Category Archives: Commissioned paintings

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

Prairie Mural – San Juan Island National Historical Park


I finished my prairie mural for the San Juan Islands National  Historical Park a few days ago. So, I thought I’d pass it around here where I reliably get some feedback – good or bad. A very solitary live I have, painting and just sending this stuff out to wait for time to happen. I think I nailed the landscape well, but I won’t know for awhile. Below are some portions of it, left and right sides.

And below is the sketch. This place is very complex when you actually get down on your knees and look at it. VERY complex. As in, how the heck do I paint THIS? And the real physical place is much more detailed than I attempted.

I wrote this about my project here a few months ago: I have a long history with the San Juan Islands of Washington State. In the 80’s and on my own restored boat, I summered here while I learned to paint (heck, I’m still learning to paint). And now I’m back there making some rather large murals for the new visitor center at the American Camp unit of the National Historical Park down at the island’s south end at Cattle Point and South Beach. Nancy and I went there a few weeks ago, a FOUR ferry ride for us up and back!

This will be printed (the original won’t be on the wall in case the terrorists burn it down) and will be 6′ wide x 5′ high. Surrounding the visitor center is open prairie stuck out on a point with water on both sides – and one of the most beautiful places in the Salish Sea.

I cropped out some detailed sections so you could see the drawing better, but even so it’s a fairly complex bunch of lines. There are glacial erratic boulders that have some strange mossy adaptions, a butterfly only found here, voles and snails, birds and invasive rabbits. Red foxes that are Cascade dark phase colors, lots of black-tailed deer and meadowlarks (a bird we’ve never seen here at home just 30m south) We saw almost everything going in the painting on the site visit.

Here are my drawings for the bottom section. See how much more open it is so it’s understandable. In the color phase it got much more detailed. Truly fun to paint.

Here’s the empty building waiting for these two paintings, plus another dozen smaller ones. Getting the first one finished helps me understand how I’ll handle the color and detail on the others. The big wall is next, 38 feet of it. Thanks, Joe, Sara and Lex at the park for making this a fun and interesting project.

This view of the prairie and Strait shows scenery, but it also has lots of my paintings if you know where to look. From Mount Rainier NP in the very distant background 100 miles away, to state parks and land trust installations in between, I think I probably have 100 paintings in various exhibits and waysides in view here. But who’s counting.

And here’s the 38′ wall with my concept sketch for the next painting. How the heck I show a 38′ wall in a dinky blog post, I’m not even going to try to do. So stay tuned.

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

San Juan Island National Historical Park

I have a long history with the San Juan Islands of Washington State. In the 80’s and on my own restored boat, I summered here while I learned to paint (heck, I’m still learning to paint). And now I’m back there making some rather large murals for the new visitor center at the American Camp unit of the National Historical Park down at the island’s south end at Cattle Point and South Beach. Nancy and I went there a few weeks ago, a FOUR ferry ride for us up and back!

It was truly fun to see all these places again, and I got some good references, one of which is shown above in drawing form. This one is 6′ x 5′ and will be on the wall shown below, far left, and shows the complex natural prairie that grows here. It’s open prairie stuck out on a point with water on both sides – and one of the most beautiful places in the Salish Sea.

I cropped out some detailed sections so you could see the drawing better, but even so it’s a fairly complex bunch of lines. There are glacial eratic boulders that have some strange mossy adaptions, a butterfly only found here, voles and snails, birds and invasive rabbits. Red foxes that are Cascade dark phase colors, lots of black-tailed deer and meadowlarks (a bird we’ve never seen here at home just 30m south) We saw almost everything going in the painting on the site visit.

Both of these paintings will be the main focus of the inside. The second painting (shown at the bottom) will need to be redrawn, but it fills the entire main wall, 38 feet by 17 ft high. That’ll be another post or two. Our goal was getting that beautiful prairie drawn before the wind and rain came. Which we did!

And here’s the 38′ wall with my concept sketch. How the heck I show a 38′ wall in a dinky blog post, I’m not even going to try to do. So stay tuned.

On the way home the next day, we were coming across Whidbey Island in between the two ferries. That road always has a stunning view of the Olympics and our home in Port Townsend, but the sunset did it up right, showing us yet again why we picked this place to be a artists. See that big freighter? Port Townsend is just on shore behind 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, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

Everglades Preliminary Drawings

This is the fishing camp we could have stayed in, accessible only by air boat – but NO, I had to sleep in the Best Western in Homestead, Florida! Yes, I checked it out and the python had left.

Sorry I haven’t posted in a few weeks, but the art has been flowing out of here like a narrow channel after a King Tide. Meaning fast and furious. I was in Everglades National Park in July for a site visit for this and now have all 17 drawings in refined versions finished up. After this, let the paint begin so this gater-guy can admire the installation right next to his home slough.

All these are for outdoor waysides, so they’ll have text blocks.  That’s what the empty white areas are for. I know, it would be better if it was all painting, but these installations will teach people about this place for many decades – long after I’m gone, kids will wander down these boardwalks and maybe learn something. One is bigger, an 8′ wide mural, but I haven’t started that yet.

These are some photos of the site visit. Lots of walking slowly around and talking, the pros telling us Northwesterners the scoop about this rare place. I learned a lot about a lot, from one end of the Sea of Grass to the other.

This drawing is about the strange and wonderful anhinga bird, and it’s actually going ON the anhinga trail. These birds hunt by slowly swimming along underwater and stabbing fish, and I got to watch that in action.

And several pieces of art are about herons. Lots of herons. There are TEN species of herons in this one painting and shows how they follow the receding water level as the season’s change and the ‘river’ dries.

There’s an algae that grows all over the place here. Periphyton. It’s food, shelter and covers the ground pretty much everywhere the shallow water is. It floats, then dives to the bottom, then dries out then the water recedes. All in one painting!

Stay tuned as this project develops. I want to thank the good folks at EDX Exhibits in Seattle for taking another chance on me, for traveling across the country and then still speak to me! Life is good.

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, Waysides, Wildlife

More at California Creek

Two more finished panels and paintings for my California Creek project at Blaine Washington.  Actually, these two panels represent 17 paintings, using with lots of little ones together. The first two were about birds and wildlife, these two are stories about clean water, shellfish and tides – and a long history of thousands of years of salmon and the people that followed them here. Here is the original concept drawing – it evolves a long, long way to finally becoming a finished installation. These will be in fused aluminum and last probably 30 years.

The fourth panel is about salmon and the people who hunted them. Eight paintings for this one. The main painting shows a summer salmon camp at the mouth of the creek where they caught and smoked the fish.

The original concept sketch, a bit more refined than the other one. I used Curtis photos as references.

And here, again, are the other two. These four will be lined up along the shoreline on an interpretive trail near a  new kayak launch.  Might have to go there with my boat and try it out. I like nothing better than creating these installations. Get out of the car, walk up to an overlook and here are a bunch of paintings that teach. An art gallery on the beach!

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, Waysides, Wildlife

California Creek – waysides for a new park

I’ve been painting four of these and we’re closing in on final versions. I thought this a good time to show two of them off. No, California Creek isn’t in California, but close to the Canadian border near Blaine Washington. The creek flows into Drayton Harbor and then the Salish Sea close to Semiahmoo Spit. It’s been in the process for awhile, but a new kayak launch park is being build at the estuary of the creek into Drayton Harbor, a perfect place for some of my paintings.

This creek has lots of hobby farms and residents upstream, and water quality has suffered from animal waste and failing septics. Lots of work  has gone into fixing all that, and this second panel tells that story. Get the animals away from the creek! And fix your mess! I think both these tell the story pretty well.

Here are a couple of shots of the area. A perfect place for an afternoon with either a kayak or paddleboard. The launch will be right at the left bridge approach with parking, and, four of these panels.

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, Waysides, Wildlife

A Butterfly Garden

I was asked to paint a wayside for our nearby H. J. Carroll County Park. A nice interlude between some fairly big efforts, it was fun to do – and here’s the final result. Two fearless women, Linda and Robin, keep this garden together, raise plants in a nearby nursery, find seeds for about a dozen ecosystems and have done this for years. It seemed like a fine effort to help with and I don’t often do any local stuff for nearby parks, especially the county.

To begin, I did some smaller sketches of plants, the species that our local butterflies like. This was great information to learn about, provided by Wendy Feltham, and it helped me narrow all this down to fit on one panel. Then I painted a sort-of sketchbook page of the life cycle of a butterfly.

And all this came together to make a nice effort that has a lot of knowledge all crammed into a small area. If you’re local, stop by the park and have a look.

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.

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Commissioned paintings, Early Paintings, National Park Service, Waysides

Grove of Titans – Save the Redwoods League


The winding road of life sometimes loops back to the start. In the 1980’s, I was commissioned to paint a mural of Mill Creek in Redwood National Park near Crescent City, California. It was my first piece of public art for any national park, and it opened my eyes to what might be possible for my future. That project made me see the value in painting for a bigger cause than simply art for people’s walls. That idea has remained with me ever sense.

After that first effort, I was soon painting for other parks and some for The Save-the-Redwoods League in San Francisco, which, at that time, was the front line in trying to stop commercial logging of the last 2% of the Coastal Redwoods. That’s right, 2%! I painted a lot of redwoods in those years.

And now, some 40 years later, I was just asked to paint some more redwoods for Redwood National Park. When I did the first painting (seen at the bottom here), no one realized the importance of this area in the Mil Creek Valley of Jed Smith Redwoods State Park. Now we know it’s home to some of the tallest and biggest redwoods on the planet, the Grove of Titans. Save-the-Redwoods League has partnered with Redwood National Park to build a very impressive elevated boardwalk to save the shallow roots of the trees there, and these three new panels with my art will be on that boardwalk. It’s within a few hundred yards of the site of that first painting!

Here’s a reference photo of that grove, you can see similar elements in the big panel at the top. Thanks to the Save-the-Redwoods League for hiring me, and thanks to EDX Exhibits in Seattle for yet another chance to paint nature. Neither of these folks realized my history here, but I somehow got the job anyway! Thanks to Deborah at SRL and Beth and Michael at EDX. You guys are wonderful to work with.

Above is a photo of the Grove of Titans. You can see where I got the design for the larger forest panel.

And here’s the original painting of Mill Creek, a watercolor on a full sheet of mat board. I’ve certainly changed my style in 40 years.

And another painting from that same era of the Smith River that Mill Creek joins. I painted this for Six Rivers National Forest, my first Forest Service piece of art dated about the same time. It was painted for the Discovery Museum in Eureka, CA.

This was a very fun project for me, to go back to my park-roots and remember all these redwood paintings I did in some other life, hundreds of them – at that time, I was the struggling artist.

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.

[previous title] — [next title]

Commissioned paintings, New Painting Post, Sailing, Waysides, Wildlife

Orcas Landing Waysides – San Juan Islands

This was the Orcas Landing in the San Juan Islands of Washington State a couple of years ago, cleaned up from when there were giant fuel tanks here. In the 1980’s I tied up at this dock, and did it again with another boat in the 1990’s. Now the tanks are gone, a new dock that’s not falling apart is there and, some of my art.

I received some photos of the final installation and it looks very good, so I thought I’d share it here. It took three years to get this figured out, but my part was just a small piece of it. If you’re waiting in line for the ferry, just walk down the ramp and enjoy the view.

I did two wayside panels here. One about the rich aquatic ecosystem right under the docks – a landscape few of us ever see.

And a panel about the tribal connections here.  For hundreds of years, the Tulalip tribe would use their canoes with a complicated cedar fiber net system to create an artificial reef to trap salmon. Reef fishing, it was called. Back in the 80’s, I saw some of this actually happening and I’ll bet I’m probably the only artist around that could paint reef fishing from memory. For the bottom part, I used artifact photos from the Burke Museum as references for the tools, and a photo of the planking of our own cedar-sided house as a background. I thought it worked pretty well to tell a complicated story. These two images enlarge if you click on them.

San Juan County removed the wooden decking, added seating and new metal and cement decking, a huge tribal mural painted on the nearby building and some really wonderful iron blacksmithing of bull kelp.

In my mind, this is exactly how public art should be approached. Not ‘art by committee’ where a group selects some strange design by low-bid, but working it out with a broad number of skilled individuals coming together to contribute what they each do best. Check out the seating and native plant garden. I’m proud to have been a part of this, and it sort of comes full-circle for me and my history here.

And here’s a story in the local paper on Orcas Island.

A new experience, three years in the making, awaits you at the ferry landing

This makes a grand total of 24 paintings now installed on Orcas Island as public art. I get around!

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

Glacier Park sloppy mural details

I posted about this painting of Glacier National Park recently, and now I’ve scanned it for the next step in becoming the back of the park map. As I was scanning and then cleaning up the file in Photoshop, I was struck with how loose and abstract my stuff gets when you zoom in on it. Brush strokes, smudges, finger prints, cat hair, my hair (what’s left of it) is all in here, stuck down forever. I think it’s a good view of my painting process, so here are some samples I screen-grabbed as I went.

This first one is the ptarmigan chicks in the center foreground. Notice the while lines around the heads to help bring that out from the background. And the vague indication of the rocks that are only a few brush strokes building from dark to light.  Not detailed at all, none of it, but it still suffices to tell the story. Click on all these to see larger versions in your browser. It helps understand what I’m showing.

And here is the ram’s head on the painting’s right. In the closeup details on the second image, you can see it’s really just a gauzy overlay of white that makes for the final presentation, and you can see again that this entire animal was initially painted dark umber to begin with.

Lower left corner with the snowshoe hare and butterfly, it all works pretty well at this resolution, but blow it up so you can actually see the brush strokes and it’s pretty darned abstract.

And finally, the area around the elk, flowers and sedges, alpine landscape with the stream. It looks okay at this normal resolution.

But as I zoom in on it, the thing falls apart fairly quickly.

If I presented this in a gallery situation, would it work? Probably, because people will buy anything = witness the last presidency. But there’s not much fine detail here except some dabs and dashes of paint. What I’m trying to get across here is that big paintings are really just that, dabs and dashes. I get questions about my process and I’d have to say here that it’s all just dabbing and dashing, splashing paint on a flat surface and standing back every few minutes to see how it’s going. In the end, it’s a huge finished thing that looks okay, but every moment is just abstract art in each very tiny area – then repeat over and over.

What IS this, anyway? What an abstract or maybe even non-objective piece of art.

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, Waysides, Wildlife

Dugualla Flats Preserve

Just finishing up two new paintings for outdoor wayside exhibits at Whitbey Island’s Dugualla Bay Preserve.  This is another project for the Whidbey Camano Island Land Trust and, as always, it was a pleasure to paint for them.

This recently restored wetland is on both sides of a dike road a few miles north of Oak Bay. One side is fresh water, the other is a salt marsh salmon habitat area. First it was bay, then farmland with nature shut out. Now it’s back to nature. The bay side is very good forage fish and salmon habitat.

This first painting is the freshwater side, a rich habitat of cattails and critters from western toads to trumpeter swan – and I can’t say I’ve ever painted THOSE two in one painting before! The wetlands have water levels that rise and fall with the seasons and on a site visit a few months ago I took some reference shots, not very good as you can see, but somehow I built an interesting painting with what I had.

I started with a quick gesture drawing, a concept sketch showing cattails on the right, map and text on the left, maybe wildlife in the center. It’s sort of amazing to me that the final painting was very close to this.

Then a more refined drawing came with a better understanding how the wildlife fits in, getting their sizes and spatial separations set for a good piece of art. The toad couldn’t be down with the rest of them in the marsh since they’re up in the drier meadows, so I just floated it in midair – a toady blimp.

And this is how the final painting looks. Click on it to enlarge in your browser. These things are certainly not just a nice painting like my days of gallery painting. It takes a bunch of planning to get the other components to all fit.

It all came together with the text, a map I did in Illustrator using the National Park Service’s map software – and the text the Land Trust supplied me. Very skilled efforts go into doing text for these panels and these are really well written. Too many words it becomes a ‘book on a stick’ and no one reads it. Too few words and no one learns anything. And this type of art is all about learning something – which I hope you did with this blog. I hope you liked 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.