Category Archives: Murals

Murals, Posts about other stuff

Wildlife – A new jigsaw puzzle coming soon

 

If you click the image, it should enlarge in your browser.

This is a new jigsaw puzzle coming soon. It’s a painting I did recently of the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust. As soon as we saw this finished image we realized it would make a pretty good puzzle, but the dimensions didn’t fit the required size. So, I’ve added some extras around the edges to make it more difficult. I think it’ll be a hit, but I’d love some comments before we send it in – hit reply and fire away.

And here’s the installation of the painting. It’s down a lovely old-growth trail and is a large wayside, 4′ x 6′, like an art gallery in the forest (as I like to say). To me, this is where I like my art shown – instead of in some stuffy gallery or on someone’s wall where no one notices it after a year. THIS location will mean my stuff will effect people for decades, or at least I hope so. This photo was taken a few months after assembly after a big winter storm knocked down the fir to the left, narrowly missing the wayside.  But no worries, the panel can be replaced – like the $5000 porcelain enamel panel (that was just the cost of the panel) that was hit straight on by a giant 4′ eucalyptus at the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge a week after putting it in. I  could have taken it personally, but the tree-people know I’m one of them!

Next week we’re heading for Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Eastern Oregon. Yup, that’s the one the Bundy Militia took over a year ago. It’s still closed for repairs and we’re involved in new exhibits, waysides and signs for all of it. We already have a series of temporary banners ready to go in the visitor center while we get all the others going. You’ll hear much more about this as we proceed.

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.

Murals, Waysides, Wildlife

Snow Creek Restoration wayside panel sketch

Finishing the year properly with a local project. A LOCAL PROJECT! Hear that, he said joyfully with some paintings for Discovery Bay, just southwest of Port Townsend, WA.

Here’s the sketch for this first one. But first some background. For the past couple of years, heavy equipment and a bunch of people have been pulling creosote posts, removing a couple of bridges, rerouting a water line, hauling off tons of rocks and trying to put nature back together after more than a century of messing things up by us. The idea was to recreate a friendly environment for salmon, and it’s looking good optimistic.

This painting will be on a wayside panel at Snow Creek, the same creek that our nearby Chimacum Creek chum salmon came from 15 years ago in another restoration – and that makes this project even more personal for me. It shows the creek meandering down under the sheltering alders and out into the estuary.  Port Townsend is down the bay and around the corner. There was a trestle and railroad grade crossing just to the left that is now completely gone, allowing two creeks to find their historic channels again. Drawing this, a landscape in transition, has been challenging, so we’ll see what transpires as two wild creeks relocate themselves. Either the painting will remain realistic or it might become completely outdated – either way, the story is accurate.

Here’s what Snow Creek looks like at the moment, carrying silt to build new shorelines and generally get back to normal. I’ll post the painting for this one soon. Thanks, Dave and the folks at the North Olympic Salmon Coalition for the pleasure of learning more about and then painting my own neighborhood.

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.

Murals, Waysides, Wildlife

Waterman Shoreline Uplands Painting

 

Click the image to enlarge it in your browser. It needs a big screen.

A new painting this week for Waterman Shoreline Preserve on Whidbey Island just east of Port Townsend. This is for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust, a bunch of truly nice people to paint for. It will be one of two large wayside panels that go beside this abandoned road – now a public trail – like a little art gallery in the forest. The painting shows the rich habitat of birds and berries that jumble up along here, a very compressed “edge zone.”

Nature is most abundant along edges like meadow/forest, roadsides/forest, shorelines/forest – so it’s a painting that hopefully expresses that.  I’ll have the finished design ready soon to share.

During my long painting career I’ve sure sold my share of art to private collectors. I still get about five emails a month asking for details about paintings I sold decades ago.  Now, it seems, I’m more passionate about hanging some art outside where visitors can get up close and personal with my stuff – but also learn a bit about where they’re standing. At heart, I’m really just a painter of nature in all its glorious details.

I’m a happy painter because of it! Thanks, Ida, for being patient on this one – and the next.

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.

Murals, Wildlife

Progress on Cache River National Wildlife Refuge Mural

Click the image to enlarge it in your browser.

Just a progress report – a snapshot of how this current effort is going. Okay, I think. It needs to get much messier, more foliage, downed stuff, details in the critters, but it takes time to throw paint on 12 feet of mud, trees and leaves.

I’m finding this a very unusual ecosystem to paint, different than anything I’ve worked on before – and that’s saying something. Seasonal flooding in the Mississippi floodplain of Arkansas means a very difficult situation for plants to exist. Critters can just move with the water’s ups-and-downs, but plants are a different deal – they can’t leave. So, lots of water-tolerant trees and vines that can get above it all. One grape, for instance, can’t climb, so it’s starts life by grabbing onto a small shrubby tree and just waiting, going up with the tree as it grows towards the canopy. Crazy, because this is a closed-canopy forest so  how long might that plant wait to get there? Other vines climb like crazy and in the old days of old-growth, they must have been ancient thick things the size of my arm.

Here’s one of my references taken by Eric, my go-to guy for photos and the refuge dendrologist. Am I getting the colors close to right?

And finally, here’s my progress as it’ll look in this section of the visitor center. There is also some text on both sides and bottom, but this shows it’s overall placement so I can tell what’s going on. Stay tuned for more, more mud, brown water, muddy trees and all.

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.

Murals

Cache River National Wildlife Refuge mural progress

This project is charging ahead in my studio and I realized I hadn’t posted anything about it. It’s a 151″-wide painting for the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas. Yes, I’ve been here. No, not for a long time. My mom did a project here many years ago about the ivory-billed woodpecker for Audubon magazine, the last place the birds was seen back in the 1950’s and the last place it was recently seen – I’d like to think maybe extinction isn’t as easy. This painting will show a seasonal stream partially flooding, low-land swampy forests of bald-cypress and tupelo, poison ivy and muscatel vines, snakes and spring warblers – and a bunch of critters that live here. It’ll also have some critters that DON’T live here, like woods bison, red wolves and maybe a bear. Two epochs in one painting, hummm!

Commissioned by Rosene Creative from Georgia who is doing the rest of the exhibits, I’m loving the chance to paint a forest amazingly different from the one I live in. Thanks to Eric at the refuge who’s been sending me a trove of photos I think I’m getting it.

And here’s the sketch. If you click on it, it’ll open in your browser.

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.

Murals, Waysides

Fish Feast for Ludington State Park in Michigan

[Click on the finished painting to enlarge it – I put a much bigger version on the web so you can see details]

I’ve been painting fish, a lot of fish!  This is for Ludington State Park in Michigan and is part of three images that total 18 feet long. This one is for kids, but it really could be a fish-who’s-who for anyone. The Vienna that went down a century ago, yes, there really is a ship wreck there that looks like this. And, yes, they really have Chinook and Coho Salmon, and a bunch of other alien fish that have either been planted or let loose and are now creating havoc in Lake Michigan.

Double-crested Cormorant by Larry Eifert
Small-mouthed Bass by Larry Eifert

We decided that the fish might be used in other Michigan State Parks in other interpretive projects, so I painted the fish and the cormorant separately, then floated them over the background digitally. That means they can use them any size or placement in all sorts of ways – sort of a fine-art digital mashup.

Chinook Salmon by Larry Eifert

I’m always asked how the heck Larry Eifert in Port Townsend Washington gets to paint fish in Michigan. Well, this project came from Joan at Genesis Graphics in Michigan, a long time supporter of what I like to do – and then through Theresa at Michigan State Parks in the  Upper Peninsula. Theresa was very nice to work with and we seemed to hit it off – so I hope to do more for them. So, the final installation will be at Ludington down on the west side of lower Michigan right on the lake – not 30 miles from where I lived for awhile in Door County Wisconsin. Small world.

And it’s an ever-widening circle of friends that keeps me going.

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 beautiful photographs

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

Murals

My Reelfoot Painting Is Almost Wrapped Up

These all enlarge with a click. This image represents 7 shots pieced together of my Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge painting – the image I just sent out for review. I’m still tightening up the critters, shadows and getting goof-ups off the paper, but we’re close. It’s been a fun process creating something from nothing – well, not ‘nothing’, but a white sheet of tree-free Yupo is almost nothing. I greatly appreciate both the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Tennessee and Malone Design in Georgia for allowing me pretty much free reign on this project. It’s been a great experience, as always, to create an entire place almost life-size. It’s not an exact place, of course, but a mix of all the best things about this wildlife refuge.

Being just east of the Mississippi, there is a lot of moisture in the air, so I tried to make it feel that way – heavily laden with humidity. This is a fall scene, cypress going brown, maples and oaks in full color and lots of leaves on the ground as winter is coming on. Did I get it?
Just so you know, those gray squares are where exterior objects will land, a big interpretive panel for the large rectangle, two railings along the bottom. The final installation will measure 36 feet x 8 feet, or almost 300 square feet.

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 beautiful photographs

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

Murals

Reelfoot Refuge – Section Test

Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge, Tennessee

Still moving along with this 36-foot mural installation, painting during the holidays – and finally delivered a digitized section of the painting for a test. This section is almost 8 feet high x 5 feet wide and is fairly finished – I think. A couple more critters to add, some cypress upgrades, fix some of the cutgrass, but it’s basically there.

Below, you can see just where this section is on the full painting, right in the middle so I can make sure colors are proper going both ways. It’s a process I used to fret about, send out for costly 8″x 10″ transparencies and scanning, but now days we do it all here. It’s nice living with a photographer with some very good equipment, and, I’ve done this big stuff for so long, I sleep soundly.

Years ago, Nancy and I painted a 90 x 14-foot outside wall for Twentynine Palms California, then painted another one the same size. When we arrived for the second wall, they told us this complex and highly-detailed mural, scaffholding and scorching afternoon sun had its big unveiling scheduled just 17 days from then! Nancy whispered something to the effect that we were in very deep do-do. I didn’t sleep during most of it, but we finished in time for a nice hike in nearby Joshua Tree National Park – and now I don’t worry about it.

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 beautiful photographs

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

Murals

Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge – progress #6

Reelfoot-progress-6-fullweb

I’ve put fairly large images on the server, so please click these to see larger versions. Somehow cramming 36 feet into a couple of screen-inches just doesn’t cut it.

I pieced seven shots together to make these, and left the perspective in place so it’s just like what you’d see if you stood in front of it – just like I see this each day when I come to the studio, turn on the heat and lights and mix paint! I’m getting there, critters are now appearing, the foreground is settling in properly, birds flying in migrating flocks. Someone asked me what the empty space is on the left – it’s 24 sq feet of interpretive panel, something I just have to put up with sometimes. Someone also asked me if I enjoyed the challenge of figuring all this out. Yes, very much!

Reelfoot-progress-6-left Reelfoot-progress-6-right

Hope you like the way it’s coming along. I do (I think!).

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 beautiful photographs

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

Murals

Stage Three on My Reelfoot Mural for Tennessee

Reelfoot-progress-3

 

Stage Three out of how many I’m not sure – maybe 10 or 20!

A little farther along the trail this week with my Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge painting. This thing is so long I’ve chopped it into two parts shown below – and all three enlarge in your browser for a better view. I’m still sort of working of all over the place, trying to figure out what their fall foliage would be like, yet trying not to overwhelm it with too much color.  It’s one thing to see it here, quite another to imagine it 38 feet long!

This week I learned about flooded corn stubble, how cypress browns in the fall, how the cypress ‘knees’ look when they grow – these are the cypress’ way to breath air when their trunks are underwater.Reelfoot-progress-3-left

 

It looks so different here on the screen than when compared with the giant thing taking shape from one end of my studio to the other. A couple of critters  have now appeared, but not in detail. Got to get those trees figured out first.Reelfoot-progress-3-right

More cowbell – we need more cowbell!

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 beautiful photographs

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