Category Archives: New Painting Post

Blog Posts by Larry Eifert

New Painting Post

Wildflower Heaven

 

The past four days: Nancy and I did something we’ve never done. In our hurry to hike every high-country trail, climb to every lookout, paint or photograph every park, we’ve never just walked out there and plopped ourselves in the meadows and spent days just soaking it up like we lived there. It’s always such a hurry with us we never get to just sit and smell the Sitka valerian (very sour). So, that’s what we did – just walked out there and sat down at about the 6000′ feet level – and I’d say it was nothing short of heaven. John Muir said go to the mountains and get their good tidings. We did!

 

There’s this high rocky road, some say the highest in Washington State, that goes off from Hurricane Ridge in the Olympics and in 10 miles or so traverses the most glorious alpine landscape I think I know of. We heard murmurrings that after a seriously big snow winter, this week was the best flower show – but that was a serious understatement. I took three flower books – figured out most but some just weren’t listed. You see, the eastern Olympics are a place unlike any other. Isolated from the rest of the continent like an island in the sky, you can see Olympics-only marmots, chipmunks, violets, hairbells and lots of others, only found here. Red, pink, orange and purple were the meadows. Some, like the photo below looked like snow. Nancy sat herself down next to a marmot family’s communal den system and got some great closeup shots of marmot pups testing their restling skills, and I just went off and found flowers I still have no idea what they’re called.

 Avalanche Lilies

What’s the definition of heaven in this life? I’d say it would be sitting in the middle of this field of avalanche lilies – but I’m just an artist, painter of wild places and still can’t get enough of it. You: go, go now. They’re still there.

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

Glacier Bay National Park Forest Trail

 

 Seems like this took forever, but when I’m painting it in Port Townsend, sending the files to West Virginia, getting approvals from Alaska – well, it just takes some time.

So, this was a bit of a challange. Without seeing the darned place, my task was to paint a place in Glacier Bay National Park. I thought that would have been easy. But then there were three of them, and the first (left side) was to show it as it was when the glacier was receding (at the fastest recorded pace) just a century ago. This thing shrank 65 miles back up the valley in less than a century! You can see it in the distance. Then the middle panel shows the plants – mosses, wildflowers and willows colonizing the barren gravel, ground is greening up, even the islands in Bartlett Cove are covered with young trees. Finally, the right painting shows what it looks like today – a young forest with deep moss and mature trees. I had some photos taken last winter in deep snow as the only reference, plus a couple of Google Earth images, buy my real references were an entire lifetime of boulder-hopping glacier rubble. This is Melanie, Chief of Interpretation last spring showing me the eratic-specimen. She’s now guiding tours in the Antarctic – lucky woman. If you look, you’ll see two glacial erratic boulders in each of the three paintings to show that it’s one place in three time periods.

 

 I know some of you will ask if I also did the map. I’ve done my share of these, but the real heavily lifting with design and map fell to Chad Beale at Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia. So that makes this somewhat of a collaboration with Harpers Ferry Center (2300 miles from me) and Glacier Bay National Park (2800 miles from him).

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

One Tree Moment for Ballard Nature Center

I still have the color to add on the five little insets, but I think this project of interpretive art is looking so good right now I wanted to share it.

It’s a very small world! I was asked by Genesis Graphics in Escanaba, Michigan if I’d be interested in doing some watercolor and ink paintings for the Ballard Nature Center in Effingham, Illinois. (So, if we did a conference call, that would be a 4000-mile round trip triangle for the words to be heard by everyone involved.) I’ve had a long and fine relationship with the folks at Genesis, and they always let me just do my thing without a bunch of hoops to jump through. My reply on this idea was, “Oh, I know where Effingham, Illinois is. My formative years were spent  just a few miles to the west in Springfield. I learned my stuff in the Illinois State Museum where I was spoon-fed nature and art by the staff and my parents.” This was relayed to the Ballard folks and it turns out two of my mom’s books are in their visitor center library. What a small world, and very soon they’ll have two generations of Eifert work there.

I know everyone likes to see the ‘behind the scenes’ stuff, so to show you how far this design was refined, here’s the concept sketch.

 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

Reprinting the Arcata Marsh Mural

This was only the third big habitat mural I ever painted, and I’m  hard-pressed to figure out the date it was finished. I’d say 1989, give or take, but it could be earlier. A printed copy of this painting lives in Arcata, California at the Arcata Marsh Interpretive Center. Its home is a sunny wall, and for that the reason we installed a copy of the painting and not the original. Now because of sun damage it’s about to have version #3 printed to replace #2.

So, this week I went into the giant lock box at the bank and fished through the hundreds of 8″ x 10″ transparencies (film they don’t even make any more) and brought this home for scanning. A decade ago was the last time we replaced this, and then we used that transparency and simply made a photo blowup. This time it’s all digital and will be printed on half-inch thick high-pressure laminate material similar to Formica. Thinking about this I was truly struck by the technical changes of this stuff in the past decade, and how artists really need to understand and keep up with it – or risk being left behind like so many other ‘industries’ – and I’ll be damned if they’re going to outsource ME to India!

When I painted this, the Arcata Marsh was a very new place, and it was difficult to imagine what it would become. Sitting on an old log processing pond at the upper end of Humboldt Bay, the idea was for the nearby sewer plant to run its almost clean water through a series of channels and let aquatic plants clean up the last of it. Birds would flock, animals would find homes, people would come to walk and view – and over the years it all came true. I’m happy to have been a part of the initial interpretation, and happy they continue to kept my painting as part of it.

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

Plumose Anemones – Flowers of the Sea

It shouldn’t have happened, but I think a few of you received a duplicate of the last post. Sorry ’bout that. Even after 5 years, Mailpress blogging software is something of a mystery to me.

This is my sketchbook page for  the August issue of 48 North magazine. I hatched this idea a few months ago while painting plumose anemones for an interpretive panel at Glacier Bay National Park and the more I learned about them, the crazier they seemed. We have these critters here in the Salish Sea and Puget Sound too, and they just seemed ripe for another few paintings. I think they’re a most amazing animal and really sensational to paint. That an animal is built like a beautiful flower is tantalizing for a painter of nature.

Here’s the story that goes with with sketchbook.

Next time you’re down on the docks at low tide take a peek down a piling into the water below. See any big white flowers attached to it that are waving in the current? Those are plumose anemones, and flowers they are definitely not! They’re actually animals, predators on the prowl for small larvae and other tasty organisms that pass by.

 While they look permanently attached to the piling or rock, if attacked by a sea star or nudibranch anemones can instantly leap for safety in an ungainly jump. In fact, large solitary anemones can be found far away from the vast gardens of larger family groups, showing they really can do a ‘walk about.’ Anemones begin life when a fragment from the base of a large anemone breaks off and grows into a tiny but genetically-identical new one. These clones start life as one sex but changes to the other when it is older. Quite a critter, 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

Exit Glacier – A New Puzzle

WOOO-WOO: Our new 500-piece jigsaw puzzle is now ready to ship. We’re more than happy to announce this one – the rich habitat below the toe of Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park near Seward, Alaska. I’ve blogged about the progress of this project, from our field trip and concept sketches last fall to the finished mural a few months ago. Now the printed products are arriving, and I think this would be a great puzzle to put together.

 

And here’s the puzzle box back with all the fun stuff about the painting. As you can see, it was funded by Alaska Geographic, a very involved and prolific non-profit that works to support many of Alaska’s parks. I’ve bought their books for years, and now I’m proud to say we’re ‘one of them’ in a small way.

You can either buy the puzzle on the website here, or just email us with your shipping info and we can mail and bill. Buying two puzzles saves you freight as it’s only $2 extra for the second one.

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. She has a new blog about the Washington State Capitol Campus that’s pretty fun.

New Painting Post

My New Portfolio Is Ready To Erupt

For some years now I have had a cd Powerpoint portfolio I send to clients, parks and contractors who give me these great commissions painting nature. Keeping the thing current has always been a challenge, but nothing like I used to deal with back in the dark days when things weren’t digital. It’s a great way to present what I might do for future projects or references of what I have painted, printed and produced. I also had a second disk for some of my easel paintings that was wildly out of control, so recently I’ve been working on a new version of all of it. This new one is a composite of both portfolios, and at 147 pages, it’s almost a book. I’ve also put it all together into one big presentation and divide it into clickable sections with a Table of Contents for easy viewing. So, there are murals, wayside exhibits, big walls, dainty ink drawings, watercolors, acrylic paintings on canvas, publications and other stuff like jigsaw puzzles and posters, nature guides and tours – the works, and all on one little disk.

 

It’s now ready to fly, so if you’re a park interpreter, design firm for nature interpretation and installations, past client or just interested in a copy (free) to have ‘just in case’, I can now mail one out to you. Just hit the reply key and give me the scoop, but please, no requests from my easel painting collectors. Sorry, but how much time do I have for this when I’d rather be painting?

 

And, a brand new 500-piece jigsaw puzzle is coming out this week, so stay tuned, oh my many faithful puzzle people. This one is of the mural I painted for Kenai Fjords National Park in Seward, Alaska. It shows the ecosystem emerging from the melting toe of Exit Glacier, and the only other place you’re going to be able to buy it is at the new Visitor Center there or through Alaska Geographic. So, it’s either a luxury cruise, a long flight and a rented car, OR, you’ll be able to get it from us! Come to think of it, options one and two don’t sound all that bad.

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

Lassen Volcanic National Park Guide

Many years ago, Nancy and I were doing field research along the Kenai River in Alaska for The Nature Conservancy. It was about as wonderful as life gets, and the mural that came of it is still there in the visitor center in Kenai. We were on that great gray river with Alaska State Parks interpreters, learning about the critters, moose, wolves, caribou. That was all easy stuff, but then there were the plants, and the Kenai area didn’t have a good book for any of that, so we had to buy a bunch of guides and piece the information together. I remember we paid around $125 for all of them, just to learn about a few plants – about what it costs for a bad hamburger up there. “Holly cow. We should write a guide for this place” said Ms Nancy – and so we did. That idea started a string of nature guides for many parks, from Badlands to Zion, Yosemite to the Redwoods, and I’d not be ashamed to say that a much larger company eventually came in and copied what we were doing. Oh who cares, it’s better to be the instagator than the copier. 

The past couple of weeks I’ve been revisiting this one for Lassen Volcanic National Park in Northern California. I have a long history of art projects for Lassen, including a mural, books and guides. This one is being revised and reprinted, and was so old it originally was PASTED UP, a term unknown in today’s page-design software programs or the kids who use them. So, I had to totally recreate it in digital form. It made me realize how complex these guides were when they were but pasted-up bits of paper on a board.

What you’re seeing here are two partial pages of the much larger guide, but you’ll get the idea. Click on either and they should enlarge so you can see details – and don’t tell me if you find a typo!! I’m telling you, I’ll track you down and give you such a dope slap – it’s already at the printer and the proof  has been approved. I’m just sayin’.

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

Glacier Bay Old-growth

Keeping it going, this week was spent working on five smaller paintings for Glacier Bay National Park. Nancy says I tend to loose track of obligations, appointments and schedules, well, try keeping five paintings with lots of details all on track. Ah, priorities! It’s like juggling. This one is a purely fictitious place but based on reality. The landscape around the Visitor Center and Lodge at Glacier Bay National Park is fresh from the ice and its forests are still pretty young. It will likely be changed before it’s finished, but my task here was to paint what WILL be there eventually if the forest there continues to evolve as it should. If things go according to one option in nature’s normal plan, this will become a western hemlock-dominated forest, a few huge trees, logs almost completely covered with moss, skunk cabbage and devils club. Everything would be green filtered light as if you’re inside an emerald. Did I get it?

Here’s the first-draft concept sketch.

And below is the second draft before I started painting. It’s still very different from the final painting, but the elements are taking shape. In the end, the huckleberries left, devils club and skunk cabbage came in after the Park straightened me out. Those two species require more moisture than I had realized was there, so we shifted things around.

I get a fair amount of mail saying that comparing these sketches are the best part of my weekly posts. It’s the ‘inside scoop’ that few see, and I think it’s easy to recognize the fact that the pencil is the painter’s most valuable tool. The second most valuable tool might be that I’m working with two guys from the National Park Service that really care. It’s such a treat for me to have interactions with people who know what their doing, both on the ground with Melenie and Tom at Glacier Bay in Alaska and Chad at Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia. I just never tire of learning about this stuff, especially from smart people. And that we did a conference call this week featuring a land-line and cel phone joining Alaska to Port Townsend together with a desk’s top in West Virginia is even better.

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 New Monthly Series for 48-North

If you’ve read my recent posts, you recognize this style of art and the layout. I think it’s how art, nature, humanity evolves – we all borrow from each other, or even ourselves.

I recently developed some sketchbook pages for a project in the Schulman Grove of bristlecones near Bishop, Ca. I showed them on this blog here and here , but it was the Forest Service’s kind words about the style, content and design that got me thinking that this might work well in a publication – like a magazine.  So, of all the many stories, articles and books I’ve published, my connections with 48-North, the Northwest’s largest sailing magazine has been the most fun. I’ve written for them for years, and so I banged on Rich the editor, door and asked if he’s like to give me a full page once a month for my little sketchbook idea. Above is the first effort coming up for the July iisue. For June’s online issue (my otters will be in July), click here. 

As I was casting around for my first month’s subject, I was in Port Townsend standing at the front door of Gallery Nine, the gallery that both Nancy and I show in. Tourists were coming and going, delivery trucks were bringing wine to the next door wine store, UPS truck was parked in mid-lane – and here comes a big river otter meandering right by us. They’re pretty common down there since Water Street is only a few hundred feet from the ocean, but seeing a 30 lb, 4-ft long adult river otter dodging cars always gets your attention. A couple of tourists were plain flabbergasted. So, I realized that’s what the first sketchbook had to be about, and I learned a lot about those interesting critters.

Cheesecake Desert: And speaking of critters, here are two of the three new kids in our meadow next to the cherry tree, taken by Nancy from the dining room window.

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.