All posts by Wilderness Walker

New Painting Post

Sugar Pine Point – Lake Tahoe and Climate Change

General-Creek-2014

Some years ago I was commissioned for two paintings of Sugar Pine Point State Park, a park that has two miles of Lake Tahoe’s forested coastline and one of the most pristine creeks to enter that lake. Fun project, I got to go there and poke around. The images were eventually made into outdoor wayside panels, and the originals are in the visitor center – pretty typical. We made lots of book store products from the images, and now the poster of General Creek has been redesigned and will soon be available.

For me, the real story is on the poster’s backside, and it’s possibly more important than first version the first time around. I rewrote the essay, and I was struck how the theme, the story, the very reason for this poster and painting has changed in just one short decade. I finished it up, sat back and breathed a ‘WOW’ to myself. Here’s the thing. The original essay spoke of each of the critters, plants and everything else that lives here as being no more important than any of the others. That’s nature’s way, after all. And it went on to say humans were no better nor worse too.

And the updated text? It now speaks of human-caused Climate Change, proving I was wrong about that last sentence. Nature will survive here, of course, but in what form we can’t yet say. Will this ecosystem still be in harmony with itself? I suspect not. Will General Creek, the main focus of this painting, still be flowing in summer when the critters need it most? Doubtful. We just don’t know, but we can guess. In my final statement, I say this: Climate Change is now effecting this landscape, which will alter what we see here in many ways – and add to the stress on a fragile place. In the future, this painting of General Creek may become a historic record of what once was.

Eifert_General_Creek
The original wayside panel beside General Creek.

All of a sudden I realized that all these large-scale murals I’ve been creating for the past several decades might become something more than their original intent. I thought they were painted to educate people about what’s here. As human-caused climate change evolves, now I see these images might be about what once was. A scary thought, for sure, but maybe one that’s more valuable and long lasting.

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

How to Show the Art of War With Art?

Triangle-of-Fire-vs7-all-art

Click to enlarge this in your browser.

This is another panel for my project at the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve on Whidbey Island with the Land Trust. While all the rest of these outdoor wayside installations are about nature, this one speaks of Fort Casey, the reason this pristine place still exists in the first place. Without the fort and this history, the Land Trust would surely have had nothing to restore, preserve and protect, and I would have nothing to paint – because it would have long-since been made into mansions owned by Microsoft guys and lawns that look like carpet.

So, how to go about this painting this story using art? I changed up the realistic style to something a bit more ‘loose’ and tried to focus on the human side of a fort that had huge guns that protected the seaward approach to Puget Sound (it was never fired upon and became obsolete in a decade). Mark at the Land Trust, with help from Steven who appears to just love this stuff, found a very appealing photo of three guys enjoying themselves right outside their workplace at the fort – the Fire Station where they triangulated the gun’s shots. They lived here, and the building they’re standing in front of is the location where this outdoor wayside panel will live, and is right on the cliff’s edge. The building is gone, but the foundation remains as a point of reference.

While the other panels are all acrylic on board, for this I used acrylic wash and pencil for the illustrations, pumping up the color so the pencil looks more like ink. I think it has a nice textural quality. I kept this somewhat loose, making the reality of giant machines of war hopefully  seem a bit more palatable. I hope I succeeded.

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

Crater Lake NP New Puzzle Has Arrived

Whitebark-Pines-of-Crater-Lake-1000pc

Yesterday we received a shipment of new puzzles for spring. This is the first 1000-piece puzzle we’ve produced in years, and it’s fun for us to see the bigger image, bigger box, bigger everything. Finished size is 20″x 28″, it has an interlocking border, and it includes a reference poster inside. You can order it here.

Eifert-Crater-1000-boxback

The box back, with lots of great info and species key.

Eifert-Crater-1000-boxtop

We’ve also included a free poster with reference key and a bunch of information about the whitebark pines at Crater Lake that are in serious trouble due to Climate Change, an introduced pathogen and the ravages of bark beetles. It’s our way to cram some great interpretation and nature into one product – and it should also be a fun one to put together. Below is the poster that comes with it.

Whitebark-Pine-Crater-Lake-box-insert

Order this puzzle simply by clicking here to go to our cart. $18.95 plus shipping at our cost.

This was funded by the good folks at Crater Lake Institute and Foundation. Thanks, Ron. I think it’s a great puzzle.

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

A New Old Poster – California Coast Redwoods

 A new 18″ x 24″ poster – coming soon!

Cal-redwoods-poster

Click all these to enlarge them in your browser

Thousands upon thousands of the original poster “Events in the Life of a Coast Redwood” have gone out the door over the past twenty years. Originally commissioned as a museum exhibit for Redwood National and State Parks, the painting lives it’s life in Prairie Creek, just the best redwood forest I’ve ever known. There’s a lot of art and photography here in our studio, and many of these past images go out of print, out of our lives – but we felt this one deserved a continued  present, so this week I redesigned it to look more like an old botanical poster someone might have created 200 years ago when redwoods hadn’t even been discovered by Europeans yet. You’ll see this in a month or so after the printer does his job.

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The story of how this originally came to be is somewhat fun – at least for me. In the 1990’s I was living in Ferndale, Cal just north of one of the biggest redwood parks. I always tried to be a thorn in the side of a local timber-killing company, always looking for ways to counteract their lying press releases ranting on about how wonderful they were in eliminating the world’s tallest trees – our heritage being made into hot tubs. (My real thorn was the fact I had hired the wife of the CEO to work for me in my gallery, and he thought we were having an affair – used to sneak around in the alley watching her.) Anyway, that company put out a poster much like this – tree in the center, but instead of nature they showed little images of subjects like Joan of Arc, Hitler, the atom bomb, Christ on the cross – stuff completely unrelated to redwoods.

So, I was dared to challenge it with a poster of my own – and got Redwood National Park to pay for it, and off we went. My poster was meant to show the rich diversity in redwood forests, something the redwood choppers denied (we need to get rid of those old, stagnant forests), and put them in a context with humanity as well as ecological history (something they also denied the existence of). Fast forward: the company crashed, people are now out of work, I get mail thanking me for standing up for something few believed in at the time. Ah, it’s all in a day’s work for the naturalist-artist!

side-section

I’ll let you know when this is available in most large redwood parks – from Redwood National to Muir Woods –  and on our website.

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

A Rare Forest – Whidbey Island Land Trust

Click to enlarge in your browser

A new painting for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust project at the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve. In case you missed the last several posts of this, here’s the last painting before this. I think I’m about 75% to completion on this new one. It speaks to the windy extreme weather on the bluff tops of Whidbey Island, Washington, how that weather shapes these 350-year-old trees, how the forest changes farther inland, how, one gnarly branch at a time, it’s slowly grown here over centuries. A rare forest indeed.

Rare-5

Great changes occurred in this design, logs moved, an entire underground section vanished – it was evolution right before my eyes. 

Rare-4

You can see some of the design changes in the lower right of this third photo. Compare this with the newest photo at the top.

Dark shapes help me focus on overall design. I sometimes stand back 25 feet to look at these 4′ paintings.

Rare-2

And here it is initially laid out, sky and ground, warm and cool. A free and fanciful non-objective painting just waiting to be hung in an art gallery somewhere. But these paintings don’t exist anymore. After I photographed it at each stage, it’s as if I’m then throwing away the image – because soon after it’s gone for ever under the progression to the next stage.

Rare-1

And here’s the original sketch showing the underground sections that are now gone from the painting.

Forest-ecology-sketch

By next week, I’ll have this finished up for a show-and-tell. Thanks for the interest in these images of the progression of a complex painting. Fun for me to see too.

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

My 48-North Story for April, 2014 – and Cats

2014-4-Mergansers

Click the image to enlarge it in your browser.

Here’s my article in 48 North magazine for April, 2014. I almost forgot to toss this into my blog until I received my copy in the mail a few days ago. You can see this on page 48 on their website. This sketchbook was all about diving and dabbling ducks, the interesting differences between them, and how each makes their living. And, it was just a chance to make sure I knew all this stuff without looking it up.

I’ve discovered that the best pages I write and draw have big eyeballs. What, you say? The tube worm story didn’t have huge ratings? Well, it’s just that we humans are drawn to those with big eyes – like Nancy and our deer herd here in the meadow that keep looking in the windows, eyeball to eyeball with the big-eyed house cat that we won’t let outside. Big moon last night and there was a coyote-chorus right below our windows. The local bobcat has come gaping in my studio window before, looking right at me as if to say: where’s the cat?

 But here’s the thing. The neighborhood is littered with ‘missing fluffy signs written by names the likes of Tiffany and Heather, neighbors who let their cats roam free to murder wild birds that have a hard enough time of life as it is. Hey, I look at it as nature attempting to maintain a healthy situation. House cats kill over a BILLION wild birds each year and the predators take care of a few of the cats. It’s obvious to me that cat-owners who allow their pets outside are people who (lazily or egotistically?) could care less about nature. They’re targets of my unending quest to open their eyes, one eyeball-painting at a time.

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

A Rare and Diverse Forest – Whidbey Land Trust

Forest-ecology-sketch

A click will enlarge this in your browser. 

This is the second painting for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust project at the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve just a few miles north of Port Townsend. Missed the first painting? Click here. This time it’s less about the critters and more about showing this rare and diverse forest, a remnant lowland bit of old-growth hugging a bluff-top. This place gets the full unfettered west wind coming right down the Straits, so the trees on the edge are wildly “flagged” from centuries of being blasted by the Westerlies. Eagles and hawks patrol this bluff edge, riding these updrafts that also increase the wind’s velocity. Weeesheeeh, can you hear it?  Then there’s the trail snaking along, a left-over from when this was part of Fort Casey where they watched and waited for an enemy that never showed up. Farther inland, the trees are huge and less flagged, but still very gnarly. In fact, they have some of the gnarliest branches I’ve seen around Puget Sound. They’re trees you’d expect on the western beaches at Kalaloch or La Push instead of here, 100 miles to the east. Trees and wind, trees and wind. It’s a fun painting for me so far.

Rare-1

And here’s my progress so far. An old friend wrote last week to say he thought when my larger paintings reach this stage, it  was about as good as it gets – free and dramatic, non-objective nirvana. I completely agree. It’s not that the finished paintings are less good, just a different good. I could end it here, show it in some gallery for a month and maybe it’d be hung in some rich-guys house. But if I continue to paint it, thousands upon thousands will see it for decades to come – so I paint on.

Rare-2

Here’s some structure appearing – blocking out trees and distant horizon, the Olympic Peninsula in the distance.

Rare-3

And now the trail is defined, some parts are refined a bit so I can judge how it’s going to come together. Background horizon is finished enough that I can understand how much atmosphere there might be to make it appear distant. Painters out there: see how light that is! Just saying. Stay tuned, because given some time, by next week this should be well along – oh, but then there’s the magazine page I have to write, a new puzzle that needs proofing, a web site to build for Crater Lake Institute – and a spring to enjoy.

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

Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve – Forest Wildlife mural

Forest-Wildlife

Click the image and it will enlarge in your browser.

Feeling pretty good about this painting, and that’s saying something for me (who’s usually a real curmudgeon about my own stuff). With several more paintings right behind this one, I didn’t hesitate to finish it up this week. Some details need to be refined, a couple of  minor changes I can already see, but we’re close – very close.

This is all about wildlife in the forest, so I designed it to show the actual trail meandering down and around the viewer. It’s as if YOU were back in the woods with all the critters, watching hikers come and go, come and go. The coyote shares the trail with people as I often see them doing (they can cover a lot of ground that way), a Douglas squirrel shucks a Douglas-fir cone, a chickadee lands on an old uprooted snag. I enjoy piecing this together, one critter at a time, and hopefully in the end it all makes sense. The critters should all be sized relative to each other, spaced in such ways that might really be true. I still need to alter the rose color, fix the shine on the squirrel, a couple of other things – and, well, what do you know, just this moment I realized I forgot the deer mouse in the old stump. Back to the easel! Next time you see this painting, look for it.

And here’s the sketch again, finished just 13 days ago. I’m telling you, I’m on fire! Can you see the deer mouse?

Forest-animals-sketch

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

Progress Report – Whidbey Wildlife

I often get emails about blogging progress reports of these larger paintings. Someday I’ll set my camera up and do a little film of it, start to finish. This painting has some degree of pressure with the calendar, in other words, no time to mess around. So here’s a little progress report in a couple of photos.

 

Wildlife-4

Click the images to enlarge them in your browser.

Top image is how it’s looking this morning. Many things get in the way of painting the hours I need to put in, like new spring printed projects, puzzle redesigns, trying to find resource material for the other four paintings – but it’s moving along well. Last week I blogged about the sketch and an overview of the entire project here.
Wildlife-1

And here’s a couple of days ago. Background’s in place so I can begin defining the foreground’s details, critters, closeups that take the time. There have already been major changes in that area, but only I will know.Forest-animals-sketch

And here’s the original sketch I showed last week. Thanks, Mark and Jessica at the Whidbey Camano Land Trust for making this a very fun project. I don’t often get the chance to paint these complex murals of my backyard forest, but this project comes close.

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

Whidbey: A New Painting – A New Project

Forest-animals-sketch

Click the image and it will enlarge in your browser.

A new project unfolds! Rarely do I get to do a bunch of paintings of something I truly love and know already. Or do it for a local park and do it for a group as tasty as this. I’m painting some small murals, doing design and handling fabrication for trail exhibits for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust – just to the north of us. It’s actually part of the Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve, and, in fact, I often sail over to Whidbey Island right under the bluff where these installations will soon be installed in the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve. Here’s the location -right on the bluff-top to the left. Port Townsend is to the right just across the channel.

Admiralty Inlet Preserve looking south

Photo thanks to Mark Sheehan, WCLT

Above is the first sketch, already underway as a painting. Four other paintings come as soon as possible – and that’s the catch. All five plus fabrication and installation have to be finished up and installed in three months – a daunting task for some, but not the manic me. I’m just a slave to my paintbrush! This first painting is about the forest on the ridgetop, a very rare coastal old-growth forest. Being on a bluff at the downwind end of the Straits of Juan de Fuca, this forest sees some pretty violent weather, so the bluff-top trees have grown very gnarly and wind-flagged. But, back in the quieter part, a more normal forest shelters a marvelous bunch of critters, and that’s what this painting is all about. It’s also an island that was under ice until just 8.000 years ago, so there are some wildly odd critters missing, like native rabbits, moles, bobcats and others normally found around here but not on Whidbey. No moles? Humm. This is the part of my job I dearly love, that of learning all this stuff from people who love it, like Mark, Ida and Jessica and Janelle, Whidbey Islanders  who are helping me figure it out. And I, in turn, hope I’m helping them create something that will effect people for years to come.

And I just have to share this. An old friend and fellow artist, John Sturgeon, who teaches video at the University of Maryland recently contacted me, or maybe it was the other way around. There were four of us in the same year, same high school art classes that went on to life-long art careers – a rather high percentage, I think. John told me something I’ve suspected, but never heard from anyone who might know: “The general consensus is… that by five years out of art school about 10% are still practicing, and by 10 years out it drops to 5% . . . then more or less stays there.  However, those that make a living from it [making art instead of teaching art] . . . less than .05%, which is astounding.  You are among that small % my friend. Pretty damn cool. ”  Trouble is, I never really went to art school to learn how to do this stuff.

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. I currently have five up, with 15 more coming.