Category Archives: New Painting Post

Blog Posts by Larry Eifert

New Painting Post

The Amazing Giant Pacific Octopus

Click the illustration and it should enlarge in your browser so you can read it better.

This is my January 2013 sketchbook page in 48-North magazine. A diver in Seattle recently hauled one of these critters ashore and it caused a big uproar, mainly because it happened right at a seaside city park. There are two much-beloved octopi-adults in the Seattle Aquarium, and the fact this diver-guy took one home for dinner didn’t sit very well with always-nice and extremely liberal Seattle.

So, with that swirling around the local news, I thought I’d do a little illustration and essay about these critters that I THOUGHT I knew about. Little did I know! It was a pity I only had 200 words of text because the giant Pacific octopus is about the craziest animal I’ve ever read about – and that’s saying a lot because I’ve spent my life doing this stuff. To me, it’s enough that they only have two bones in their entire body, but their sex life appears to be the stuff of legends.

As if the essay and sketch page above isn’t interesting enough, like the 14-FOOT arm span or shark and clam dinners, there was even better stuff I had to leave out. Such as: during mating, the male releases a ‘sperm bag’ that’s 3 FEET long, which he then approaches the female with and using one of its 7-foot long arms gently inserts it into her. He gets to do this several times with multiple partners if he’s lucky, but basically that’s it for him – and he dies soon after. When the female gives birth to the 100,000 little octos, they’re all attached to a long ‘rope’ that she ‘hangs up’ in her den. She then fastidiously and constantly grooms this until the kids hatch, where upon she dies as well. Oh, and I could go on, but as my editor said, “I can hardly wait to see the illustration … or not!”

I’m telling you, I never get tired of learning about this stuff, but this time it left my mouth slightly slacked.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

New Painting Post

Paintings From Paradise

 

For the last few weeks, Nancy and I have been in San Jose and Cabo San Lucas, then a some nice days in San Diego visiting family on our way home. Of course I couldn’t let a good day at the beach go by, so I painted a few watercolors of those times with my little Prang travel kit. Above, there’s Nancy coming along the beach with Cabo’s  inner harbor right behind her. The last time we saw this place was in 2005 when we sailed Ave Maria, our 50-ketch (just the two of us – 38,000 lbs of boat – two tired sailors) into the harbor midway through a very good adventure (here’s the link to THAT story).

And here’s Nancy again going to where she is most comfortable, swimming in a tropical ocean. These are both “5 x 7” on Arches paper.  At one point on this one, I had an 8-yr old Mexican kid come by and watch me. Not a peep, not a change of expression, just cautious amazement – and then he went on  his way without a word. I like Mexico a lot!

 

And below is another one, more of a trip log, of that girl-I-share-life with, book in hand, shoes off in the sand and using a boulder for part of her towel.  This one is 7″x 7″. These paintings are such great ways to remember a trip. By seeing these paintings later, I’ll vividly remember each rock, the color of that golden sand, the frigate birds whirling overhead and maybe also recall the green Ridley sea turtles that we saw hatching out on the same beach just a few hundred yards to the left.

 

And here’s the amazing part. Good friends, and I mean GOOD friends invited us to share this cliff-top house right on the hill above Cabo overlooking the invisible line that marks the Pacific Ocean and Sea of Cortez. It was quite a place. Our bedroom was the room behind the chairs – really! But what the photo doesn’t show is that the edge of that pool drops straight down probably 3-400 feet to the ocean. REALLY! It was a thrill to swim up to that edge and look over, to look DOWN at the backs of the frigate birds and pelicans as they went by. I don’t ever remember sleeping in a room so far out on a cliff that had both the morning sun rising and evening sunset streaming into opposite windows. Besides this, the ceilings of most rooms had custom handmade arched parabolic brick ceilings that amplified the sound like we were all ‘miced up’, an obvious needed addition because the sound of the crashing waves below was sometimes deafening. There were times we thought we felt the place shake.

 

Thanks for reading this week. I’ll be back on my normal blogging schedule from now on. Thanks for the kindness from everyone this Solstice Season.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

New Painting Post

Low Water – High Contrast

I get a charge out of finding little back corners in nature, dark places that look as if they’ve been created from a painting, sort of reverse art. This was one of those places. North Fork of the Nooksack River, a wild and crazy place during a storm, but as the sun set here in late summer a few months ago, it was as soft and ‘painterly’ as they come. And in a few minutes the sun was gone, color was gone, light was gone and it was as if this scene never happened.

 

When I was growing up and probably like some of you, my parents read all those classic adventure novels to me each night. I fell asleep listening to tales about the Last of the Mohicans,  the black spot in Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer and Huck – all illustrated by my hero NC Wyeth. I remember I would always sit on the left side of the book so I could study the cover art when it tilted a bit. That was 60 years go and I still try to paint like that guy. Father of Andrew Wyeth, American painter of even bigger renown, he was a large man that left a huge legacy. Wyeth’s style featured deep shadows, moody warm ocher light that, at least to me, always looked like the canvas was glowing from within – like there was a light bulb behind it. And those shadows – well, let’s just say there were wild critters lurking in every one, even if you couldn’t see them. The colors in this painting come straight from NC’s pallet, and of the 8 or so colors I use (that’s about it, total – just call me cheap), all were his too. If you don’t know about NC, Google him and see where I came from – or at least where my pallet came from.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $160 unframed.
We have custom wood frames that would make it a total of $185 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

New Painting Post

A Collaboration

This week fellow artist and friend, CW Stern and I joined forces to create a turned vessel. It’s fun to push out into something different, but for me this was not exactly new as I actually began my artistic murmurings with a lathe and chisels of my own all those many years go in Eastern Canada – we’re talking 1969 in Waubaushene, Ontario, where the next bus stop north was an Indian village and I had to shovel three parking spaces to end the winter with one.

So, behold a collaborative effort: design by me, all the rest (and I really like this part) by Chuck. First he turned the basic vessel and I penciled on the pattern to be cut away meticulously by Chuck’s ultra-fine dentist drill. You can’t really tell in these photos, but the walls are very thin. The result is quite interesting, I think.

 

This hollow form vessel is a little over 8″ tall with only a 1 3/8″ top opening where all that wood came out of. Walls are about 1/4″ at the thinnest place. Chuck is offering it at $350.

Shipping adds bit more depending on your zone, and if you’re interested please email me.

 

I think all this started a few months ago when I joined forces with another friend, drum-maker Tom Stewart to create a one of his amazing instruments. He built the drum and I embellished the outside with paintings of alpine ptarmigans. “Feathered Feet” was blogged about here.

 

I think this is what a vibrant group of artistic friends do, they sort of feed off each other, and one of the real reasons Nancy and I live here. Not only are we surrounded by Olympic Peninsula nature, but an amazing array of artists.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

New Painting Post

Light in the Meadows

I painted this a few months ago, but larger stuff kept getting on the weekly blog. I painted this because I was struck by the misty air here that almost made the ground and creek glow. On the far edge of the flood plain the alders were really lighting up, like a spotlight had been trained on them, but in a few seconds this all changed when a cloud moved over us and changed the light from warm to cool. Gone, but I still remember the moment. It’s what paintings are all about, chasing those glorious moments of memory. Too many giant paintings have been coming out of this studio in the past few months and I’m sure ready for some of these “moments” here.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
Custom frame makes it a total of $170 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

On a more ‘retail’ note, the website is finally coming back together and by the rate of people buying Christmas stuff, it seems to be working Okay. I’m adding the prints and puzzles, journals and stuff every day, so stay tuned for more as the experience gets richer. http://larryeifert.com/shop is the portal, but you can also get to it from the website simply at http://larryeifert.com

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

 

New Painting Post

Harlequines Are This Month’s Sketch Page

 Just click on the page and it’ll enlarge.

 

What to paint for my December 48-North magazine page? Well, I was hiking on the beach trail in Port Townsend and two beautiful harlequin ducks were just sitting there on a rock, eyeing me carefully and getting nervous. I stopped – they looked. I immediately wondered if these were the exact same ducks I saw in summer up on the Dosewallips River? Could be, but not likely. After that day on the river, I painted this 24″x48″ acrylic of that spot where the river was roaring in full spring run-off and the alder leaves still in bud.

 

If you read the magazine page at the top, you’ll see that harlequins spend their summers up in the mountain rivers diving in the near-freezing glacial melt waters for insects. Winter comes and here they are in our backyard (well, almost) doing the same in the Salish Sea  -where waters are considerably warmer. I’d like to think I saw the same two birds, but the best thing about birding is that I’ll never know.

 

I’m still rebuilding the web store for jigsaw puzzles, posters and prints and it’s coming along. If you try to purchase something and it doesn’t work, just email us.

 

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

New Painting Post

A Portland Challange

I left this image fairly large on the web server, so if you click it you can see some details.

For the past few weeks I’ve been plodding along with this painting on the same studio wall right next to the Florida mural. That’s my home these days, second floor of Union Bank in Port Townsend. Now, with the Florida-thing more or less finished, I’m on to this like our Harry Cat is on bonito flakes – and I’m closing in.

This painting is far enough along that I thought I could put a photo of it in the plan specs to see how it might look. The building is 24′ wide, 12′ high. The blue lines below represent where a glass cabinet will go, which might show you how big this thing will be when it’s installed.

The scene is Portland Oregon looking east from about 3 miles up. That’s downtown right in the middle, the Columbia Gorge on the left, Willamette River snaking across from the right. When finished, this will be printed on high-pressure laminate panels and installed in a new visitor center at Powell Butte (right in the middle of the painting) where a big water-works project is taking shape. I’m working with Sea Reach from Sheridan on this, the same good folks I did the Mt Saint Helens paintings for two years ago. The idea is to show the Bull Run watershed near Mt Hood where Portland gets its water – with a delightful airplane view of the entire area. It’s been a challenge to figure out – to say the least. What DOES this place look like from 3 miles up? I’ve flown over it enough on commercial jets to sort of know how it might ‘feel’, but it’s still been tough to figure out. And this IS a painting, afterall, and not a photograph, so I’ve had to understand how reality translates into little dabs and dashes of paint. Am I getting it? Stay tuned for the final edition and I’ll let you know what they say.

Here’s my preliminary sketch. Sure looks different from how it’s looking now, don’t you think?

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

New Painting Post

48 North Magazine Cover for November

 I write a monthly feature page for this magazine, 48-North, and occasionally they put one of my paintings on the cover. This month they have my sketchbook story about moon snails and the cover painting is of our 1940 classic wooden Monk sloop, Sea Witch. Wow! While we sold the boat to a Canadian couple two years ago, I still have vast and fond memories of this craft, and of the four big boats we’ve owned, for me Sea Witch was the best – a perfect boat. This painting is called “Otters on the Dock” and when I painted it, I offered it up as a totem to the two river otters that would occasionally pay us a visit and poop all over the cockpit and bright work with stuff that is too awful to even think about. I thought that maybe if I payed homage to these two, they’d cut it out. No such luck.

As I go down memory lane right now, 30′ Sea Witch is a pretty famous boat in the Northwest, having been used as a floating adventure for not just Nancy and I, but also Jo Bailey, who for decades used the boat to write countless cruising stories and several books. Also in the painting are my summer dockside geraniums. There’s a sweet wooden sloop without an engine that my neighbors would sail in and out of the slip with only an oar to stop them. Sparkle in the back that was by far the fastest wooden sailboat boat in town, and the Portside Deli (a fine place for lunch or afternoon coffee). But marinas evolve, and today the only subjects of my painting left in place are the engineless sloop and the otters. And I’m not sure about the otters.

Here’s a photo of Sea Witch at her launch in 1940 in Seattle, sent by Pete VanAtta, son of the gal christianing the boat. She was the daughter of the builder standing in the back.  These old boats seem to create extended families.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

New Painting Post

It’s a Wrap for the Florida Mural

I left this fairly large on the server, so if you click on it, it should enlarge so you can see details.

I finished the Polks Nature Center mural for Lakeland, Florida this week. Soon this 8′ x 24′ mural will be plastered on the wall in central Florida. I think it worked out pretty well. I posted sketches and  progress reports before, but if you forgot how it began last month, here’s the right side of the sketch. As you can see, trees changed, critters moved, came, left. The gater arrived below the white crane, the pelicans vanished. The tiny cypress got much bigger and cypress knees grew. Sandhill cranes arrived and began to take off from the swamp. Nature’s like that, don’t you think?  Always changing, never static.

 The real challange here was that I wasn’t on location to really get how this place looks and ‘feels’. Understand that it’s all a made-up scene, but I need to realize how the atmosphere looks, how merky it becomes with all that humidity, how the sky is often leaden blue and not like Western dry skies or even my local Olympic Peninsula crispness. And that water color? A mix of leaden sky and murky swamp. I hope I got it right!

I really enjoy making the big paintings into my own little world, but I have good references to how it works. This morning I was having breakfast and abstractly looking out at our gigantic five-stemmed maple – and suddenly part of it moved. That part of the trunk I was looking straight at was our local barred owl, sitting patiently waiting for a meal to walk by down below. Then a red squirrel came up the trunk and started harassing the big guy. Amazing. Then, like this big mural’s progress, a moment later they both left – and I wondered if I’d seen it at all.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

New Painting Post

Point Reyes National Seashore mural sketch

I left this at a pretty large size on the web, so if you click on it, you’ll see the enlarged version and all the details.

A few weeks ago I blogged about our field trip to Point Reyes National Seashore and the painting I’m doing for them. Now, here’s my sketch, and Jane at Harpers Ferry Center already mocked it up into the design for the park map so I can see where I need to move things around to fit the text. Vultures below the text, some branches trimmed off a little. The painting itself will hang in the Bear Valley Visitor Center, but funding for it is coming from this park brochure project. I think it’s going to be a pretty lush and vibrant painting. With luck we’ll have some support stuff like posters and puzzles to offer of the painting by next summer.

Some of have askd how I come up with these designs. Do I just copy the real place and add some critters? Well, above is the main reference photo I went by, so you can judge for yourself. It was pretty foggy so some of it was just guesswork, but if you compare this with the sketch, and then the concept drawing below I did on location, you can see how far these things change from my field hiking to field sketchbooking, to the beginnings of paint. That headland in the upper left distance is actually turned around the other way and much more distant in reality – the big bay, Drake’s Estero, is also farther away. All that actually moved back in the final sketch, and the cypress got bigger. Artistic license – or call it surgery to make a better painting. Push and pull, elements get moved until they finally settle in a place they should have been in the first place. I just didn’t know it when I began.

Thanks for reading this week. My big painting for the Polks Nature Center in Florida is so close to being finished I can taste the celebratory wine on my tongue. I’ll show it to you next week.

Oh, and we were forced to build a competely new web shopping cart over the past few weeks, so please bear with us if all the products aren’t up yet. Don’t worry, the puzzles are there at least, and a few posters, but if you want something that’s not there, just email us. Playing webmaster is not one of my favorite jobs.

Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.