Category Archives: New Painting Post

Blog Posts by Larry Eifert

New Painting Post

Hooded Merganser study

2015-3-Hooded-Margansers

“Stick it on the paper, hard and fast, as fast as your brain can move the pencil and brush. Don’t think about this, just do it!”

Today, a little watercolor that isn’t for sale, but is part of another project – and I liked it enough to show it around. If art is simply reflecting life, this little male Hooded Merganser could have been painted several times this past month. We’ve been seeing several courting pairs in the Port Townsend Boat Haven marina on hikes through town, and we watch as each male is circling, rearing back, showing off his Mohawk to a potential lady-love. Later, they’ll find a nest hole up one of our local wilderness rivers like the Dungeness and set up house.

Not so many lines, a dash of color, and you get a Hooded Merganser.

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

Here’s the blog on the web.And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Pacific Wren study

Pacific-Wren

This little wren hangs out around the deer-fenced garden. It sometimes sits on the gate, not 20 feet from where I’m sitting right now, 50 feet from where this was painted.

Feels like it’s family in some way – short cocky tail, no neck. That’s a Pacific Wren ‘look’ all right, and the instant way you can i.d. this little ball of brown fluff.

Pacific-Wren-framed

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 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

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.

New Painting Post

Passing Moment – Soon Gone

Heather-Creek-Feeder-Stream

Our little trail went right by this seasonal creek carrying runoff from snow much farther up the mountain – Buckhorn Peak. I loved the way the trail, carrying us, mimicked the creek, carry the water. Both of us were traveling, both right here at the same moment in time and together by chance. One of us appreciated the light and lush effects it produced with light streaming through the forest and onto the water. In a moment, all three were gone.

 

Heather Creek is up the Dungeness River, Olympic National Forest and National Park, second steepest watershed in America. In its 32 miles, the river drops 7,300 feet. I can say I’ve been from bottom to top of this river – it’s one of my favorites. From old-growth hemlock forests lacking fire scars to a waterfall that looks like a feathery curtain, broad meadows, alpine tarns, towering peaks named Deception, Buckhorn and Constance – it’s all here. I’ve painted it often, and if I can walk, I’ll be back!

Heather-Creek-Feeder-Stream-framed

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 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

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.

New Painting Post

Whidbey Island Prairie – Spring and Early Summer

Spring-prairie-progress

Work in progress: a new painting on it’s way. Click the image and it should enlarge in your browser.

Unveiling of an almost-finished new project today. I’ve been working on this for some time and it’s closing in on completion. Thought I’d toss it out for comments. I still have some bit to go, like adding another layer of closeup grasses and sedge, refining some of the flowers and critters – just tightening it up.

Nancy
Nancy at the prairie – pack strapped on full of camera gear for reference shots.

This is the sixth painting for the Whidbey Camano Island Land Trust and it will eventually be an outdoor wayside panel “planted” in a piece of rare natural prairie they’ve recently acquired. It’s right along the bluff in the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve – and in the background you can see Port Townsend and the Olympic Peninsula. So what’s the big deal here? It’s rare natural prairie, yes, but also a place with some very interesting and rare plants, like the Golden Paintbrush. And the site is only one of a handful where this beautiful plant grows. While it grows here naturally, the Land Trust is actively adding thousands of new plants or all types to jump start that’s already here. It’s a massive undertaking I’m continually impressed with – and I can’t even mow my own grass on a timely basis.

Nancy1
At the plant nursery where the Land Trust is supplementing thousands of new plants to help the prairie regain its original ecosystem. It’s a long haul that will take years.

This is the first of two of these prairie paintings. Stay tuned – I’ll send out photos of this one upon completion, and keep you in the loop for the second. It’s a very fun project for me.

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

Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post, Wildlife

Rufous Hummingbird Looking for Spiders

Rufous-Looking-Spiders

Click to enlarge in your browser.

Just a new painting that could be happening right outside my studio window, but isn’t. We have several Anna’s Hummers wintering over nowadays – enjoying our warmer winters. I often see them flying among the branches, carefully checking each bit of moss, each crook and corner, then a quick snatch-up of a hapless spider for lunch. The other hummingbird species commonly here is the Rufous, a reddish-brown job like this painting, but for some reason these tiny birds are NOT over-wintering. Instead, just like forever before, they fly off to Mexico or Costa Rica (where we all want to go this time of year). It’s obviously cheaper and safer for these little guys to stay home and dine on spiders and mites, but so far they don’t do it (so I painted one as if it did). Makes us think it’s spring already.

Rufous-Looking-Spiders-framed

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 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. You might send this to someone who you think would appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up for my  weekly posts. I’m trying to expand my list. An email with their email to me will work too.

Thanks for reading this week, and enjoy the last of 2014.

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.

New Painting Post

Up The Hill

Up-the-Hill

This little acrylic was painted a month ago and I was holding it for a friend who appears to not want it now – so here it is on my blog ready for a new home. I painted several studies of this hillside road close to us, but this one became a trail. To me, the white at the top of the grade makes the center of interest work well – like a light bulb enticing you “up the hill.” This is the nice thing about painting over photography, but I’d never say that to Nancy (who spends a lot of energy looking for photographic images that look like paintings).

 Sorry, it’s now sold.

Since Solstice and the new year are almost here, I just want to thank everyone for the amazing support I’ve gotten on my blog-thing. I posted my 250th post last week, and of these 36 new small paintings I’ve recently finished, only a few are left in the studio. Feels good. Thanks, everyone. I wouldn’t have imagined it, but this is becoming a very personal way to sell my stuff. Each sale seems to have an email-back-and-forth that lets me get to know who’s buying it – a very different experience from the typical gallery sale where I usually don’t even know the name of the buyer because it might breech some client/gallery confidence. And at this stage of my life, ‘personal’ is becoming more and more important to Nancy and I. Making a living as a painter is more than just making money.

Up-the-Hill-framed

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 framed. Outside measurements are about 12″ x 15″. The 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.

New Painting Post

Rufous-sided Towhee Study

Towhee-on-Leader

Sorry, it’s sold. “Rufous-sided Towhee Study” is an acrylic on board, 6″x 9″ and is offered in an 12″ x 15″ frame for $145, frame included. And we have several different frame styles.

These guys always look agitated and eccentric, so that’s what I tried to paint. 

We have multiple families of these tail-flickers here at the studio. Always a pleasure to watch, we’ve come to recognize individuals by where they sit in the afternoon sunning themselves near a favorite hiding spot. Bold and vigorous, they flick those big tails, back and forth, up and down, as if that’ll impress someone. Maybe me.

Here’s the teachable moment, at least for me. We’ve come to realize the real value of ‘backyard’ birds isn’t just the entertainment, beauty and activity they provide out our windows, but a gauge of how vibrant and healthy a place is. When we moved in here many years ago, the last guy had a dog, sprayed lots of stuff, Roundup, soil sterilizers, you name it. He offered us about 10 sprayers and claimed I’d sure need them – apple spray, cherry spray, and when I asked him if he actually got cherries he said no. Time moved on, we didn’t spray, didn’t have an outside dog – and the wildlife eventually came to us in a very big way. Countless paintings of our ‘locals’ have ‘flown’ out the studio door because of the closeup wildlife we have for models. If you read this blog, you see that fairly consistently. I’m convinced that it’s not where we live as much as how we’ve treated our land and its residents. We’re a family here, although sometimes kids can get a bit unruly (take for instance that 220 lb. buck that came through last night).

 

Towhee-on-Leader

 

Here it is again: This ORIGINAL painting, “Rufous-sided Towhee Study” is an acrylic on board, 6″x 9″ and is offered framed in an 12″ x 15″ frame (outside measurements) for $145, frame included. and 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.

New Painting Post

That Golden Sunset Hike

Sunset-Hike

On a late afternoon hike not long ago,  I clearly remember this place, open scattered meadows, a golden-red sun streaming in from the left and lighting up things as if they were internally electrified. Trees seemed to be somewhat blurred as the light bounced around, making it feel almost like a sunlight-fog. I  wanted to walk here forever, but the bugs were getting intense the farther I went. Can you guys tell I’m a hiker? I mean, without hiking I can feel myself starting to dry up emotionally. I truly believe doing it will keep me alive forever, and help keep me in such better health that old age won’t feel like old age. So far, it seems to be working, and helping me to keep painting too.

Sunset-Hike-framed

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 framed. Outside measurements are about 12″ x 15″.
The 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. Know someone who might appreciate my stuff? Send me an email and I’ll sign them up.

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.

New Painting Post

Once a Logging Road

Old-Logging-Road

 

First, I’d like to apologize for the extra posts some people received a few days ago. Fuse blew in the studio, computers crashed, amazingly the post in question was duplicated 32 times and began sending the mailing list out. What a mess. I try not to overstep my welcome.

So, back to this new painting: Imagine giant 80-ton log trucks rumbling down this little road. Must have been a nature-nightmare, but now it’s about as serene as it gets for cutover forest, an occasional big tree still left here and there. We’re lucky enough to have a few of these big guys here at our place, standing beside the old haul-road like overlords sweating they might be next. But, thankfully, industry is gone and we’re making sure it doesn’t come here again any time soon. I like the way the sun falls on the road, like little searchlights.

Old-Logging-Road-framed

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 framed. Outside edge of the frame is about 12″ x 15″.
The 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

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.

New Painting Post

The Top of Our Hill – a new painting

Top-of-our-hill

Sorry, this is sold.

About two minutes from my studio, our road drops to the Chimacum Creek Estuary. When we moved in here, we asked what was ‘down there’ and were told simply, ‘oh, some water, a few trees, it just deadends into the forest’. Little did we realize there was a place worthy of park-status, and we’ve loved it ever since. Salmon, herons, kingfishers, Nancy recently spotted a mountain lion almost exactly here.I’ve painted the road many times, but never with the warm glow of fall, so here’s an warm fall-color rendition. Recently, our local Land Trust just bought some of it, saving this place for us and everyone else.

Top-of-our-hill-framed

* Click images and they should enlarge in your browser.

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 framed. Outside measurements are about 12″ x 15″.
The 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.