Category Archives: National Park Service

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.

Commissioned paintings, National Park Service, People Paintings

American Camp mural progress report

One man with a brush! One brush stroke at a time! (these blow up in your browser to see details)

Personally, I think there must be an easier way to pass the time in my 70’s, but here I am none-the-less – cranking away on a super-complex wall mural in my studio.  I’d  have to say this project sure is fun and a real challenge, and keeps my brain about as sharp as it can be.  I’m just glad I took physics and higher math in high school.

This is being painted half-size for a 35′-wide x 17′ tall wall in the new visitor center at the San Juan Island National Historical Park near Friday Harbor, Washington. Same project, I  finished the first one, a big prairie ecosystem painting. This is a bigger thing by far. This is the entire side wall of the building, and has all sorts of stuff complicating things, wall plugs, fire alarms, a door, a reader rail with tribal artifacts – makes me dizzy just trying to work it out.

What’s Going On?

This scene shows the summer gathering on the prairies at South Beach and Salmon Banks in the San Juan Islands, where many tribes would gather in late summer to fish and dry salmon, dig and roast camas bulbs and lay in winter stores.  The buildings were temporary. This went on for thousands of years and so the painting is set in a pre-iron, pre colonization time, maybe 500 years ago. So far, Nancy has been the model for almost all the people. I think there are about 30 of them. Some facial features I found online in the Curtis photo library, some I took from modern tribal gathering photos but just slimmed everyone down. This was also pre-refined sugar and wheat times.

So how is this installed?

I’ll do the sky as a separate painting using a car paint sprayer, scan and photograph all of it, piece it together into on giant digital file. Then Capitol Museum Services in Manassas, Virginia will put it on vinyl and up it goes (thankfully, I don’t have to do that part).  I’m just the guy with the paintbrush.

More soon. Stay tuned. Feel free to pass this around. People seem to like 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, Murals, National Park Service, People Paintings, Wildlife

Prairie Mural – San Juan Island National Historical Park


I finished my prairie mural for the San Juan Islands National  Historical Park a few days ago. So, I thought I’d pass it around here where I reliably get some feedback – good or bad. A very solitary live I have, painting and just sending this stuff out to wait for time to happen. I think I nailed the landscape well, but I won’t know for awhile. Below are some portions of it, left and right sides.

And below is the sketch. This place is very complex when you actually get down on your knees and look at it. VERY complex. As in, how the heck do I paint THIS? And the real physical place is much more detailed than I attempted.

I wrote this about my project here a few months ago: I have a long history with the San Juan Islands of Washington State. In the 80’s and on my own restored boat, I summered here while I learned to paint (heck, I’m still learning to paint). And now I’m back there making some rather large murals for the new visitor center at the American Camp unit of the National Historical Park down at the island’s south end at Cattle Point and South Beach. Nancy and I went there a few weeks ago, a FOUR ferry ride for us up and back!

This will be printed (the original won’t be on the wall in case the terrorists burn it down) and will be 6′ wide x 5′ high. Surrounding the visitor center is open prairie stuck out on a point with water on both sides – and one of the most beautiful places in the Salish Sea.

I cropped out some detailed sections so you could see the drawing better, but even so it’s a fairly complex bunch of lines. There are glacial erratic boulders that have some strange mossy adaptions, a butterfly only found here, voles and snails, birds and invasive rabbits. Red foxes that are Cascade dark phase colors, lots of black-tailed deer and meadowlarks (a bird we’ve never seen here at home just 30m south) We saw almost everything going in the painting on the site visit.

Here are my drawings for the bottom section. See how much more open it is so it’s understandable. In the color phase it got much more detailed. Truly fun to paint.

Here’s the empty building waiting for these two paintings, plus another dozen smaller ones. Getting the first one finished helps me understand how I’ll handle the color and detail on the others. The big wall is next, 38 feet of it. Thanks, Joe, Sara and Lex at the park for making this a fun and interesting project.

This view of the prairie and Strait shows scenery, but it also has lots of my paintings if you know where to look. From Mount Rainier NP in the very distant background 100 miles away, to state parks and land trust installations in between, I think I probably have 100 paintings in various exhibits and waysides in view here. But who’s counting.

And here’s the 38′ wall with my concept sketch for the next painting. How the heck I show a 38′ wall in a dinky blog post, I’m not even going to try to do. So stay tuned.

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, People Paintings

San Juan Island National Historical Park

I have a long history with the San Juan Islands of Washington State. In the 80’s and on my own restored boat, I summered here while I learned to paint (heck, I’m still learning to paint). And now I’m back there making some rather large murals for the new visitor center at the American Camp unit of the National Historical Park down at the island’s south end at Cattle Point and South Beach. Nancy and I went there a few weeks ago, a FOUR ferry ride for us up and back!

It was truly fun to see all these places again, and I got some good references, one of which is shown above in drawing form. This one is 6′ x 5′ and will be on the wall shown below, far left, and shows the complex natural prairie that grows here. It’s open prairie stuck out on a point with water on both sides – and one of the most beautiful places in the Salish Sea.

I cropped out some detailed sections so you could see the drawing better, but even so it’s a fairly complex bunch of lines. There are glacial eratic boulders that have some strange mossy adaptions, a butterfly only found here, voles and snails, birds and invasive rabbits. Red foxes that are Cascade dark phase colors, lots of black-tailed deer and meadowlarks (a bird we’ve never seen here at home just 30m south) We saw almost everything going in the painting on the site visit.

Both of these paintings will be the main focus of the inside. The second painting (shown at the bottom) will need to be redrawn, but it fills the entire main wall, 38 feet by 17 ft high. That’ll be another post or two. Our goal was getting that beautiful prairie drawn before the wind and rain came. Which we did!

And here’s the 38′ wall with my concept sketch. How the heck I show a 38′ wall in a dinky blog post, I’m not even going to try to do. So stay tuned.

On the way home the next day, we were coming across Whidbey Island in between the two ferries. That road always has a stunning view of the Olympics and our home in Port Townsend, but the sunset did it up right, showing us yet again why we picked this place to be a artists. See that big freighter? Port Townsend is just on shore behind 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, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

Everglades Preliminary Drawings

This is the fishing camp we could have stayed in, accessible only by air boat – but NO, I had to sleep in the Best Western in Homestead, Florida! Yes, I checked it out and the python had left.

Sorry I haven’t posted in a few weeks, but the art has been flowing out of here like a narrow channel after a King Tide. Meaning fast and furious. I was in Everglades National Park in July for a site visit for this and now have all 17 drawings in refined versions finished up. After this, let the paint begin so this gater-guy can admire the installation right next to his home slough.

All these are for outdoor waysides, so they’ll have text blocks.  That’s what the empty white areas are for. I know, it would be better if it was all painting, but these installations will teach people about this place for many decades – long after I’m gone, kids will wander down these boardwalks and maybe learn something. One is bigger, an 8′ wide mural, but I haven’t started that yet.

These are some photos of the site visit. Lots of walking slowly around and talking, the pros telling us Northwesterners the scoop about this rare place. I learned a lot about a lot, from one end of the Sea of Grass to the other.

This drawing is about the strange and wonderful anhinga bird, and it’s actually going ON the anhinga trail. These birds hunt by slowly swimming along underwater and stabbing fish, and I got to watch that in action.

And several pieces of art are about herons. Lots of herons. There are TEN species of herons in this one painting and shows how they follow the receding water level as the season’s change and the ‘river’ dries.

There’s an algae that grows all over the place here. Periphyton. It’s food, shelter and covers the ground pretty much everywhere the shallow water is. It floats, then dives to the bottom, then dries out then the water recedes. All in one painting!

Stay tuned as this project develops. I want to thank the good folks at EDX Exhibits in Seattle for taking another chance on me, for traveling across the country and then still speak to me! Life is good.

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, Waysides

Grove of Titans – Save the Redwoods League


The winding road of life sometimes loops back to the start. In the 1980’s, I was commissioned to paint a mural of Mill Creek in Redwood National Park near Crescent City, California. It was my first piece of public art for any national park, and it opened my eyes to what might be possible for my future. That project made me see the value in painting for a bigger cause than simply art for people’s walls. That idea has remained with me ever sense.

After that first effort, I was soon painting for other parks and some for The Save-the-Redwoods League in San Francisco, which, at that time, was the front line in trying to stop commercial logging of the last 2% of the Coastal Redwoods. That’s right, 2%! I painted a lot of redwoods in those years.

And now, some 40 years later, I was just asked to paint some more redwoods for Redwood National Park. When I did the first painting (seen at the bottom here), no one realized the importance of this area in the Mil Creek Valley of Jed Smith Redwoods State Park. Now we know it’s home to some of the tallest and biggest redwoods on the planet, the Grove of Titans. Save-the-Redwoods League has partnered with Redwood National Park to build a very impressive elevated boardwalk to save the shallow roots of the trees there, and these three new panels with my art will be on that boardwalk. It’s within a few hundred yards of the site of that first painting!

Here’s a reference photo of that grove, you can see similar elements in the big panel at the top. Thanks to the Save-the-Redwoods League for hiring me, and thanks to EDX Exhibits in Seattle for yet another chance to paint nature. Neither of these folks realized my history here, but I somehow got the job anyway! Thanks to Deborah at SRL and Beth and Michael at EDX. You guys are wonderful to work with.

Above is a photo of the Grove of Titans. You can see where I got the design for the larger forest panel.

And here’s the original painting of Mill Creek, a watercolor on a full sheet of mat board. I’ve certainly changed my style in 40 years.

And another painting from that same era of the Smith River that Mill Creek joins. I painted this for Six Rivers National Forest, my first Forest Service piece of art dated about the same time. It was painted for the Discovery Museum in Eureka, CA.

This was a very fun project for me, to go back to my park-roots and remember all these redwood paintings I did in some other life, hundreds of them – at that time, I was the struggling artist.

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.

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Backpacking, Hiking, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Wildlife

Back to the Beach

Some little paintings of my time there, inside that tent at sunset, and below, low tide watching sea otters herd the kids around the little bay. They’re simple paintings, but make good memories seeing them again here. 

I went back to a wilderness beach hike with my little Six Moon Designs tent and my paints. I had plenty of great nature to worship, including an amazing belly-up humpback whale and a Steller’s sealion, both washed up without much injury as far as I could tell. I’m telling you, it is thrilling to walk up to a 30-foot whale on a wilderness beach, a sort of primal experience I will remember for awhile. As I walked up to it, sounds seemed to become sort of diminished, as if I were walking into a quiet room. It was a long way from the water, as you can see in the photo – a minus tide put the waves very far away and the whale seemed oddly out of place.

Then this guy:Exactly above my tent in the top canopy of a Sitka spruce, this bald eagle started in at about 5:30 am, broadcasting its discontent at not seeing breakfast out in the ocean I guess – or, who knows what. Soon the ravens got involved – and it was all over for a sleep-in morning. The Starbucks was made early! Later, I watched this eagle spot a fish at least 300 yards out from where it sat on a treetop, taking a long glide off the branch and catch it! How could it see that far?

I just recently finished three large paintings for Redwood National Park through the Save-the-Redwoods League. In one, I painted the canopy fern mats that develop in ancient trees (not just redwoods) that come from centuries of needle litter building up on branches. These become pockets of leather ferns, huckleberrys and critters. The wandering salamander live generations in those mats, and marbled murrelets, an endangered sea bird, nest on them.

Walking out of the hike to the trailhead, I spotted this one on an ancient Sitka spruce, not far above my head. It had all the components, leather fern, black huckleberry and maybe some salamanders hidden away in the roots. It all seemed to tie together that my work is my play, my hiking is directly tied to my art. It’s just all one. A symbiosis, if you will, of cause and effect.  Symbiosis is interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association, typically to the advantage of both. Art and nature, I am who I am, therefore it seems I have to paint and write about it, hopefully to the benefit of nature.

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.

National Park Service, New Painting Post, People Paintings, Waysides

Lewis and Clark National Park – Installation

This is a long post, lots of photos, but I wanted to document this. In 2019, I was commissioned to do a series of paintings for the Dismal Nitch unit of Lewis and Clark National Park at the mouth of the Columbia River. Astoria is just across the river, the huge Megler Bridge is just to the west.  We were recently there and I took some photos of the installation, along with a big bronze sculpture that’s there as well.

This is the spot where the Corps of Discovery, fighting a stormy southerly with huge waves and rain, hunkered down for days. Aptly named, Dismal Nitch, it really is just that, a little nitch in the cliffs. Giant logs were banging together, they were almost out of food, soaked and cold. Their quest, the Pacific Ocean was almost in view, but here they were fighting for their lives.

This is an important place in America’s history, just before Lewis and Clark connected our country together, east and west, in early November of 1805.

Just prior to me in 2008, artists Gareth Curtiss and Bill Clearman installed this 6′ x 4′ bronze at the site, and I fell gratified to have my stuff in the same location. It’s a stunning bit of lost wax casting. My part of this was the design and illustrations of the wayside. Giving credit also to Rosene Creative from Georgia handled the top end of it, Faye Goolrick of Atlanta did the text and Eric Kittelberger from Cleveland did the final maps. It’s how these projects go, a nationwide effort.

To make this project even sweeter to me, in 1963, my mom published a book about Lewis and Clark and The Corp or Discovery for Dodd Mead in New York, 1962. It’s the story of the Corps and all the wildlife and botany they discovered – almost daily – on their three-year journey. And here I was, a half-century later, painting the same story.

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

Glacier Park sloppy mural details

I posted about this painting of Glacier National Park recently, and now I’ve scanned it for the next step in becoming the back of the park map. As I was scanning and then cleaning up the file in Photoshop, I was struck with how loose and abstract my stuff gets when you zoom in on it. Brush strokes, smudges, finger prints, cat hair, my hair (what’s left of it) is all in here, stuck down forever. I think it’s a good view of my painting process, so here are some samples I screen-grabbed as I went.

This first one is the ptarmigan chicks in the center foreground. Notice the while lines around the heads to help bring that out from the background. And the vague indication of the rocks that are only a few brush strokes building from dark to light.  Not detailed at all, none of it, but it still suffices to tell the story. Click on all these to see larger versions in your browser. It helps understand what I’m showing.

And here is the ram’s head on the painting’s right. In the closeup details on the second image, you can see it’s really just a gauzy overlay of white that makes for the final presentation, and you can see again that this entire animal was initially painted dark umber to begin with.

Lower left corner with the snowshoe hare and butterfly, it all works pretty well at this resolution, but blow it up so you can actually see the brush strokes and it’s pretty darned abstract.

And finally, the area around the elk, flowers and sedges, alpine landscape with the stream. It looks okay at this normal resolution.

But as I zoom in on it, the thing falls apart fairly quickly.

If I presented this in a gallery situation, would it work? Probably, because people will buy anything = witness the last presidency. But there’s not much fine detail here except some dabs and dashes of paint. What I’m trying to get across here is that big paintings are really just that, dabs and dashes. I get questions about my process and I’d have to say here that it’s all just dabbing and dashing, splashing paint on a flat surface and standing back every few minutes to see how it’s going. In the end, it’s a huge finished thing that looks okay, but every moment is just abstract art in each very tiny area – then repeat over and over.

What IS this, anyway? What an abstract or maybe even non-objective piece of art.

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.