Category Archives: National Park Service

Hiking, Interpretive Art, National Park Service, Nature Art, New Painting Post, Wildlife

Dipper Flying Home – a new painting

American Dipper Flying Home is an original oil painting – not even varnished yet. It tells the story of a little flying dipper flying into a big waterfall, high in the Olympic Mountains of Washington.

This is an 18″ x 24″ oil on canvas, and it is now available. The frame in the photo comes with it but we have other choices – I just really like how the frame colors fit with this painting. Outside measurements are about 24″ x 30″. We can ship this at cost, double-boxed and ready to hang. Email me at larryeifert@gmail.com if you’re interested in more information. The framed price is $1300.

For those who don’t know about these interesting little birds – dippers, here’s a short essay about them. Also known as Water Ousels (East Coast), they make their living completely dependent on cold, clear mountain streams. They lives are entirely connected to these streams and they don’t migrate – even in winter. They even nest behind waterfalls in mossy wet pockets they build.

Dippers were John Muir’s favorite bird, and maybe mine, too. (their name is because they tend to bob up and down as they stand on rocks) The young birds are wet from birth from the constant cold spray of snowmelt water. The parents teach them the routine by diving in, then ‘walking’ underwater, kicking over stones searching for insects and larva. They use their wings outstretched to hold them down in the current. Dippers never leave their streams, and if a tight river bend means a brief flying detour over land, they, instead, fly the long way around the curve to stay connected to their water-home. It’s the very definition of wilderness I’ve always been drawn to and love to paint.

Below is my photo of Royal Falls, one of the sources of the Dungeness River and a major reference for this painting. Royal Falls is high in Olympic National Park, but only about 25 air-miles from where I write this in my studio. The Dungeness is one of the steepest watersheds in the country, dropping over 7000 feet in just 28 miles.

A dipping American Dipper at Tunnel Creek, Olympic National Forest.

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.

National Park Service, Nature Art, New Painting Post, Wildlife

Northern Spotted Owl original oil painting

This painting is sold!

Northern Spotted Owl: This is an 18″ x 24″ oil on canvas that is now available. The frame comes with it but we have other choices – I just really like the frame colors with this painting. Outside measurements are about 24″ x 30″. We can ship this at cost, double-boxed and ready to hang. Email me at larryeifert@gmail.com if you’re interested in more information. The framed price is $1300.

And here’s just the painting. Through the years, I’ve painted other images of spotted owls, several for Redwood National Park, but those were more ‘interpretive’. This is aimed at showing the dense, vibrant and truly amazing amount of organic ‘life’ in these Pacific Northwest forests. The spotted owl evolved for just this type of landscape with short wings for maneuvering through branches.

Above is a ‘progress’ photo I took in the studio, showing the evolution of this painting. It stayed fairly true to my ideas all the way through. And below are two reference photos. These were taken by Olympic National Park research crews high in the canopy at the Quainault forest. I used these for the big 500 sq ft mural installed at the Hoh Rain Forest Visitor Center and they are the best photos I’ve ever seen of this unseen canopy world, hundreds of feet above hikers on the ground below. It reminds me of an organic messy grocery store.

Other paintings currently available can be found here on this page of my website. I’d be happy to answer any questions about any of them. No gallery is involved.

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.

Hiking, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Wildlife

North Fork Nooksack River – a new painting

This painting is 16″ x 20″ acrylic on canvas, and is available. Email me if you’re interested at larryeifert@gmail.com.  It’s also available with the nice Taos school inspired frame (like you see here) and I already have a shipping crate ready to go. The offering price framed as you see it here is $950 – shipping cost is extra but it will go double boxed UPS.

The Nooksack River, just south of the Canadian border in Washington State. It’s one of our favorite Northwest rivers because it drains water from two of the greatest Pacific Northwest peaks, Mt Baker and Mount Shucksan. North Cascades National Park: big mountains, big glacial power, and the river valley shows that with miles of beautifully sculptured river rock. I’ve painted this area before, but pulled this painting together after I found an unfinished canvas just waiting for me. For some reason, I started this then it just sat there. I especially liked the way the foreground goes blue at the bottom, showing the sky overhead, the water tinted with glacier flour that always makes these river more aquamarine than cobalt.

Someone already asked me about the ducks in the painting, a pair of common mergansers, male has the green head. In the Northwest, these guys spend winters out in salt water. Then in spring, mated pairs head back up rivers to nest in tree cavities beside their grocery stores – the rivers. Their routine is to float leisurely downstream from pool to pool, diving for fish, sometimes resting on a rock in midstream. Then they fly back upstream and start the routine all over again.

This, believe it or not, this was my model for the painting. I like to take an idea and just make it up into a painting that’s far beyond what I originally saw. Let’s see, bigger rocks, add the birds, make the thing glow with Hudson River School late afternoon light.

Again: This painting is 16″ x 20″ acrylic on canvas, and is available. Email me if you’re interested at larryeifert@gmail.com.  It’s also available with the nice Taos school inspired frame and I already have a shipping crate ready to go. The offering price framed as you see it here is $950 – shipping cost is extra but it will go double boxed UPS.

Thanks for reading this week.

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.

National Park Service, New Painting Post

Bounced Light – Sol Doc River

For those not from the Olympic Peninsula, the Sol Duc is one of the most beautiful rivers here, and I’ve painted it many times. In fact, if you drive the 17-mile park road from the gate to Sol Duc Falls Trailhead, you’ll pass 24 Eifert paintings along the way on turnout signs, exhibits and information kiosks. Like an art gallery in the old-growth.

This little painting is actually of the North Fork of the Sol Duc, a fantastic hike that goes up and over a ridge before dropping to a thigh-deep ice water crossing requiring boots and pants off. On the other side, it just doesn’t get any nicer, with plunge pools carved into bedrock and a meandering trail that plows up the canyon to the river’s source. Of course, in the dead of winter, this painting is just a nice memory of it, and that’s why I painted it.

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $149 framed as  you see it. Outside edge of the frame is about 12″ x 15″.
This custom frame has a triple liner and glass. Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

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.

Hiking, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Wildlife

North Fork Sol Duc River – a new painting

This painting is 16″ x 20″ acrylic on canvas, and is available. Email me if you’re interested at larryeifert@gmail.com.  It’s available with the nice Taos school inspired frame and I already have a shipping crate ready to go. Shipping would be extra but we usually ship UPS so it won’t be much.

This painting was inspired by a day hike up the North Fork of the Sol Duc River in nearby Olympic National Park. Not many hikers get here, as it requires a breathe-taking thigh-deep river crossing, but it’s worth every icy step. Once on the east side of the river, the trail goes for miles along the banks, from pool to pool and finally turns into a vague rambling through streamside brush. In places there are sandstone-scoured potholes, meadows beneath huge big-leaf maple groves, just a glorious Olympic ramble. This place has produced several paintings from me, all similar, all emotional light studies of this pristine river’s journey from alpine down into the main stem of the Sol Duc.

Where does this trail start and end? On Olympic National Park’s Sol Duc River Road there’s a parking area just a quarter mile upstream from Salmon Cascades. The trail heads upslope on the east side of the road, the drops to the North Fork in half a mile past the ford. It’s about eight miles upslope to an old CCC shelter, then a few more miles to Mount Appleton and Blue Lake. While the main Sol Duc trail system is mobbed in summer, almost no one makes it this pristine place, just a raven’s flight of a couple of minutes.

This painting is 16″ x 20″ acrylic on canvas, and is available. Email me if you’re interested at larryeifert@gmail.com.  It’s also available with the nice Taos school inspired frame (like you see here) and I already have a shipping crate ready to go. The offering price framed as you see it here is $950 – shipping cost is extra but it will go double boxed UPS.

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.

National Park Service, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

Jackson Dam Grand Teton National Park

It’s been awhile since a blog post. All our websites were hacked by a very creepy cripto outfit and it’s taken me months to get it going again. We’re good now, but way behind posting what I’ve been painting. Here’s one, a big 48″ wayside for Grand Tetons National Park, right beside the Snake River below the Jackson Dam.

You can see the sketch changes a bit as it evolved to the final painting, but the basic concepts are still there. I started this in spring, then summer made it so park staff was swamped with millions of tourists.

This is a draft mockup of the final panel, design by EDX in Seattle. Nice working with friends start to finish on these as the project goes through various contractors. Custom Southern Exhibits is doing the fabrication, an Alabama company I’ve worked with many times before.

And here’s the location, right on the beach to the right. With one of the most dramatic backdrops in America, I’m happy to keep doing this stuff, the same job I’ve had for decades – making art for National Parks, the “best idea America ever had”.

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.

Backpacking, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Wildlife

Ruddy Turnstones – Spring Migration

This painting is for sale, so drop me a note at larryeifert@gmail.com if you’re interested. Click the image and it should enlarge in your browser.

This is an original acrylic painting on canvas, 30″ x 40″.  $3600 framed. A Certificate of Authentication is included. Outside dimensions with the frame is about 36″ x 46″ and it’s not going to be framed in a cheapy frame, but one suitable for galleries. Frame options are available. We have a double-boxed professional box for this to ship with and shipping will be charged at cost.

I like to tell stories in my paintings. This one started that process when I walked out to the end of the local marina’s commercial dock and was greeted by almost 100 chattering little birds, turnstones, resting from days of migration. They fly at night for safety, rest and gossip during the day. But, I also saw them a year before on an April backpack around the Ozette Triangle Trail in Olympic National Park. I saw many sandpipers on the low-tide beach rocks just at dusk – just before they all took off in a whoosh and headed north. Sorting through photos, I ran across these trip photos and found this one, which became the rocks in the painting. It was all I needed to get the project going.

Here’s my little talk about making this painting.  It’s on my YouTube Channel along with several others.

My first-draft concept sketch. I put the grid lines in to help redraw it on the canvas.

And I’m currently putting this white-silver frame on it, but we have other styles available.

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.

Murals, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

I’m free: 540 days of Everglades paintings

I started this project June 29th, 2021. That’s 542 days start to finish. It took that long to complete 24 paintings for Everglades National Park, but the painting part only took a fraction of that! Meetings, waiting, more meetings. So, here’s the last one, 108″ x 48″ that will be installed along along the Anhinga Trail Boardwalk in the Royal Palms area. It’ll  have text tastefully spread across it, two languages both English and Spanish. All these photos should enlarge in your browser.

  • No, these paintings are not the only stuff I’ve painted in 542 days.
  • Yes, I also painted dozens of other images for state parks, national parks, a bunch of salmon recovery groups.
  • Yes, these will all be reproduced in aluminum with steel frames around them.
  • Yes, it’s not only me doing this, as I’m part of a team from EDX in Seattle and they are doing many more wayside panels than just mine.
  • One trip there was with EDX. A second trip was just Nancy and I this last spring to pick up more material I needed.

There is already another painting here, one that’s 30 years old, so my new painting will be replacing it. What’s the difference, besides age? Times change. Today, the alien snakes, pythons and Anacondas people have released into the Everglades have killed off many of the species that were in that old painting! Pretty much gone are the raccoons and otters, the ecosystem is changing. So, I’m just upgrading this to the current and future world.


And here’s the scene from the boardwalk. I think I got it fairly well.

And sitting on the railing throughout my first recon photo session, this immature cormorant just sat there as he got his clothes straightened out. I could walk right up to him.

And of course, this guy was hanging out under the pilings.  The Anhinga Trail is truly one of the best places in Everglades National Park to see wildlife, almost guaranteed.

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, Early Paintings, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

Everglades National Park – Plentiful Fish wayside

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.

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, People Paintings, Wildlife

Installation Photos San Juan Island murals

Panorama of my 35′ x 17′ tribal wall. Possibly the biggest painting in the Pacific Northwest about prehistoric Indian life before European contact.

While the furniture and other exhibits aren’t installed yet by the good folks at Capitol Museum Services from Manassas, VA, I received these photos from the Park Superintendent, Elexis Fredy, and they’re good enough to pass around. This is at American Camp, San Juan Island National Historical Park in Washington State. Thanks, Lexi, for sending these. I thought I’d show them here because I rarely get to show actual installation shots of the process. I paint this stuff, go home and start the next one.  I know, you’ve seen these paintings before on my blog, but not in the actual space they were designed for. The back wall is 35 feet across, 17 feet high, the prairie mural is 7 feet across. My part of this is finished, and I’m currently working through 35 new paintings for other parks.

This secondary mural is 7 feet wide and shows today’s prairie, which is most of American Camp’s landscape. It will have a reader rail with an additional 5 paintings of mine along the bottom.  

I painted my first visitor center exhibit 60 years ago! Not a typo. It wasn’t exactly good, but it was my start, and later I figured I’d not improve much if I went to art school and learned to paint like everyone else – so instead, I just got to work. It’s been a long and most interesting path, to put it mildly. It used to be that I’d travel to the site, get a room to live in or camp, and start painting. Sometimes it’d take weeks, a couple of projects took more than a month. The food was generally awful, and it wasn’t easy, living out of a suitcase. One, a huge project in the Denver International Airport, meant I had to clear security each day, have ALL the materials xrayed, get crazy badges and walk to work going beneath 747’s that had just landed from Germany.

Today, this has all evolved to a much more civilized process. I get to paint in my studio at a smaller size, send a digital file that is then printed on vinyl and actually looks better than the original. The installation in this new building will show off my stuff for many decades, probably upwards of a half a century and be seen by people long after I’m gone. If the place burns to the ground thanks to domestic terrorists, they’ll just put up a new version in the new building (hear that, Bundy Clan). If someone throws acid on it, they can just change out a panel instead of the entire wall.

And here’s the installation crew getting things ready. Better them than me, I’ll say that without hesitation.

A little back story on the art. In 2020, I was commissioned by EDX Exhibits in Seattle to design this wall, and the only real guidelines given were that it should show the real location at South Beach on San Juan Island. I lived on my boat in the 80’s near here, so I already knew the place – and that was of great help). I set the scene of a summer tribal salmon camp, where for centuries families would come to fish and dry salmon – and pick and process camas bulbs that were the two main staples of their diet. It’s a pre-contact scene without iron or steel tools, so it might be any moment in time between 8,000 years ago to about 1700 A.D.

How Did The Process Start?

It was great fun for me to research this, and I’m thankful they gave me almost complete freedom to do what I wanted. It took dozens of site photos, Google Earth views and every Edward Curtis photo I could find to do this. The web has many helpful photos, but some were completely unreliable. The park and tribes checked accuracies of hundreds of details, but not the overall design of people working and meeting on the prairie where the park is today. For example, they had Wool Dogs, a now-extinct breed of canine that were both pets, babysitters and wool sources they trimmed clothing with. There are several in the painting.

The visitor center will open at the end of June 2022 – come out and see 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.