Category Archives: Commissioned paintings

Commissioned paintings, Jigsaw Puzzles, Murals, Nancy Cherry Eifert, New Painting Post, Washington State Parks, Wildlife

The Mount St Helens project

I’ve been working on this project since May, but the painting didn’t really start until August. I’ll bet over a million brush strokes! I’m close to finishing painting 24 images for the big revamping of the Washington State Park’s visitor center at Mt St Helens National Monument. I’m told it’s one of the biggest interpretive projects ever for Washington State Parks.

I’ve already made some art for this fantastic park before, but that was a series of outside wayside panels for the US Forest Service placed around the mountain, plus a big painting that we eventually made into a puzzle. This current effort is at Silver Lake on the park’s west side, a big visitor center built right after the eruption in 1980. I’m working with EDX in Seattle who did the designs and asked me to do the art. Sure glad they did – it’s been interesting.

For this post, I’ll focus on just the wetlands tabletop, 17 feet long and 4 feet wide, it’s one of the most complex visitor center exhibits I’ve painted. Other parts of the project will be posted soon.

I have few finished photos of this, but I did get the tabletop main painting scanned – a whopping 4.5 gigabits of data that will be printed on aluminum (I think).

Drawing and the beginnings of the painted art.
Final painting for the tabletop, about 17′ wide.
Part of the left side of the tabletop.

The tabletop has all sorts of lift lids showing hidden critters beneath them. There are spinners that show the eruption, another with the evolution of Silver Lake. It’s a very busy thing and I’m hoping kids will love it.

On my next post, I’ll get into the smaller pieces of art, then the second wall (an entirely different theme and painting 14′ long).

Nancy on the boardwalk at Silver Lake. Enough wood here to build several houses, and it’s in good shape – goes on for half a mile. The volcano is straight ahead but still 25m away.

In case you don’t remember what the mountain looks like, here’s a puzzle we did some years ago for it.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

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 stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Commissioned paintings, New Painting Post, US Fish Wildlife Service, Waysides, Wildlife

Similk Bay Beach Restoration Art

I’ve painted many pieces of art for the Northwest Straits Foundation. They’re the shoreline restoration folks in Bellingham, WA that coordinates the restoration funding with actually getting the job done. And, they often come to me for the final, interpretive panel that explains what they did.

This time it was for Similk Bay along the eastern side of Whidbey Island, just northeast of Deception Pass in Washington State. It’s a very shallow bay, full of critically important eelgrass, but at low tides you could actually drive on it – it was that shallow. And people did drive on it! For years they used a small launch ramp right here, running over the eelgrass with its crabs, young salmon, forage fish, all manner of fragile aquatic life. Then: why are the crabs gone? Where are the fish?

There were people disgruntled to loose their launch pad, but sometimes progress backward is good. Below was my five-minute concept sketch. I put it in the design program to see how it fit with some text. Pretty well, I thought.

Below is my refined sketch. You can see how it’s basically it’s the same drawing, but all the details are now worked out. It still changed a lot before the final color version. All of this, including the final painting, took less than a month.

And here it is in the design program. It fits pretty well. I wrote the text, as I often do, but it was altered many times as all good writing is a collaboration before it’s final publication.

And below is the site where this printed panel will live. Cars drove right down here past the driftwood to launch their boats. The final panel below.


Here’s a sample of the beach, part of my process is to take lots of reference photos. I needed this in the studio later to figure out how the beach and bay bottom might look.

And my house model. The old launch ramp is right next to the house. I really enjoy these projects because it allows me to place art where you’d never expect to find it – ON A BEACH SAVING AN ECOSYSTEM! My paintings end up on people’s walls, but they also end up in place like this.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com. 

And thanks, Lisa, at Northwest Straits Foundation for continuing to support this guy, one man with a brush.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Commissioned paintings, New Painting Post, Washington State Parks

Using Art for Historic Fort Flagler

On top of everything else, I somehow fit these two paintings into 2022, a  year of many paintings. This park, Fort Flagler State Park, is on Washington’s Marrowstone Island, only 4 air-miles from our place near Port Townsend. It’s so close, how could I say no to learn more about my ‘hood’?

It’s a place that has relics from WW1, WW2, and many other improvements that have come along during the years – including after it became a state park. Sorting all that out was monumental, but thanks to Kelsey at State Parks, we figured out what to paint and what to leave out.  The above painting is about the fort and Admiralty Inlet, the waterway the fort is guarding.

The panel below is the same fort, but the housing area during WW2, an amazing ‘town’ of high-end barracks and homes, the power plant, stores and social buildings, parade grounds, the hospital and all the rest that was required when this was basically wilderness. No driving over to  the Food Co-op for kale, but the fort had huge gardens and probably acres of greens. I left out the Chinese laundry that was on the beach – imagine, all the wash was done using hot salt water!

Besides maps, I used my own site photos to figure all this out. I pieced it together, one building at a time, one street after the other. It wasn’t easy, but that’s why this stuff is still fun for me. I DID grow up in a museum. It’s in my blood.

Oh, and thanks to Sam W at state parks who keeps giving me these fun projects, who was also a great help dodging the gun-guys and their overly picky changes.

Above are my sketches with changes the historians came up with.  It’s just part of the process: I toss it out there as best I can, they all mutter and say “nice try, but”. As you can see, these finished panels are now installed and have become another part of the history of this place. It’s not just some of the best beaches and forest trails, but a really historic landscape.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Commissioned paintings, Early Paintings, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

Everglades National Park – Plentiful Fish wayside

I’m now finishing up all 24 paintings for Everglades National Park. I went there twice in the past 2 years to get it all straight in my head, and now the final paintings are coming together. Here’s number 19, a story about fish. Putting art with words, I’ve become better at it, but it’s still much more difficult than when I just painted landscapes.

I have a little note on my website (larryeifert.com)  that asks to see old paintings if you have them.  I get some interesting submissions, and this one just arrived from John Van Spyk who said he inherited this. Dated 1989, it’s now 33 years old. I painted hundreds of these small landscapes back then, taking my painting kit out along roadsides and going to work. I could do several of these a day and sold them in the Eifert Gallery in the little town of Ferndale. Here’s another one I recently received from Judy Salter. Both of these are watercolors, and I think they’ve stood the text of time pretty well.

But now I’m into much more complicated efforts – and still enjoy it. Here’s the evolution of the fish painting: the original concept sketch, then the beginning of the colored chapter, and finally again the final. It didn’t change all that much, did it?

Location photos for the painting during a Florida rainly day. There’s Sherry, part of the design and production team.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Commissioned paintings, New Painting Post, Washington State Parks, Waysides, Wildlife

Sand Verbena Moth

I went on vacation – from making art.  It’s been years since I did that, maybe never. I’ve been a working artist for over half a century and I can’t remember ever just, well, stopping – I worried I’d forget how to do it.

I’m now back in the saddle and painting from a long list of patient people waiting – and this wayside panel is soon going to my local park, Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington. Here’s the original concept sketch.

This park is a beautiful place, but all is not paradise here – alien plants are everywhere. European dune grass and Scotch broom have infiltrated all over the dunes, choking out natives like the yellow sand verbena that needs shifting dunes to live.  This plant actually has it’s own pollinator. The sand verbena moth was just  discovered in 1995, and it turns out this new-to-us fuzzy creature needs this plant to live, and only this plant. There are only 6 locations in Washington State where it still survives. The moth uses the verbena for everything, from eating flower nectar, to laying its eggs in the same flowers, to the larvae eating the flowers and leaves. The plant, in turn, uses the moth to pollinate it – a symbiotic love affair.

Here’s the sand verbena moth.

The area where the dune restoration is progressing will soon have this wayside sign installed to tell this story, and help keep people off these dunes – and off the verbena and moths. It doesn’t look like an endangered habitat, but it is.

This is, in a nutshell, what I do – I make art to educate and help people to understand their roles in helping nature. I’ve always thought it’s a good reason to make paintings.

And here are my little inset paintings for the lower left area. Fun little studies by themselves.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Commissioned paintings, Everett Washington, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

City of Everett WA Madison Morgan Park

ALL THESE ENLARGE WITH A CLICK

I’ve been painting some outdoor wayside panels for the City of Everett, Washington. This is my 3rd and 4th for Everett, which is north of Seattle and is becoming a real city with some real money to spend on this stuff. But it’s also becoming a ‘real city’, with its nature gone. They have a small nature park in the middle of it and so I’m working on some installations that tell about its nature. Lots of shrub plantings are going on here, putting the place back to some assembly of a native forest.

This is the original concept sketch and you can see how the design really stayed the same as the painting progressed. The boundaries for me were not hemmed in at all, they were just pleased I was doing it.

This panel is sort of a nature guide, birds on the top and animals on the bottom. It was a fun image for me to figure out, as these are all the same critters as we have here in our own little forest just 40 miles to the west on the Olympic Peninsula. And I’ll say this, we have better by far, right here in our own meadow. That makes these paintings show how fortunate Nancy and I are to have these acres of trees and critters that feel safe here. We even have old snags that serve as homes for many.

This is the original finished painting before it went into the design. It takes a variety of skills to make these, design, writing, making art and a deep background of the nature. Somehow it all has to come together to make a dramatic and beautiful piece of art that, hopefully, lots of people will stop and learn something. A bit of art in the forest.

And this is the corner of Madison-Morgan Naturescape Park where these two panels are going. The second wayside is being painted now and is coming soon, so stay tuned. Then between 15 and 20 more are going around Silver Lake in Everett, another urban nature park being spruced up by my stuff. In total, I should have about 24 paintings on panels here that will all last beyond my life – it’s a good legacy.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Commissioned paintings, Murals, National Park Service, People Paintings, Wildlife

Installation Photos San Juan Island murals

Panorama of my 35′ x 17′ tribal wall. Possibly the biggest painting in the Pacific Northwest about prehistoric Indian life before European contact.

While the furniture and other exhibits aren’t installed yet by the good folks at Capitol Museum Services from Manassas, VA, I received these photos from the Park Superintendent, Elexis Fredy, and they’re good enough to pass around. This is at American Camp, San Juan Island National Historical Park in Washington State. Thanks, Lexi, for sending these. I thought I’d show them here because I rarely get to show actual installation shots of the process. I paint this stuff, go home and start the next one.  I know, you’ve seen these paintings before on my blog, but not in the actual space they were designed for. The back wall is 35 feet across, 17 feet high, the prairie mural is 7 feet across. My part of this is finished, and I’m currently working through 35 new paintings for other parks.

This secondary mural is 7 feet wide and shows today’s prairie, which is most of American Camp’s landscape. It will have a reader rail with an additional 5 paintings of mine along the bottom.  

I painted my first visitor center exhibit 60 years ago! Not a typo. It wasn’t exactly good, but it was my start, and later I figured I’d not improve much if I went to art school and learned to paint like everyone else – so instead, I just got to work. It’s been a long and most interesting path, to put it mildly. It used to be that I’d travel to the site, get a room to live in or camp, and start painting. Sometimes it’d take weeks, a couple of projects took more than a month. The food was generally awful, and it wasn’t easy, living out of a suitcase. One, a huge project in the Denver International Airport, meant I had to clear security each day, have ALL the materials xrayed, get crazy badges and walk to work going beneath 747’s that had just landed from Germany.

Today, this has all evolved to a much more civilized process. I get to paint in my studio at a smaller size, send a digital file that is then printed on vinyl and actually looks better than the original. The installation in this new building will show off my stuff for many decades, probably upwards of a half a century and be seen by people long after I’m gone. If the place burns to the ground thanks to domestic terrorists, they’ll just put up a new version in the new building (hear that, Bundy Clan). If someone throws acid on it, they can just change out a panel instead of the entire wall.

And here’s the installation crew getting things ready. Better them than me, I’ll say that without hesitation.

A little back story on the art. In 2020, I was commissioned by EDX Exhibits in Seattle to design this wall, and the only real guidelines given were that it should show the real location at South Beach on San Juan Island. I lived on my boat in the 80’s near here, so I already knew the place – and that was of great help). I set the scene of a summer tribal salmon camp, where for centuries families would come to fish and dry salmon – and pick and process camas bulbs that were the two main staples of their diet. It’s a pre-contact scene without iron or steel tools, so it might be any moment in time between 8,000 years ago to about 1700 A.D.

How Did The Process Start?

It was great fun for me to research this, and I’m thankful they gave me almost complete freedom to do what I wanted. It took dozens of site photos, Google Earth views and every Edward Curtis photo I could find to do this. The web has many helpful photos, but some were completely unreliable. The park and tribes checked accuracies of hundreds of details, but not the overall design of people working and meeting on the prairie where the park is today. For example, they had Wool Dogs, a now-extinct breed of canine that were both pets, babysitters and wool sources they trimmed clothing with. There are several in the painting.

The visitor center will open at the end of June 2022 – come out and see it.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Commissioned paintings, Murals, National Park Service, New Painting Post

San Juan Island NHP – the final story

I wanted to post this since I’m almost at the end of this long-running project. This is being installed shortly in the new visitor center, San Juan Island National Historical Park, Washington State. Two murals and 18 other pieces of art, this was all started in November 2020, 530 days ago as of April 14. These things take time, patience and ‘keep smiling, this can’t go on forever’. (all images should enlarge in your browser, and you’ll  need that for a 35-feet painting. 

Above is my original concept sketch, drawn on a piece of writing paper and placed in the plans (that weren’t even finished yet). This was for EDX, the designer and a wonderful company in Seattle I truly enjoy working with.  Below, you can see the expanded version, bigger paper, more details I researched using Edward Curtis historic photos for references.

You can see how these things progress, adding detail at each stage.

Then we realized a wall with my second mural would block the left side, so I moved things around. Same content, just in different places.

And then, just like that I painted it. The fabrication contract was won by Capitol Museum Services near Washington DC, and I was on the bid as the artist that would, in effect, finish the same project I had started months before! The park would have preferred color references first for the painting, but I just went for it.  I painted it half size, cut it in pieces so I could scan it, which was done in 110 individual scans on my flat-bed, then pieced together on my computer.  I wonder how many artists in this country could have done all this ‘in house’?

And below is the wall it’s going on in the new visitor center, 35 feet wide by 17 feet tall. My second mural of the prairie is going on the wall to the left.

And here’s the other mural, a current scene of the park’s prairie.

A long and winding road, isn’t that what life should be. This one made me thankful I’m still doing this, a straight and narrow path of painting American nature at its best.

More soon. Stay tuned. Feel free to pass this around. People seem to enjoy seeing my process.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Commissioned paintings, National Park Service, New Painting Post, People Paintings

Wrapping Up My American Camp mural

This photo was sent by Margy Emerson of her sister next to the installation.

Getting close to the final brushstroke on this 35-foot wall for the San Juan National Historical Park visitor center mural. How does a painter know when it’s the final brush stroke? When he can’t stand to make another one! (or so the old saying goes.) This wall was probably more brush strokes that I would have liked, but the entire process was interesting, challenging and really fun. I can’t help but feel grateful for the opportunity.

Here are some section shots that should enlarge in your browser so you can see it better. I think there are around 105 Indians, 18 gulls, 3 eagles and 2 wool dogs. Those wool dogs are an extinct species of dogs tribal weavers would use for wool, and I have one of them spinning with a drop spindle.

The scene is at South Beach, San Juan Island, Washington, a place that is now a national historic park. Historically, It’s a park because of the Pig War in 1859 between the U.S. and Britain. In reality, the “history” is more about the giant salmon runs in late summer, when millions of fish coming down the Strait of Juan de Fuca would crowd the shoreline. For thousands of years, many different tribes would show up here to catch and dry a few of these fish, and also dig camas bulbs, and catch up on the news. Both the salmon and camas flour were important winter foods.

The painting is supposed to show pre-European contact, so no iron, steel, or woven cotton fabric. It was fun to research all this, but it’s also why I enjoy making art so much for the National Park Service. We both feel art is a good way to show our legacy, our history and future (see the current generation and future generation down in the right corner). The NPS seriously pushes me to paint beyond what I’ve ever thought I’d paint. This project made me realize how grateful I am for taking physics and algebra in high school!

Here’s a photo of my studio with part of this being painted. See those reference photos down along the bottom? Nancy was my model for almost every one of the people.

Below is the visitor center wall this is going on. It’ll be installed by early summer if we’re all lucky, along with another 11 paintings from me, and all the other exhibits. Capitol Museum Services from Manassas Virginia is doing the installation.

The outside of the new visitor center with Nancy in front and a truly amazing Douglas-fir that they basically built the building around. Most commercial projects would have just bulldozed the tree, cleared the land and then planted little Mall-Ready trees, but not the NPS!

And the last two photos are the location of the painting a quarter mile from the visitor center. It’s actually a couple of square miles of landscape all pushed together into one painting, add people, voila!

When I was growing up, the kid of two people who worked for the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, Illinois, I would go down to the museum after school. My babysitters were the curators who were building giant habitat exhibits much like this new wall mural. Most of the exhibits were about nature, but a couple were of Indian life. Robert Larson, a famed painter in charge of this (and a big man who didn’t need a ladder to paint the sky) would talk to me as he worked about what he was doing. I was always a little kid with his mouth open in awe. That was 60 years ago! I know Bob would have enjoyed this, wanted to be a part of it. His kindness and friendship, along with all the rest of those wonderful people in the museum’s back end, are still a factor in my life.

Here’s a photo of Larson doing a plaque of my mom after her death. It’s in the Virginia Eifert Book Store in the museum. And below, one of his big Indian paintings at the museum.

Robert Larson paints the Archaic diorama in the ÒPeoples of the PastÓ exhibit. Photo courtesy Illinois State Museum

More soon. Stay tuned. Feel free to pass this around. People seem to enjoy seeing my process.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Commissioned paintings, National Park Service, People Paintings

American Camp mural progress report

One man with a brush! One brush stroke at a time! (these blow up in your browser to see details)

Personally, I think there must be an easier way to pass the time in my 70’s, but here I am none-the-less – cranking away on a super-complex wall mural in my studio.  I’d  have to say this project sure is fun and a real challenge, and keeps my brain about as sharp as it can be.  I’m just glad I took physics and higher math in high school.

This is being painted half-size for a 35′-wide x 17′ tall wall in the new visitor center at the San Juan Island National Historical Park near Friday Harbor, Washington. Same project, I  finished the first one, a big prairie ecosystem painting. This is a bigger thing by far. This is the entire side wall of the building, and has all sorts of stuff complicating things, wall plugs, fire alarms, a door, a reader rail with tribal artifacts – makes me dizzy just trying to work it out.

What’s Going On?

This scene shows the summer gathering on the prairies at South Beach and Salmon Banks in the San Juan Islands, where many tribes would gather in late summer to fish and dry salmon, dig and roast camas bulbs and lay in winter stores.  The buildings were temporary. This went on for thousands of years and so the painting is set in a pre-iron, pre colonization time, maybe 500 years ago. So far, Nancy has been the model for almost all the people. I think there are about 30 of them. Some facial features I found online in the Curtis photo library, some I took from modern tribal gathering photos but just slimmed everyone down. This was also pre-refined sugar and wheat times.

So how is this installed?

I’ll do the sky as a separate painting using a car paint sprayer, scan and photograph all of it, piece it together into on giant digital file. Then Capitol Museum Services in Manassas, Virginia will put it on vinyl and up it goes (thankfully, I don’t have to do that part).  I’m just the guy with the paintbrush.

More soon. Stay tuned. Feel free to pass this around. People seem to like seeing my process.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.