Category Archives: Murals

Progress Report on Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge mural

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All images click to open in your browser, and I hope you do. I put fairly large files up so you can see details.

Here is some progress on my 18 foot painting for Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge. The painting will be printed and installed at 38 feet x 8 feet. I’m getting there – still focused on setting the tone of the fall colors. The fall foliage-thing is something of a mystery, since it changes. In one way, it’s all correct at some point since leaves change a little at a time. But, too yellow, too brown, too red – who really knows?


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Here’s the left side, cypress in the lake and swampy stuff in the foreground.


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And there’s the right side going into seasonally-flooded hardwood forest, red oak, some cypress, some red maple – and then out into flooded corn fields that will be all stubble in fall with lots of ducks flying around.


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.

My Reelfoot NWR Mural Begins to Come Together

Progress Report:

I blogged about the sketch for tho weeks ago, and now paint is flying.  The photo above is part is the far-left side that will be 8 feet tall –  but it’s still lacking details. I took this to make sure the colors (that change almost daily in fall) are what everyone wants. It’s getting there. If you stood next to this in the final installation, your head would be about at the bottom of the cypress branches.

Progress – seemingly to be painfully slow at this stage. I just stick to it and tend to paint all over the place to get a feeling of how it’ll all mesh together. A little here, a little there, then fill in the holes to connect it all. Installed, this thing  will be two adjoining walls with a corner for a total of 38 feet, but painting it is still just one inch at a time. I greatly enjoy making my brain stress to the max trying to make it all work. LNE-2Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge is in northwestern Tennessee, close to the Mississippi River and a place created when a huge earthquake formed a series of shallow lakes. Cypress and other bottomland forest species followed, making for a very picturesque place, especially in fall when the cypress needles turn yellow and red.

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.

My Show at Gallery 9 – Saturday Throughout October

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18 foot mural about Florida, right side.

On Saturday, there’s a little show of mine opening in Port Townsend at Gallery 9. Thought I’d just pass it around. This is possibly the first gallery show I’ve ever put up where the main attraction isn’t for sale! One wall – one painting, and we were worried it would even fit.

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Left side of the painting. 18 feet x 4 feet.

ABOUT THE PAINTING (from the press release)

Port Townsend painter Larry Eifert has painted large-scale nature murals for parks, refuges and nature centers for many years. This 18-foot x 4-foot painting was commissioned for the Polks Nature Discovery Center in central Florida, and is painted on synthetic and tree-free paper. This is the original painting and was completed in 2013. It has never before been seen locally, and intertwines four separate ecosystems of Florida’s pine forests and cypress swamps. When completed, the painting was digitized, then enlarged 200% to 32 feet x 8 feet and printed on Dacron for its final installation.

If you’re local, we hope to see you there.

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.

Shoreside Art for Fort Townsend State Park – Healthy Shorelines

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Click to enlarge.

Behind the scenes here in the studio I’ve been working on two outdoor wayside exhibits for my local park, Fort Townsend State Park. I was commissioned before for a painting for this lovely place several years ago, an old-growth forest mural that’s installed on the green near the campground.  This time it’s the beach area of the park where they’re removing tons of rock and shortening the landing to make it more ecologically healthy. A few months ago I received the award to create two outdoor panels that will be installed when the heavy equipment leaves.

This panel tells the story of why all those giant boulders are being removed, that healthy shorelines are created by eroding bluffs and not rock walls. Erosion brings fresh sand and gravel to the beaches – rock walls stagnate the process – and young salmon like overhanging branches and leaves. This may not be the final version of the text, but it’s close to finished. It’s a difficult subject to try to illustrate – erosion, beachside house without retaining walls, logs on the beach and all the critters: guillemots, herring, crabs, seastars, kingfishers and the rest.

Here’s the real location where the panel will be installed: most of these boulders are leaving.

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I have an interesting history with this park. It was the place I camped when I first came to Port Townsend in 1973, over 40 years ago. I remember it as one of the best campgrounds I’d ever seen – and it still is. I also remember the showers were the very first I ever had to pay for – 10 cents a shower. I was outraged! The costs have changed, but that wonderful campground is still there – but now I live right behind the park.

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.

A Mural For The Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge

Click all images to enlarge them. At 38 feet, you’ll need to.

So – a new project is underway. This is for a new visitor center at the Reelfoot National Wildlife Refuge in northwestern Tennessee near the Mississippi River. I’ll post the progress in weeks to come, but wanted to at least pass around the sketches for comments – which always help me – even the bad ones. This one means a lot to me because I spent time here as a kid with Virginia on one of her research field trips ( but more about that later).

This installation will be 38 feet long and 8 feet tall, but I’m painting it half-size at about 19 feet by 4 feet – still a big painting. We’ll scan the painting, then it’ll be printed like wallpaper on Dacron. This means the art can be vandalized or the visitor center even burn down and they still have an installation. Since they’re self-ensured, the government is like that. Makes it easier for me to paint, but the brushes get fairly tiny.

Click to enlarge in your browser

Cypress swamps and waterlilies on the left side. This lake was created by a huge earthquake in the early 1800’s when the Mississippi River ran backwards and filled up this bottomland subsidence. Today it’s full of ducks and geese, turtles, fish and muskrats – just my idea of fun. And next, here’s the right side: all red oak forest in a seasonal flooding area. The fun part will be that they want a fall scene, so the cypress will be yellow, red oaks a flaming red/yellow. Add to that a good blue sky and it’s should be flashy – or at least that’s the plan.

Click to enlarge in your browser

Stay tuned, there’s more to come.

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.

Washington State Public Art Roster gets ME

Necedah National Wildlife Refuge paintings, images that eventually became 138 lineal feet of public art. I used this as an example of what I do. Necedah NWR is in Wisconsin.

Click this image to enlarge in your browser.

Every three years lots of Northwest artists apply to get on the Washington State Public Art Roster, a fairly small pre-approved group of professional artists that will be tapped to create perminent installations in new public buildings throughout Washington State. Libraries, schools and all other institutions that use the 1% of the cost of building for art use this list, AND, a couple of days ago I received a letter saying I’d been accepted and am now on the list.

This is a rare event for me. My life has been filled with entering art shows or competitions that are always won by crazy or fairly amateurish non-objective or abstract work, and almost never by competent and skilled people who have spent years diligently homing their discipline. It’s just that I’m from a generation that came from another generation that believed the very nature of being professional meant knowing how to do it better than most others. In my pitch to the Washington State Art Commission, I stressed this, saying that making public art that viewers spend lots of time looking at is important, that it’s what public art is all about – at least for me.

How far it’s come for me. A painting I did for Carol Armstrong, over 50 years ago. I think it still looks okay.

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.

Spring in a Vanishing Ecosystem – a new painting

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Two new wayside panels went off to the fabricator this week. Here’s my favorite. Both are 24″ x 48″ and will live their lives right here on this lovely bit of nature called Nasse’s Prairie on Whidbey Island, Washington. Part of the Whidbey Island Land Trust’s rather heroic efforts to restore this bit of natural prairie on the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve where some extremely rare flowers live. In fact, golden paintbrush is here and is only found in twelve places, two right here on this prairie. The original painting is 24″ x 48″, acrylic on hardboard. Thanks, everyone at the Land Trust, but especially Mark, who helped me in delightful ways and never once got ‘postal’ on me.

And here’s Nancy with her pack full of camera gear taking the reference photos for this painting. Looks like I got the colors about right in the painting above.

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.

Eifert on the Washington Ferries for the Summer

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The Port Townsend Leader newspaper puts out a free summer magazine for visitors, and this issue has a piece of my Mount Rainier mural on the cover. That’s fun for sure, but they also used a bunch of smaller wildlife paintings scattered throughout the inside, making the entire thing sort of an Eifert Gallery in print. These magazines are on all the local ferries and in the terminals, lodging and visitor centers, a nice thing for awhile until I get sick seeing this painting everywhere I travel. Thanks, Marian, for being so delicate when you chopped up the painting and moved a few critters around. Here is the entire magazine online.

And here’s the original painting in the Ohanapecosh Visitor Center, Mount Rainier National Park.

Rainier-installation

I did this painting back in the day when I used to just dance into park offices and offer my services – as if I were somebody. I was cheap and completely unaware of the ‘rules’ of RFQs, IDIQs, funding sources and liability insurance policy constraints. I’d just go in and say “you need this” and they’d say, “sure, we’ll take it out of this fund here in the bottom drawer”.  Now? Well, don’t get me started.

Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. I’m trying to expand my list. An email will work.
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.

Point Reyes National Seashore

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I think some of you will say “wait a New York minute, I’ve seen this.” True, but this week I was in a client’s office looking at my website on her computer and this painting wasn’t there. Embarrassing.  There were posts of progress, of locations last year, the sketch – but I spaced out the posting of the final version. I keep this stuff on my blog/website for reference, like a catalog – and with almost 500 pages it’s a handful to keep track of. So bear with me while I add this one from last year to it.

If you haven’t seen this place, it’s Point Reyes National Seashore just north of San Francisco. A landscape full of atmosphere and history for me (I’ve hiked it, rode a horse through it, sailed by it in my own boat twice). We arrived at Headquarters and asked what they wanted in the painting. The beach, lighthouse, fog, ocean, redwoods, Doug-fir, Drakes Estuary, Tamales Bay, about 50 sq miles of coastal scrub with all the critters. Nothing to it! The painting hangs in the main visitor center, the back of the new park map features it, and now it’s  here.

Finished map and mural.

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Labels were added on a draft design that wasn’t used.Point-reyes-labels

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.

A New Painting of a Summer Prairie on Whidbey Island

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Just a couple of small changes and I’d call this 24″ x 48″ painting a wrap. This is the seventh image for wayside exhibits at the Admiralty Inlet Preserve, a place of rare beauty just across the channel from Port Townsend, Washington. The Whidbey Camano Island Land Trust has been commissioning me for a series of outdoor exhibits, and this one speaks of the mid-to-late summer natural prairie area and their efforts of being land stewards.  It’s been many decades since fire has been used to revitalize this place, so that’s what the smoke is at the top.

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And here are a couple of reference photos showing what it really looks like. Top photo by Mark Sheehan, bottom one by me. Imagine trying to accurately paint this complex landscape. It was a challenge, but I think I fairly well got it. It’s one thing to just abstract it up and toss in a bunch of grass and sedge stalks, but quite another to figure out individual species and how it grows. Patience, I guess, or optimistic enthusiasm that I might be able to figure it out! 

Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. I’m trying to expand my list. An email will work.
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.