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.
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.
We live in a forest, beside a meadow. Every time I leave the house, go down the back steps on my way to the studio, I see a little flash of tail scurry by – swish, and it’s gone. It’s like a mouse, but with wings. I think this little Bewick’s is a pretty good reason to live here and I’ve painted images of them often. After getting bird drawn, I simply went a few feet from my studio steps, snatched up a fern frond and grabbed a bit of branch the last storm blew off one of the alders. Right there, the makings of ‘still life with little bird’, a painting was born.
I’ve always painted this way, taking careful notice of what’s around me, piecing together a design and putting it down on paper. I can do this at my home or in some alpine meadow, and it always seems to give me a thrill to see it come to life.
Here’s one of the oldest efforts I have record of doing this routine. Someone sent me this painting from 1979. What was with all that black? I don’t even own a tube of black paint today. I don’t have the foggiest idea, but this has been a long journey of trying things out, refining my efforts and trying to make each one better. This little hummingbird painting is 41 years old now! It was painted in opaque watercolor, a paint I worked with for a couple of years while trying to figure out how to use this stuff most call kid’s poster paint.
And just one more showing a section of this new painting – I have improved a bit. Maybe.
Yellowthroat warblers 1983. Now in Wellington, New Zealand, Melanie Murray
THIS, is just a bit of going down memory lane. It’s also a chapter of how I got here today after painting for over 50 years.
I receive a lot of emails from people who own my old stuff. Sometimes they just let me know, others want to know how much it’s worth (it’s worth what it’s worth to you) or who gets it in the divorce settlement. Some of these I honestly don’t remember even painting, like this one. It now resides in Wellington, New Zealand and the owner, Melanie Murray has no idea how it got there. It was in a store, she bought it, looked me up. It was painted 37 years ago. I think it looks pretty good, considering, and so does the frame and mat (which I recognize, too, but also don’t remember). The info on the back reveals more. That’s my handwriting, my rubber stamp. I mis-named the painting on the back compared with the front (laugh), and it was painted when I was 38. It was the 209th painting of that year. That’s about one per day, seven days a week, and if you want to know how to paint, that’s the secret right there! You just PAINT!
And if you do that, you’ll forget some of the ones you did, or maybe a few hundred – or thousand.
Trinity Alps of California, 1982, owned by Sue Shakespeare
Below is another painting I received this last year. It DO remember this as it shows a favorite place. I backpacked here often, but I honestly don’t remember which mountain or which lake it is, doesn’t matter anyway. Both of these are opaque watercolor, a sort of kid’s poster paint that creates both vibrant colors and deep washes. At 38 years old, it still looks pretty good.
And two more from the mid-1880 that arrived in emails. The boat was my own, the first big boat I had that I restored and sailed to Alaska. Seeing this little painting caught my breath, mainly for seeing the boat again. For some years, I’d spend summers up British Columbia’s Inside Passage painting, sailing, painting – and then mailing these back to my gallery in California. By fall, they’d all be sold – so I never saw them again. Except this one when it was emailed to me. It was likely painted on the cockpit table, drawn while sitting in the dingy floating around while “October” was at anchor. The painting says 1984, San Diego, showing I sailed thousands of miles aboard that boat, a floating studio. I was painting a diary, and then sold the pages as soon as I made them!
And finally, this old historic barn that was painted in 1977 in the Eastern Sierra Mountains of California. Still loved by the family who bought it back then, just another generation going forward. At that time, the Eastern Sierra was full of these hay barns, hand-made with split wood. Many were on their last legs and were great subjects to paint. I had met a very good painter who knew opaque watercolor inside out, Sherry Gribben, who had won the Death Valley Mule Days art show. We painted together for a bit and I learned much from her. I don’t have many mentors, but Sherry certainly was one, as brief as it was. She’d laugh at my lame attempts, but I look at this painting now and think it’s not too bad. Really.
This is an older painting of mine, and the rhododendrons certainly in bloom, but I felt compelled to write about this week’s freeze and the little birds in our meadow.
From coast to coast, I know we’ve all had amazing weather this past week. The southern storms drove a giant blast of Canadian air down and west over the Cascades, and here we’ve had record lows for a week. Temps haven’t gotten out of the twenties, with nights down into the lower teens, weather we just don’t ever get in Puget Sound. None of us have clothes for this stuff. And while we’ve all been suffering, that can’t be anything compared to what our two wintering-over Anna’s hummingbirds must be experiencing. For all my decades around the Northwest, I’ve never seen hummers here in winter, but last year we had one stay all season, and we’ve heard we’re not alone with this. We put out a feeder when we spotted him, but it wasn’t because of the sugar water that he was here, because we put it out AFTER we spotted him. This year we have an adult and a juvie, and we were ready with a feeder (and a 150w flood lamp on it 24 hours a day after the freeze hit). So far it’s working.
I wrote about hummers a few years ago, and learned that they have ways to cope with this cold stuff. They have normal body temps of about 105-108F, with a sitting heart rate of about 250 beats per minute. However, at night they sleep normally, or, they can go into a turbid state where they actually drop their body temp to between 30 and 65 degrees (depending on need), and drop their metabolic rate to one-fifteenth of normal. In this way, they can maybe make it through a very long night of 15 degrees.
Before nightfall, they make one extra smart move. They find and remember where breakfast is going to be. Then, in the morning it takes upwards of an hour to fully wake up before flying. This requires a huge energy drain on this thumb-sized bird, and if that feeder is frozen when it gets to it, the bird is in big trouble (like a car on empty that gets to the gas station and the pumps are locked).
Temperatures are warming up now, but we’ve felt a great privilege to keep tabs on these two intrepid birds this week. Snow and hummingbirds just don’t go together, but if this is a sign of Climate Change, I’m happy with it.
Thanks for reading this week. Larry Eifert
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with more art in America's national parks than any other artist
