Category Archives: National Park Service

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.

Commissioned paintings, Murals, National Park Service, New Painting Post

San Juan Island NHP – the final story

I wanted to post this since I’m almost at the end of this long-running project. This is being installed shortly in the new visitor center, San Juan Island National Historical Park, Washington State. Two murals and 18 other pieces of art, this was all started in November 2020, 530 days ago as of April 14. These things take time, patience and ‘keep smiling, this can’t go on forever’. (all images should enlarge in your browser, and you’ll  need that for a 35-feet painting. 

Above is my original concept sketch, drawn on a piece of writing paper and placed in the plans (that weren’t even finished yet). This was for EDX, the designer and a wonderful company in Seattle I truly enjoy working with.  Below, you can see the expanded version, bigger paper, more details I researched using Edward Curtis historic photos for references.

You can see how these things progress, adding detail at each stage.

Then we realized a wall with my second mural would block the left side, so I moved things around. Same content, just in different places.

And then, just like that I painted it. The fabrication contract was won by Capitol Museum Services near Washington DC, and I was on the bid as the artist that would, in effect, finish the same project I had started months before! The park would have preferred color references first for the painting, but I just went for it.  I painted it half size, cut it in pieces so I could scan it, which was done in 110 individual scans on my flat-bed, then pieced together on my computer.  I wonder how many artists in this country could have done all this ‘in house’?

And below is the wall it’s going on in the new visitor center, 35 feet wide by 17 feet tall. My second mural of the prairie is going on the wall to the left.

And here’s the other mural, a current scene of the park’s prairie.

A long and winding road, isn’t that what life should be. This one made me thankful I’m still doing this, a straight and narrow path of painting American nature at its best.

More soon. Stay tuned. Feel free to pass this around. People seem to enjoy seeing my process.

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, National Park Service, New Painting Post, People Paintings

Wrapping Up My American Camp mural

This photo was sent by Margy Emerson of her sister next to the installation.

Getting close to the final brushstroke on this 35-foot wall for the San Juan National Historical Park visitor center mural. How does a painter know when it’s the final brush stroke? When he can’t stand to make another one! (or so the old saying goes.) This wall was probably more brush strokes that I would have liked, but the entire process was interesting, challenging and really fun. I can’t help but feel grateful for the opportunity.

Here are some section shots that should enlarge in your browser so you can see it better. I think there are around 105 Indians, 18 gulls, 3 eagles and 2 wool dogs. Those wool dogs are an extinct species of dogs tribal weavers would use for wool, and I have one of them spinning with a drop spindle.

The scene is at South Beach, San Juan Island, Washington, a place that is now a national historic park. Historically, It’s a park because of the Pig War in 1859 between the U.S. and Britain. In reality, the “history” is more about the giant salmon runs in late summer, when millions of fish coming down the Strait of Juan de Fuca would crowd the shoreline. For thousands of years, many different tribes would show up here to catch and dry a few of these fish, and also dig camas bulbs, and catch up on the news. Both the salmon and camas flour were important winter foods.

The painting is supposed to show pre-European contact, so no iron, steel, or woven cotton fabric. It was fun to research all this, but it’s also why I enjoy making art so much for the National Park Service. We both feel art is a good way to show our legacy, our history and future (see the current generation and future generation down in the right corner). The NPS seriously pushes me to paint beyond what I’ve ever thought I’d paint. This project made me realize how grateful I am for taking physics and algebra in high school!

Here’s a photo of my studio with part of this being painted. See those reference photos down along the bottom? Nancy was my model for almost every one of the people.

Below is the visitor center wall this is going on. It’ll be installed by early summer if we’re all lucky, along with another 11 paintings from me, and all the other exhibits. Capitol Museum Services from Manassas Virginia is doing the installation.

The outside of the new visitor center with Nancy in front and a truly amazing Douglas-fir that they basically built the building around. Most commercial projects would have just bulldozed the tree, cleared the land and then planted little Mall-Ready trees, but not the NPS!

And the last two photos are the location of the painting a quarter mile from the visitor center. It’s actually a couple of square miles of landscape all pushed together into one painting, add people, voila!

When I was growing up, the kid of two people who worked for the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, Illinois, I would go down to the museum after school. My babysitters were the curators who were building giant habitat exhibits much like this new wall mural. Most of the exhibits were about nature, but a couple were of Indian life. Robert Larson, a famed painter in charge of this (and a big man who didn’t need a ladder to paint the sky) would talk to me as he worked about what he was doing. I was always a little kid with his mouth open in awe. That was 60 years ago! I know Bob would have enjoyed this, wanted to be a part of it. His kindness and friendship, along with all the rest of those wonderful people in the museum’s back end, are still a factor in my life.

Here’s a photo of Larson doing a plaque of my mom after her death. It’s in the Virginia Eifert Book Store in the museum. And below, one of his big Indian paintings at the museum.

Robert Larson paints the Archaic diorama in the ÒPeoples of the PastÓ exhibit. Photo courtesy Illinois State Museum

More soon. Stay tuned. Feel free to pass this around. People seem to enjoy seeing my process.

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.