The first wayside panel of several more to come, this is going on Freeland Beach, a county shoreside park that has just rebuilt their beach to accommodate forage fish. Sure, people get to be here as well, but this is yet another effort to save endangered Orca whales in Puget Sound. Freeland is on Whidbey Island, just east of my studio here in Port Townsend, Washington.
Here’s the jobsite on the beach, an ancient wayside’s soon to be replaced by my new panel.
Just looks like a beach, doesn’t it? But there are good beaches for little fish, and not-so-good ones. The idea is make the beach useful for safety and spawning for little several kinds of small forage fish. These are small, schooling fish that serve as a vital food source for larger predators. Eaten by salmon, then the salmon are caught by orca – because orca are starving. This map below shows the three forage fish species, blue, green and red. The beach is right in the middle of the map.
So, enough science and thanks for reading to here. Here’s the panel sketch with my initial text.
And below the new beach with logs, beach grasses and other native plantings.
Yesterday I sent this and it wasn’t pleasant to view on computers. So, I apologize, but here it goes again. You know, old guys, new software. I don’t need to say more, except thanks for sticking with me.
I just finished these last week so wanted to share. A click will enlarge them nicely.
This project was for a native plant garden in Santa Clara County California. It’s a place surrounded by my art in other parks, Mt Diablo, up to Muir Woods, Big Basin Redwoods to Fort Funston and Angel Island, Golden Gate National Recreation Area are some. This park is urban, running along Coyote Creek through San Jose, with a sea of people living along the south shore of San Francisco Bay which includes nearby Silicon Valley and Stanford. Shown here are big background landscape paintings that I was given a fairly free hand it painting – like a gallery show right here in this little park.
Spanish First! So that’s the redundancy of the two sketchbooks in every panel. Took me a bit to accept it, but I’m okay with it now.
These are the very first wayside panels I’ve ever painted with Spanish as the primary language, which says lots about who uses this urban park. I’ve made many of park panels with Spanish as a second language, but never Spanish as the first language – which shows how far this country has changed in the past few decades. I’m proud to be involved in change.
The other interesting direction taken here is that the text isn’t necessarily connected to the art. It’s common to have background art connected to the rest of it, but this is refreshingly ‘wide’ vision of presenting these are more art than school. The sketchbooks are my pencil and watercolor paintings, with canvas acrylics as the backgrounds. All are 42″ wide.
There are elk in this panel, and the title ‘Restore’ suits it. Yes, they’ve introduced Tule elk back into the landscape above the East Bay, and so you can see them here at Hellyer Park up on the ridgetop fairly often.
This last panel is also different, using the entire panel as a thank you to the community’s efforts to repair a landscape much in need of the natural plants that are the foundation of a healthy city.
I want to thank Carolyn at Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation for these, for giving me a free hand at design and art. As I move forward with my art, replacing the almost extinct National Park Service with a path forward in continuing to do what I love – which is to make art that teaches people about their surroundings. It’s clear I didn’t really loose my job as our National Parks closes up shop, and I don’t mean any temporary government shutdown, but these great parks will soon become something else I’m not going to be a part of.
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I recently made two panels for the Whidbey Island Land Trust and Oak Harbor Garry Oak Society. Here’s the oak panel. This and a panel about nearshore restoration will be installed at the new Keystone Preserve on Whidbey Island very soon. I’m pleased how this all finished up, from concept designs, to making the art and finally making it all work with a text story. Art telling stories, we’ve been talking about that lately.
Garry oaks are the only oak trees in the Pacific Northwest, and they’ve become very rare. This is the same tree as the Oregon white oak, stately and slow-growing forests that were actually cultivated crops for thousands of years by the Indian tribes. These trees provided food and an open forest designed for other important plants such as camas and the other root vegetables for the first people who lived here.
Above is my refined sketch for the painting. I was trying to find a way to show the forest and some way to identify the important native plants that are rare as well. And this bluebird, below, gives a scale to the oak leaves and bird that could fit in the palm of my hand. Watercolor and pencil drawing.
And below, the second panel for this project, about the restoration of the bluff at the Reserve, eelgrass beds, orcas, salmon and forage fish.
People have been asking, are you still painting for the National Park Service as it spirals down to non-existence? Yes, I currently have two projects and two more awaiting for them – but it’s a sad story that shows my work with them is going to end soon – thanks to the Fascist leadership who is setting up the NPS for total failure. It’s been a wonderful experience for me to spend these past decades painting art for a grateful bunch of people who cared more about their country than making money.
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In 2024, I was commissioned by the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe in Sequim, Wa to make a series of wayside panels for the Dungeness River Center. This is an interpretive center, exhibits and classrooms, for the wild and free Dungeness, one of the steepest watersheds in the country. The project went on half a year, but I never posted a word about it here. Too many other paintings to talk about, I guess – not to mention finding the time to even sit down to post them.
The Tribe asked me to make these outside panels so when the visitor center is closed, visitors still have a visual learning experience. The panels are around the building, but also along the Olympic Discovery Trail that passes nearby. This trail is also part of the Pacific Northwest National Scenic Trail from Glacier National Park to La Push WA on the Pacific Ocean.
I’m happy with the results. This place is centered around an old railroad bridge (Railroad Bridge Park) and the Tribe bought it, gaining back a bit of their original land they had for thousands of years. In the process, we got to know a rather amazing group of S’Klallam people – and learned a lot doing it. We both felt privileged to be involved.
You’ll see both English and S’Klallam languages on these. The Tribe has programs in the local schools teaching this ancient language, and we tried to blend the languages, especially on the species captions. I think it worked pretty well, although it was a real challenge to figure out a font that has all the characters. Try finding a ADA compliant font with a backwards question mark, or a word that means Belted Kingfisher!
There’s a lot more than just painting that goes into this stuff. I don’t do it all, but from the ground up there’s the concrete pad, an ADA-approved installation of the legs and frame that will last 30 years, the aluminum panel the image is etched on is made only in South Dakota. The entire Adobe Suite of software (usually 4 programs that I use to design it) makes it print-ready. Then a committee has to approve what is written and painted so that it’s an accurate story. The art seems a secondary bit of this, but it takes the most time, and without good art, what is this but a book-on-a-stick!
We tried something new on this panel (above), making the three insets from laser-cut plastic that can be traced with pencil or crayon. School groups can trace the image onto paper to take with them – sort of a hands-on approach to a visual object.
Dusty Humphries, an artisan at the Tribal carving shed (actually a huge new building, not a shed) allowed me in to photograph his work. A truely amazing place.
Lori Grinnell Greninger seemed to be all over this project, giving us help in many ways – and not just modeling her hat – which the building was modeled after.
This last panel has the only image not of my own art or photography. Thanks to John Gussman for the drone image. Also a great thanks to Kathy Steichen for recommending me to the Tribe for this project in the first place. After a lifetime of painting, these new challenges keep me young, and I’ve worked with Kathy on many projects now.
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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.
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.
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And thanks, Lisa, at Northwest Straits Foundation for continuing to support this guy, one man with a brush.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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