All posts by Wilderness Walker

New Painting Post

Spotted Towhee Branch Study

Towhee-branch

I watch these birds each morning and noon, scrambling around on the big feeder just a few feet from our table. ‘Saucy’ would be a good towhee-adjective, active and constantly tail-flicking, they probably have to eat all the time just to keep up with it all.

Towhee_branch_framed

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 framed in a custom frame, triple mat that has an outside measurement of about 13″x 17″.

Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details. Jump fast – these guys don’t stay around long.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

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

New Painting Post

Little Tarn – Bailey Range

Lillian-Tarn-2

We hiked along this slope, in and out of little groups of snow-stunted hemlock, and after awhile this stunning view appeared. The Bailey Range beyond, little tarn full of quiet reflecting water, alpine edge-of-the-forest where the mountain hemlocks group together to withstand some pretty harsh winters. Two big Cascade frogs sat in the water watching us, as if we might be frog-hunters, which we are certainly not. I posted another little alpine tarn painting on the last blog, and it’s found a home a very long way from Olympic National Park – and its new owner wishes differently. That painting touched something, so this one might do the same. Hands off, Yaming, let’s let someone else have a chance.

What I’m endlessly enjoying with these subalpine painting studies are the positions of the graphic elements, the snow-slimmed trees, the freeze-shattered boulders, little bits of water that are always arranged in flawless designs. I think I’m drawn here for another reason too, that of seeing a landscape unaltered in any way by us – an increasingly rare thing these days. These rock gardens look like a master gardener has been here, but the caretaker is Mother Nature, the only real master gardener.

Little-Tarn-framed-2

And here’s what you get – if you’re interested:

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 framed and ready to hang. A triple custom mat, framers glass, a nice cherry custom frame. Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

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

New Painting Post

The Little Tarn on Lillian Ridge

Lilian-Ridge-Tarn

“Little Tarn on Lillian Ridge” acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ framed: $145.

Actually, the little tarn doesn’t look anything like this, but it was a starting point. It’s a favorite place of ours, maybe yours too for a few or you that hike the Obstruction Point area of Olympic National Park. For me, this area is about as close to ‘goin’ to church’ as I can find. It’s one of the highest roads in the Northwest, and once out of the darned car bumping along that ridgetop, there are miles upon miles of alpine landscapes to wonder.

We hiked down here a couple of weeks ago, below the ridge and away from other hikers. The loudest sounds we heard were big bumblebees working the lupine and bluebells, and a couple of gray jays giving their soft greetings. So I painted it, and then get to live it all over again in the studio – like a memory of a good dream.

Little-Tarn-framed

This ORIGINAL FRAMED painting is acrylic on paper board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 custom FRAMED and a tad bit more for Priority Mail. Glass is 11″ x 14″, outside frame measurement is 14″ x 17″. This is the original painting, NOT a print. Remember, I’m offering this with the frame and a triple custom mat. Email us for details.

SOLD, THIS PAINTING IS GOING TO TEXAS TO SOMEONE WHO WANTS TO BE IN THE OLYMPICS.

Thanks for reading this week. Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

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

New Painting Post

Squirrels Everywhere

Squirrel-Tiger-Lilies

Certainly a fruitful spring here. Three fawns in the meadow, more Douglas squirrels than we can count, and the female junco whose nest is hidden in the hose coil is going on her third, yes third, brood. Yesterday I checked the car’s air filter, and sure enough there was a squirrel’s nest in there again. I’m telling you, it’s not too easy to live with Nature, but we probably wouldn’t be nearly as happy without it – especially without the “Big Boys”, those two bucks that hang here every day.

At any rate, here’s my homage to it all – a Douglas squirrel with our tiger lilies in bloom (although the horse radish has sort of taken over that area of the place and the lilies are somewhat overwhelmed). The painting looks calm, but I’m telling you – it’s not.

This painting is an acrylic on hardboard, 15″ x 15″ and available unframed for $375. Email me if you’re interested. I can also get a nice custom frame, but for that we need to talk.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

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

New Painting Post

Badlands Jigsaw Puzzle – Now Available

Badlands-18x24-puzzle

Finally, our summer load of new puzzles have arrived, and Badlands National Park might prove to be a real winner. By my count (somewhat fuzzy) this is somewhere around the 80th jigsaw puzzle we’ve developed or licensed from my paintings. The original mural is installed at the main Visitor Center in Badlands National Park in South Dakota. What, you say? You even have work in South Dakota? Yes, and this painting was done to commemorate the release back into the wild of the black-footed ferret, a native hunter important to that prairie ecosystem.

 

This is the box back, chocked full of enough critters to fill a field guide.

12762-Badlands-puzzle-box-bottom

 

 

And here’s a detail showing you what color carpet we have (just in case you want to know these things). The main thing is to know these are now available, because I received a bunch of emails requesting such things. You can order them here from the website store.

 

 

Eifert-Badlands-12762-box

All the other available puzzles are there too.
Email us for details if you’d like.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs or see what she’s currently offering in the WEBSITE STORE.

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

New Painting Post

Ochre Stars in Trouble – My July Story in 48 North Magazine

2014-7-starfish-wasting

Click to on the story to enlarge it and read the most interesting and disastrous events unfolding around the Northwest’s starfish populations.

I wrote and painted this page about a month ago for 48 North – but since then we’ve been looking more intently for ochre stars, or any starfish for that matter. It’s not good. So, this is one of the current environmental tragedies unfolding in the Pacific Northwest. Starfish of all sorts are dying by something we humans have called “Starfish Wasting”. No one knows exactly why this is happening, but many think it’s some sort of virus. Stars are the top dog in the nearshore food chain. Without a healthy population of these guys, other critters like shellfish and urchins tend to take over, throwing everything out of control. The stars simply waste away, arms fall off, bodies turn into a mass of molten goop.

SAM_1900

Yes, those are ALL mussels at Tongue Point, without a star in sight.

We’ve already seen this ourselves. On the lowest tide of the year last month, we went to Salt Creek and Tongue Point, west of Port Angeles and where there should be good populations of stars. Instead, we found shellfish completely out of control, acres of them. The ONLY star we saw was this little blood star, surrounded by shellfish in all directions.

SAM_1882

Then we hiked the Ozette Loop a week later, a 9.5 mile loop on the west side of Olympic National Park, same thing. After two nights on the beaches and scouring 3 miles of coastline, we did not see a single star of any kind. Not a good sign, for sure (but the hike was as wonderful as like gets).

A friend, Camille, is a Washington Dept of Fish and Wildlife clam-expert, and she’s now telling me there are young ocher stars along the Hood Canal – possibly signs the disease is passing, but who knows? Certainly not us! We are really only visitors here, and contrary to some, we are simply not in charge or even know much about the planet we share.

I also can see that using art to enhance awareness of environmental events is probably a high form of communication. What do YOU think?

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

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

New Painting Post

Final Designs for the Whidbey Island Land Trust

Rare-Diverse-Forest

Not just a nice painting, but an entire outdoor art gallery! This wayside panel goes to ‘press’ this week, so here’s the final design. Forest path, old-growth forest on the cliff, windblown ancient trees and a complex ecosystem – all in one painting. Since the text talks of this forest, we put in eight smaller paintings of the local trees and shrubs, so the art becomes a nature guide. Click to enlarge in your browser.

This will be fabricated out of very thick high-pressure laminated ‘plastic’ resin and cardboard with a lifespan certainly longer than mine. An art gallery in the forest – just my idea of where art should be shown.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

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

New Painting Post

New Life for an Old Painting – Arcata Marsh, CA

Arcata-MarshIn the 1990’s I was commissioned to paint this wildlife mural for the City of Arcata, California’s marsh project. A fairly innovative idea at the time, they were using old log sorting ponds to purify their sewer water, using them for settling ponds. Of course, being Arcata which is mostly Humboldt State University, it involved wildlife, and lots of it – and so a visitor center was built and this painting is an exhibit there, but it’s inside the building.

Now, two decades later, they’re using the same image as their entrance sign at the gate, so I did a redesign last week and it’s at the fabricator now. This simply wouldn’t have been possible back when I first painted the image, but nowadays I can digitally create this huge sign, send it off over the cable – and soon this beautiful,  6′ x 6′ and 3/4″ thick, it’s going to be made out of something like Formica – with a life span longer than I’ll be alive.

Arcata-marsh-installed

Of course, this is all possible because I retained the copyrights to this painting, so when Denise at the Marsh wanted to do this project, she needed to come to me. It’s a way we working artists make a living. I only signed away the rights to one large painting – the first one I ever did for the National Park Service at Redwood National Park. It ended badly, with me having to actually buy my own posters from the parks’ bookstores and not even having a digital copy of it to put on my website. A cautionary tale, don’t you think?

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

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

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

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

New Painting Post

Some Small watercolors for the Whidbey Island Land Trust

Guillemot

I’ve been working away at some fairly large and complex murals for the Whidbey Island Land Trust project, but the project also involves a bunch of these smaller and fairly loose acrylic wash/pencil sketches – so I thought I’d pass them around. Fairly loose; I know some of you will say they’re not loose at all. But for what I normally do, they’re pretty loose. There are about 40 of them, and these are some of the finished ones. That’s a pigeon guillemot on the top, here’s a coyote below, and a little gallery of some more. Fun to do these loose images after plugging away of some pretty details larger painting.

Coyote

These will all go below the larger paintings on wayside panels, spicing up the educational components of these outdoor exhibits. Yes, pencil and acrylic! 

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

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

New Painting Post

Ratfish – My 48-North Page for May, 2014

2014-5-Ratfish

This is my sketchbook page for 48-North magazine for May. Almost forgot to post it while it was still relevant. I caught one of these crazy-looking fish a few years ago (while I was still fishing), and hauling this over the gunwale made me wonder why I continued to sit there with a pole in my hands. They’re pretty crazy-looking critters. Below is the story that went with it.

“Have you ever seen a ratfish? Odds are you haven’t, and yet these odd-looking creatures make up fully 70% of all the fish mass in the Puget Sound main basin. Their family name, Chimera, was a mythological monster with a lion’s head, goat’s body and serpent’s tail – pretty close if you toss in a rabbit’s nose with two incisor teeth. Where are they? Rats like it deep, looking for clams and worms on the bottom at 250 feet, which probably accounts for their covert lives, but when I caught one once off a dock in Port Ludlow, I thought I’d hooked a space alien. And I’m here to witness that they bite – just like a rabbit does with those incisors.”

“Why are there so many? No one knows for certain, but I’d imagine an unhealthy ecosystem might be a place to start looking, because nature needs diversity, not one species that takes over. I used to think of rats as strange and ugly, but as a painter, I now see they are truly beautiful, with glowing green cat’s eyes, copper orange and blue shades of glimmering white spotted skin and that rabbit nose. Gliding along on bat wings, they’re not speeders like salmon, and yet the ratfish has been around for 300 million years – a true survivor – and as we eat our way down the food chain, the rat will eventually come be on our plates beside cockroaches and algae.”

2014-5-fawns

And I just had to add this of our deer. Our 2014 crop of black-tailed fawns are all over our meadow – two singles and one set of twins. Four fawns, three moms and all jockeying for position, attention and learning how to live together. It’s quite a visual feast.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

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