Category Archives: Murals

Murals, Nancy Cherry Eifert, US Fish Wildlife Service, Waysides, Wildlife

Malheur Refuge Wildlife Painting

This is another painting I did for Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon – remember the hostile take-over by the Bundy Clan? This was that place!

I was given some nice leeway on these efforts, so I could add some mental candy, a soft sunset coming to mind here. They were fun paintings to do, because I just plan likw painting wildlife. Below is a detailed version of a section.

It can get very crowded at Malheur, as you can see below. This is one of Nancy’s photos, an amazing mass of wildlife that proves, yes, you still CAN see this sort of thing in America, but only if we pay taxes to keep it this way. Want to see this? Go to Malheur in March or April, get a room in the one-and-only decent motel – and go geese watching. You won’t forget it easily. By the way, these birds are ALL talking while they’re doing this!

Below is the reference painting I worked from, certainly not copying it, but just a ‘feeling’ reference. I did this one for The Nature Conservancy a couple of years ago at the Carson River Project in Nevada. I always liked the softness of this landscape, backed up against the High Sierra. Lake Tahoe is just over the ridge. I think the painting holds together nicely.

And below is the original refined sketch, after the rough concept drawing. This is the step before painting begins, and while it’s certainly not like the final, it comes close enough to call it good at this stage.

I’m going to be expanding this blog in the next few weeks, adding more art from my partner in crime, Nancy Cherry Eifert, and essays on hiking and seeking wilderness. This blog seems to be growing into something bigger than just art and it’s evolving. So I should too.

Thanks for reading this week.

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.

Murals, National Park Service, Wildlife

Fort Matanzas National Monument – Florida

Fort Matanzas National Monument is getting an Eifert painting.
I was recently in Florida, south of Saint Augustine at Fort Matanzas National Monument. Boy was it hot. So hot, some of the rangers actually carried towels to help dry off, the humidity was so amazing. Of course, a big camera is a big help, so it stayed cool in the car – and then each time I got out – BANG, the humidity would hit that cold camera and I couldn’t see out of it for five minutes.

I was there to research a mural that’s coming along now for the back or their park map. So, each year, some 650,000 people will get to take an Eifert painting home with them when they visit.

I got the job done, met some great people and came back to the cool Northwest – 30 degrees cooler – and have started down the path of building one of these big paintings. While the original idea was to show the nature of this place, an ecosystem very much like what it was 200 years ago when the fort was active, we veered course at the last moment and now I’m painting it as if it IS 200 years ago. As far as the wildlife is concerned, it’s about the same – amazing for a place surrounded by humans.

Above, I’m getting a royal tour by some guys that have been here decades. Between them, I’ll bet there’s 60 years of experience here – and the fourth was so smart I kept saying ‘ahhh’, or ‘ohhh’ when I realized she was far brighter than me. That’s a LOT of knowledge going along with me to help, and I really soaked it up. It’s what I do this crazy stuff for, the experiences – and this was a good one.

Here’s a view from the fort top, overlooking cannon that actually fire and looking out on the inlet it guarded. It’s a landscape altered by hurricanes, but it’s also the ONLY undredged river inlet on the entire eastern side of Florida. I let THAT sink in a bit, then sharpened my pencil.

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.

Murals, US Fish Wildlife Service, Waysides, Wildlife

Malheur – Buena Vista Overlook

I’ve been working on art for Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon, a continuing effort that’s finally coming together. This wayside panel I just finished is going there, telling the story of springtime water vs. fall desert. It’s been interesting to compare the two scenes – which is a completely fabricated scene. No such place exists, yet it’s at Malheur in many places.

This view is of the spring snowmelt season there, when water from the local mountains fill up this grand valley with ponds and marshes. These lakes are only a couple of feet deep at most, many are less, but the place is crammed with birds either nesting or on their way north. It’s possibly the single most important wildlife refuge in the West.

And this scene shows the same place a few months later. The lakes have dried to an almost desert landscape and the lush foliage of spring has yellowed. It was interesting to figure this out – just the cattails were challenging to understand their life-cycle.

And here is where this and two other waysides are going – Buena Vista Overlook. My new paintings will replace these old and tired ones atop a stunning view of the valley below. These are big panels, each five feet wide. They needed to be big to compete with the scene.

Call this my small effort at using art to fight our current culture of White Terrorists in America. This is the place the Bundy Gang of Thugs took over a few years ago in a Right-wing attack on our heritage. Remember? Yes, this place is OUR heritage – and then the Trump administration  pardoned them when they were sentenced for their crimes. Not enough said – but if you want to save what’s left of these places, VOTE for nature!

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.

Giclee prints, Murals, National Park Service

New – Canvas Prints from Murals

Yellowstone National Park, Grand Prismatic Hot Springs

I’ve been getting many requests for one-off prints of my larger paintings. Call us disorganized, I guess, but we emptied the lock box of about 100 transparencies and digital scans, and now I  have  a new section on the website for giclee prints of paintings. Many of these can be printed wall-sized, I mean 7 to 10 feet wide, but most requests I get are more in the 3 to 4 feet size. So, if you want to see what I have up here so far, check out the ever-expanding list. Hopefully I’ll have around 100  or more when I’m finished. Some haven’t been seen in decades (I haven’t even seen them in decades either, and some are really pretty good).

Here’s another that was painted for The Nature Conservancy at Great Salt Lake. The original art is in their visitor center there, but few have seen it. It would make a pretty good canvas print, don’t you think.

Again, here’s the link to the current list.

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, Murals, National Park Service, Wildlife

Wind Cave NP Site Visit

What’s this big guy doing on our hood? Attacking a brand new rental car – starting with licking the bumper and then advancing to the really fun stuff. Damage! See that foot-long horn (one of a pair) on top of a 2,000lb creature with the manners of a child? I loved every minute of it.

Here we were at Wind Cave National Park in the Black Hills of South Dakota. We’ve been on a site visit, researching, photographing and sketching for a new and really interesting project. Wind Cave has one of the most amazing caves we’ve ever been in, 150-some miles of it, and also super high-quality mixed grass prairie up top with hundreds of bison, elk, pronghorn, deer and prairie dogs. A feast for our eyes.

This is pre-sketch drawing number 8, placed in the design grid on the back of their new map guide. 750,000 people come here each year and this will be the handout they all take home.
And this is drawing number 1, beginning with some vague notion of underground vs. above ground prairie and Black Hills. Compare this to the top one and it shows how things progress and evolve in my head as I do these things on location – no studio time, no time to think, just draw – and then I have to present this as a program to park staff at the end.
Nervous? I used to be but it’s just life on some higher level now.
National Park Service staff and me, left, at the highest point in the park. We were discussing how often this location gets struck by lightning, which was happening. Photo by Nancy, who took hundreds of others. Melinda, next to me, came from the East Coast to help on this.

Stay tuned as this painting develops. It will be about 5′ x 4′ and be filled with many more critters, flowers and details – especially in the cave where some of the most interesting hang from the ceiling (no, not bats). If you follow me, you’ll see the entire progression from this messy beginning to a finished ‘thing’. 

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.

Stay tuned as this painting develops. It will be about 5′ x 4′ and be filled with many more critters, flowers and details – especially in the cave where some of the most interesting hang from the ceiling (no, not bats). If you follow me, you’ll see the entire progression from this messy beginning to a finished ‘thing’. 

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, Murals, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

Lime Kiln and Orca Whales

I received some installation photos for my Lime Kiln Point Lighthouse paintings. Everyone seems to like them, so I thought I’d share it all here for the record. I painted these last winter for Washington State Parks with EDX Exhibits in Seattle. Installation and these photos were by Marius at Doty Signs in Seattle.

This lighthouse is THE place to watch orca whales up close in the wild. There’s possibly no place on Earth you can get closer to wild whales without getting on a boat, and in summer, people line the shoreline here to watch the killer whale families feeding on salmon right in front of them. This is a big deal since the southern population of orcas is endangered and it’s not looking good for a recovery. It’s a thrilling experience to see them, and I’m proud to say my stuff now explains what people are looking at. Plus, there are one or two really nice looking pieces of art!

This is sort of a big deal for me, too, as new rules don’t allow boats to approach these endangered animals, leaving Lime Kiln as the best viewing in the Northwest. It’s also a place I know well, since I had “October”, my 40-foot sloop tied in nearby Friday Harbor in the ’80s – my ‘painting platform’ as I sailed from San Diego to Alaska and most places in between. I have history here. Nancy and I, decades later aboard our 45′ floating home ‘Rumpy’ came by here one afternoon and watched in amazement as an entire orca family slowly swam directly beneath our boat (engine off). One of the big males was bigger than our boat, but they minded their manners and didn’t touch us.

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, Murals

Hoh Rainforest Visitor Center

We were out in the rainy Hoh Rainforest, commissioned to take installation photos by the project designer in Washington D.C. Nancy took some very tasty images and I thought I’d share them here. This project ended last summer, but no good photos existed of it, and project artists, designers and builders need these for examples to show for future adventures. This old guy just happened by for one of the shots. That’s a see-through painting of Mount Olympus on the right, a complex collection of forest floor paintings on the tabletop – and beyond is the real thing.

Look out the windows past the art and this is the view. Big Sitka spruce is what this beautiful place is all about. I feel fortunate to have my art here, an installation that will be enjoyed long after I’m gone from walking these trails.

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. Art, words and life from a former generation.

Murals, New Painting Post, Wildlife

El Malpais mural

El Malpais National Monument mural painting completed

I finished my El Malpais National Monument mural a few days ago. Of course they don’t know about it yet because the park staff is shutdown, but I thought I’d post it here to let everyone else know that artists don’t get sent home – we ARE home. Park staff isn’t getting paid, and neither am I.

Enough of that! The progressive steps of this painting are shown below, from the concept sketch created on location in Grants New Mexico, to the refined sketch and finally the painted version on top. Scroll to the bottom to see the chronological progression in reverse. 

This painting shows the rather amazing and pristine high desert plateau landscape right on the Continental Divide in central New Mexico. This giant park has over 400 lava caves, ancient pueblo ruins, sandstone cliffs, vast lava flows, cinder cones and some of the oldest Douglas-fir trees on the planet. The painting shows most of these components, and also several cave entrances, bats emerging for the evening, a ringtail watching them pass. There are two tinajas, or waterpockets with frogs and others coming to drink after a hot day in the desert. This part is on sandstone, like the background cliffs. There are ancient junipers that were probably here 1000 years ago when the pueblo was occupied, and lots of pot shards are littering the ground. We saw all this, and much more I couldn’t get in while on our site visit last spring. 

The design for the park’s map brochure.

This painting will be going to the main visitor center in Grants, but a larger copy with also be produced for an exhibit there. The real reason for this, however, is that it’s going on the back of the new park map brochure, so each year over 100,000 people get to take it home with them – along with this painting of mine. This part of the project is being produced by the excellent staff at the National Park Service’s Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia. They always do great things with my paintings. I know the production will be top-notch.

Super-refined sketch prior to painting. This one was drawn in the studio here in Port Townsend and was the final draft before painting.
Refined sketch number seven, also drawn on location.
ELMA sketch #7

Above is the initial sketch photographed for big screen presentation at the park. I did this on the pavement at the hotel in Grants New Mexico, then loaded into my laptop and piped it onto the big screen for the park to see and comment on while I listened and wrote comments. This is sketch #7, the final one attempted and it was heartily approved. Even the superintendent was there, which is a rarity for me.

This was drawn on location, along with half a dozen others, but wasn’t a specific place. It has all the ‘elements of El Malpais, but doesn’t hold faithful to any ‘stand here and see this’ location. I think I nailed it pretty well.

El Malpais means Badlands – they sure are.

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 here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Jigsaw Puzzles, Murals, Waysides, Wildlife

A New Puzzle for the North Olympic Salmon Coalition

A new puzzle arrived for our local salmon restoration group and we high-jacked a few of them for us. I guess you could call it a ‘Limited Edition’. This non-profit puts restoration projects together with partners with funds to help Olympic Peninsula watersheds, and they’re just about the best bunch of folks we know around here.

Last year I did some art and designs for a series of wayside panels that completed a major habitat restoration in the estuary of Discovery Bay on the Olympic Peninsula (that’s the bay in the background of the puzzle). They decided that a jigsaw puzzle might be a perfect way to spread the word about this and raise some money. Very progressive attitude, and a perfect way to showcase some of this art.  I did the design, and below is the box back – learn about salmon and restoration, all in one.

Here’s the box front. I used three paintings, melded them together and I think it’s a fairly difficult puzzle. 

And below is one of the paintings installed. Thousands of salmon migration barriers are on streams and rivers in the Northwest. This project opened up two streams and help these fish return to spawn a next generation.  NOSC removed 1900 tons of rock, 425 tons of contaminated soils,  added 3200 feet of a community waterline and lots more. It was a big project – and I was proud to be a small part of it by providing some interpretive art. We also handled the fabrication and printing, all in a day’s work for me.

If you’d like a puzzle, you can order it here on our website. Or, call Nicole O’Hara at NOSC, (360) 379-8051 and get one as a donation to this great group. Then, if you’re local, get out here and have a look at all this.

Thanks for reading my stuff 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 stunning photography

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Jigsaw Puzzles, Murals, New Painting Post, Wildlife

The Salish Sea – a New Jigsaw Puzzle

A new puzzle arrived  yesterday, called The Salish Sea. This is a section of a painting I did for the Whidbey Island Land Trust and shows the rather amazing underwater (and normally unseen by us) ecosystem just offshore between Port Townsend and Coupeville, Washington. There are a LOT of critters stuffed in this painting and it should make for a good puzzle. Below is the box back, as interpretive as I could get it. The puzzle is 24″ x 18″ and has 500 pieces. 

This place, a stark and diverse shoreline, gets the full brunt of storms and waves coming right down the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It’s part of the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area and has a harsh vibrancy about it that I just love. It was fun to paint.

People send us these photos from time to time.

All these images enlarge in your browser if you click them.

You can order from our online store here: or by emailing us if you want to send a check here: larry@larryeifert.com.

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 stunning photography

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.