that was deemed to controversal for this (I, personally, think her legs look great and might have helped the painting). The hikers at the bottom are the two of us, but they thought I should be turned into a Latino – so that was fun. And Nancy’s also standing on the Sol Duc Falls bridge in the upper right.

The map was another matter altogether. I did the large painting from Google Earth flyover images, then scanned it into Photoshop. Then it was brought into Illustrator for all the roads, trails and those wierd map labels that curve and contort. Finally, that file was brought into InDesign for the final layout with all the other images. What a juggling act!

To check availability of the other small originals I’ve blogged about the past few weeks, check the blog here.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

New Painting Post

Snow Creek Estuary

Happiest Halloween, Everyone. Tonight we helped hand out 40lbs of candy in downtown Port Townsend at Gallery Nine. 40lbs from our gallery times about 40 stores is a LOT of sugar! It was a wonderful home-time event for a bunch of very cool kids from towns as far as an hour away. My favorite was the H1N1 pig costume.

This week I was supposed to have the bristlecone mural all finished up and ready to show you – but other life got in the way, including new keel bolts for the boat and a maybe never-ending exhibit project now almost in its fourteenth month. But who’s complaining. Both those diversions were artistic in their own ways. The keel bolts kept that 70-yr old boat from sinking in the slip, so you could call it art-rehab.

I did, however, find some time to do this little acrylic of Snow Creek Estuary. (click on it to enlarge. If not, click here.) This place is very close to our studio, right here on the ‘back’ side of our local Quimper Peninsula. Snow Creek comes down from the eastern Olympics and drains into Discovery Bay, the site of George Vancouver’s first anchorage here-abouts in 1792. Few live here, and it still has a pretty healthy run of chum salmon. It was from here that ‘our’ Chimacum Creek got a hatch box full of these genetically-similar salmon eggs about a decade ago. Nature worked her wonders, and now there are over 1000 chum salmon that come home to Chimicum to spawn each fall, right below out house.

Just at dusk a few weeks ago, we stopped here for Nancy to do some photography, and while out in the meadows, we discovered a giant population of garden spiders, all sitting patiently in their webs for some insect action. These are some serious spiders, so we backtracked gingerly the way we had come. We felt we had intruded into their world – which we had.

And now, back to the studio and the bristlecones of the Great Basin.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
The gold frame makes it a total of $180 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

To check availability of the other small originals I’ve blogged about the past few weeks, check the blog here.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

This week I also remodeled the Interpretive Section of larryeifert.com and added some new projects.

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

New Painting Post

Late Afternoon – Lillian Ridge Trail

Lillian-Ridge

SOLD
Obstruction Point area, Olympic National Park.
Acrylic on linen canvas – a small easel painting this time.

This trail is a favorite – I can’t paint it enough. It’s about 35 miles, as the eagle flies, west of our studio in the eastern Olympic Mountains – a serious set of rocks. I painted another version this last spring and posted it here in March. It’s not the amazing scenery or that it’s an almost level trail (well, that might be part of it), but it’s also the fact that, at over 6000′, it’s above any glaciation that’s ever occurred there. To walk here is to trod on the exact same stones and sit on the very same overlook that the mammoth hunters did during the last Ice Age. The shattered shale that crunches under my boots is unchanged, and I could very probably be the very NEXT person since that Pliocene hunter to sit on that rock and look for Olympic marmots, those alpine animals that are only found here. The only difference might be that it would have been the hunter’s dinner and not mine.

For an artist that wishes nature were a bit less mild these days, that wishes he were born a few years earlier so he could have seen more of our now-vanished legacy, this is heady stuff.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
The gold 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.
Email us for details.

Still working on the bristlecone painting, but painting in the boatyard (our boat) has gotten in the way.

Thanks for reading this week. For new readers, I try to alternate between park interpretive stuff and easel paintings, but they’re all about nature. It’s what I’ve done for over 40 years.

Larry Eifert

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

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

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of these emails – or just ‘talk’ with us.

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

***previous*** — ***next***

Murals, New Painting Post

Stream Stones and Bristlecones


Progress on the Bristlecone Pine mural
I sent out the pencil sketch for this painting on September 8. and now, after several review comments and changes only a dendrologist (tree scientist) would recognise, I’m moving along pretty well on the final. Many large-scale painters do a complete smaller image first, then recreate it in the larger final version. I’ve never been comfortable with that process because it seems like I’d just be painting something twice. It’d be like remarrying the same person you’ve already divorced – all those little issues you hated the first time ’round are still lurking there. Nancy and I have done several 90′ paintings without a finished ‘baby’ painting and it was truly exciting – for both us and the clients that were scared numb. Nancy once stated: “we are in SERIOUS trouble here” but we still pulled it off nicely. Next week I hope this’ll be close to finished and I’ll send another update.

But that’s not all:

Stream Stones

This is another painting from our recent alpine excursions. If you know your Pacific Northwest geology, you’d pick up that these stones are from the North Cascades and not the Olympics. Cascade stones are very much more diverse in color and texture – brownish iron oxides and lots of gray speckled granites. If you see these stones around the Olympic Mountain edges, they undoubtedly came there from scraped streambeds in the Cascades by way of the mile-high Cordilleran Ice Sheet 80 centuries ago, and they match pebbles you’d find in any Cascade river today.

You might think 80 centuries is awhile ago, but consider this: there are bristlecone pines in the White Mountains and Nevada that approach 50 centuries. And that’s the way I tie the top part of this entry with the bottom part of.