Going through some old photos in trip journals, I ran across this photo of a local trail in June. It’s February right now, and this place, not 30 miles from here up in the Heather Creek area of the upper Dungeness Valley is currently beneath a lot of snow. Still, my heart yearned to be there right now, hiking along and looking at the trail flowers – yes, there IS a flower called a trail flower.
So, with all that in my mind’s eye, this little painting arrived.
And here it is framed.
This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $149 framed. 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. 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
Short Drop, a painting that could be a million places in the Olympic Mountains and North Cascades. If you live in the Northwest, you know this place, and countless others like it. We hike favorite trails in winter, mainly because they’re tourist-free and often find these seasonal streams, but come summer there will be no such thing – many times not even looking like it ever had water flowing there.
But now when I stood there next to it? I could look at it for hours, listening to the Short Drop of falling water.
What do I get out of this? I like studying the situation, how the water leaves the ‘lip’ and begins its fall – that critical moment of drop. In these little waterfall paintings, that very spot almost always become the center-of-interest, the place on the canvas our eyes are drawn too like a magnet. It did for you, I hope, when you first looked at this. The rest of it, the foam, sticks and little leaves are all supporting characters helping that lead actor do its job.
This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $149 framed. 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 if you’re interested. These little painting go quickly – just sayin’.
Beethoven, because – well, it’s a song sparrow. There are dozens of subspecies of song sparrow, all singing dozens of tunes, but they all include four specific notes that sound like the first four notes of Beethoven’s Symphony #5. Ta da da – daaaa. And once you relate the bird to the song, you’ll have a friend wherever you travel in America – because they’re everywhere. I know this one well. It likes to sit in a gnarly winterized berry patch at the edge of the forest where it lifts it’s head high and blasts away – sometimes for hours. I’m fond of calling them LBJs, for ‘little brown jobs, and the other day it was right outside my studio window, so, a painting appeared in front of me as if by magic.
This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $149 framed. 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.
SOLD
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
We were hiking the Spruce Trail at the Hoh Rain Forest a couple of months ago, no people – winter had arrived. Then a brilliant flash of red, a sapsucker landed right in front of us on the trail not ten feet from us, just sat there. After a bit it began jumping around, looking at us as if trying to explain something, but who knows what – we’re not good at sapsucker-lingo. This went on for a good amount of time, and then, as if finally giving up on us, it few off down the trail. We followed, and here it was again, repeating the same routine. I’ve never had the chance to spend as much time with one of these fairly rare birds – it was intriguing.
I’m fairly well convinced that we’re not the only smart things on this planet, if we are at all. There are complex goings-on that, mainly because of our arrogance, we’re missing. I would have loved to have spent time here with this little colorful bird and learned from it, but, alas, we knew not where to begin, so instead I just stupidly sat there with my mouth agape while Nancy clicked away. At least I can paint something in memory of the experience.
This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $149 framed. 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.
SOLD
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
Not once have I ever seen a golden-crowned kinglet on any of our feeders, but they sure are all around us here in our little patch of forest. I had one flitting around the hummingbird feeder today, not five feet from where I sit right now – and so that’s enough of a reason for me to paint it. I think kinglets just focus on eating insects and seed or suet feeders aren’t on their radar.
So, I brought in a little sprig of winter Nootka rose hips for a prop and painted away. This fairly glows with glazing on the background, but the computer screen just can’t handle that, so you’ll have to imagine it.
This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $189 framed. 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.
SOLD
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
This was just a thoughtful moment for me, something like a nice dream one has before awakening – except I wasn’t asleep. Sitting at my easel, mind off thinking beyond the blank board in front of me. One of your bucks meandered past the window. Then in a very clear thought I saw myself sitting beside a nice little mountain stream, messy logs and limbs piled up from past high water, a salmon spawning pool behind it. I remember wondering where the ‘dipper’ was – and then – I just sat down to paint it. No reference photo, no sketch, just my memory of someplace that doesn’t exist. Or, maybe it does.
Five colors later, and here it is. I think the light is nice.
This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $149 framed. 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.
SOLD
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
This past year has been one for us to lose some friends. And so, to help us remember that life, nature, and friends are fleeting, I present the little splash of yellow happiness. This Wilson’s Warble is the very one that has gave us joy this past summer. This little guy spent a lot of time around our pond and little waterfall feature, obviously gleaning insects, but also working on his almost-daily bath. He was a joy to watch – so here’s a little painting about the experience – and that IS what I do, experience nature and then try to show that meaningful time to others.
This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $149 framed. 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 of you’re interested.
SOLD
Thanks for reading this week, now get out and get some ‘nature’ yourself. Larry Eifert
I have a small bit of time from larger projects and it has allowed me to get some smaller paintings put together. This format, about the size of a book, has always been a favorite of mine. It allows me to see the entire painting in one glance, amazingly different than a big mural – and here’s the first one – a Bewick’s Wren in some of our wild Klamath plum down the lane. I’m offering it in this custom frame, but we have others if you’d like a change. Don’t hesitate; these don’t stay around long.
This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $149 framed. 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.
SOLD
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
Many of you know that I was led into my life of nature and art by my parents, but especially my mom, Illinois author of 20 books and editor of a magazine that’s still going after more than 75 years.
Collecting mushrooms for dinner. While she wrote a book on mushrooms, she almost poisoned the entire family with a wrong identification.
I still get fan mail for her, one just a few weeks ago, but I never seem to have enough time to add more of her massive collection of work on her website. Recently however, I toggled my painting of that big mural with updating her web ‘look’ and added some new albums- and it just went live at Virginia Eifert.com
I hope the look and feel of it is now better suited for use as a reference site, showing her life in some of the thousands of photos I still have here. Much of her work, is, as it should be, stored at Western Illinois University and the Illinois State Museum, but I have lots of it to share, more personal exploits of her adventures instead of the professional stuff.
Viriginia’s books are also being recreated for Kindle and Nook, and the next should be ready for her 105th birthday this coming January, “Land of the Snowshoe Hare” which is one of her best. I am also a product of Virginia in mind, body and soul. If I’ve been an artist for over 40 years, it’s because of Virginia, who fed me a complete diet of nature, art and science for the brief time she was here.
Publicity shot for the Illinois State Museum, who hired her at age 28 to create the museum magazine and series of books still in print today. She wrote 326 issues of the Living Museum until her death.
This from the website front page:
VIRGINIA EIFERT
AMERICAN AUTHOR AND ARTIST, PHOTOGRAPHER AND NATURALIST 1911 – 1966
A GIFTED NATURALIST WHO LEFT BEHIND A GREAT LEGACY OF WORK – VIRGINIA TOUCHED MANY LIVES IN MANY WAYS.
MEMORIAL COLLECTIONS OF HER WORK ARE IN WESTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY AND THE ILLINOIS STATE MUSEUM.
THE PURPOSE OF THIS WEBSITE IS NOT TO SHOWCASE VIRGINIA’S KNOWN WORKS, HER MANY BOOKS AND THE FAME THAT STILL GARNERS FAN MAIL 50 YEARS AFTER HER DEATH, BUT TO SHOW HER PERSONAL LIFE, HER ROOTS OF HOW SHE ACHIEVED WHAT SHE DID.
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?
Here’s the left side, cypress in the lake and swampy stuff in the foreground.
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.
