Category Archives: New Painting Post

Blog Posts by Larry Eifert

New Painting Post

Cutthroat Creek Meadows

This painting and about 20 others are destined for a November show I’m having at Gallery Nine in Port Townsend. If sold here on the blog, I hope I can still hang it there for a week or so. While only about 5% of my mailing list is from Port Townsend, I’ll be hanging the show on Monday if you’d like a pre-show preview before Saturday Gallery Walk.

Cutthroat Lake is on the east side of the North Cascades, but just barely. Where the snowmelt runs out of the lake, it braids itself through some very pretty mosquito-filled meadows, then comes together to plunge down into Early Winters Creek towards the Methow Valley in eastern Washington. We were there a few months ago and I was interested in the way the light was streaming through the trees and onto the creek. It made for a very interesting and complex set of light patterns around the jumble of islands, downed trees and moving water. From this location, we turned around and walked a few hundred feet, and this was the spectacular scene that awaited us. (Clicking on both these images will enlarge them.)

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $140 unframed.
The custom wood frame makes it a total of $165 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 here for details or just hit reply.

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

Schulman Grove Pinyon Pine Forest

(If you click it, this will enlarge in your browser)

This is the second of the three Schulman Grove bristlecone paintings for the new visitor center east of Bishop, California. A few weeks ago I painted the first one of the alpine area that will go on the far right side. Now this one goes on the left side and shows pinyon – juniper forest. Overall size of these three is about 17′ x 5′. If you look at the upper right of the painting, you can see the bristlecones growing up at 10,000′, where the middle painting is sited. That’s the High Sierra in the distance.

Pinyon pine nuts have provided food for people, birds and animals for as long as they’ve been growing. Because of this, the Forest Service requested a gathering party of Native Americans be added to the mural so they can interpret that on the reader rail below. That seemed awkward to me, because it places it as historic and out of context with the other two. What to do? So, I set an amber value scale to the painting to make it feel like an old sepia-tinted photo. I’m hoping it will still go well with the other two paintings, but there’s a very different feel to it.

A busy time these days as I have a show coming up at local Gallery 9 in Port Townsend. I’m enjoying the back and forth between huge mural canvases and looser easel paintings. There’s a lot of paint being tossed around.

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

National Wildlife Refuge Week poster

(These photos should both enlarge with a click) 

The same folks at US Fish and Wildlife Service who commissioned me for the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge murals earlier this year have now used a small piece of them on the poster for National Wildlife Refuge Week. That’s a thrill for me on several levels, not the least of which is that this goes all around the country – and I’m already getting some fun fan mail about it.

For me, wildlife refuges are iconic places. I’ve had a very long history with these soggy mudholes, with proof shown in the photo below. It was taken just a few miles north of the same Necedah Refuge in Wisconsin, August 1956, and I was 10. The boat’s name is Redskin and it was just that, a red carvel-planked wooden boat I was turned loose with for weeks to explore the local back marshes and lakes. There was never a life jacket in sight! I used to row out to a lily-pad backwater and just hang my head over the stern watching the fresh water sponges inhale, exhale. Watch the fish make lazy circles under the snags and floating logs, watch the turtles make plopping sounds as they tried to get away from my not-so-quick little hands. These places had a powerful effect on me, a hold that remains firmly in control as I continue to paint them today, over a half-century later.

My dad was never one to shirk from duty, and if I (in the bow) and Virginia (in the stern) wanted to go out and find wildlife, he’d do it – no matter if it was hours and hours of rowing uphill. He once bragged that he planned to carry me up 12,183′ hiker’s only Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park each time we’d go there (which was often), so that by the time I reached high school he’d be stronger than Jack Lalanne. I think the idea lasted two years.

Thanks for reading this week. And thanks for the kind words about the poster.
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 mural sketch

This will enlarge if you click on it so you can see the details.

I recently posted the on-location concept sketch for this project, and now here’s the proper drawing I’ve presented to the Chief of Interpretation at Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska. Exit Glacier is in the background, outwash plain coming down into the forest near the Nature Center, young cottonwoods, alders and spruce emerging from a landscape the melting glacier recently left behind. Moose, bear, coyote and short-tailed weasel among the group. I think I’ve got it.

I get questions about how I construct these larger images, so if you click on the concept sketch link above it’ll open in another window so you can compare. That was what I went from back here in the studio, plus a bunch of photos. The parks usually give me a species list and the number of elements they want to see. There are one or two still missing here, but I’ll get them in – like a marmot and mosquitoes, but I think I got all the rest in.

When the art is installed in the Exit Glacier Nature Center, a nearby panel will have some buttons that, when pushed, will produce digital sounds as if you might be standing there in the forest listening to nature ‘talk’ to you. A moose vocalization, insects buzzing, raindrops plopping, the glacier booming, rustling of birds – the beautiful clear and ethereal voices of the varied and hermit thrushes, those soft forest whistles you can never forget. Soundscapes are a new way to interpretive these murals and I think it’s a great idea as long as the device doesn’t break down. Now if they could just pipe in the smells of moose pellets on forest duff!

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

Tern Lake – Kenai Peninsula

While on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula recently I did some preliminary stuff for a few paintings when I returned home to the studio. Here’s the second one, inspired when the late afternoon light was streaming through a mountain notch and lighting up this marshy lake. The golden atmosphere made the air really glow. These mountains were so high and steep I just couldn’t get their tops in the painting, but the blue atmosphere up there gives you a hint of what’s high above. We saw mountain goats in the upper meadows up there, tundra swans and green-winged teals on the lake. It was a soft environment just holding its breath for winter to begin.

What always strikes me about Alaska every time  I’m here is the pure enormity of it all. I live next to Olympic National Park, and it’s a big park – but if you took the time to walk across it, you’d eventually come out and find towns, streets and stores on the other side. It’s like an island of wilderness in the midst of civilization. But Alaska isn’t like that at all. If you walked into THAT wilderness, you simply wouldn’t ever come out the other side. Civilization is a small island within nature. One trail we were on there had a wildlife sightings list at the trail head. It said:eight bears, one moose and calf. So, as we started down the trail Nancy noted that we were 9th on the food chain. It made for a much more heightened and self-aware hike.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $140 unframed. Now click on the framed image and it should enlarge. Notice this version doesn’t have the trees on the left. I added those today, so the painting below no longer exists exactly like this. Notice the difference? No, you don’t get it without the trees!

This mahogany frame with a custom linen liner makes it a total of $165 (and we have other frames) 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. SOLD, SORRY

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

Alpine Painting for the Schulman Grove

(both these images should enlarge if you click them)

This week I finished the first of three paintings for the new Schulman Grove Visitor Center near Bishop California. Below are the sketches, pinyon forest on the left, bristlecone forest in the middle and the alpine goes on the right. Together they take up an entire wall of the new building and both doors are lined up to showcase the paintings when you walk in the place, a beautiful new off-grid summer visitor center located in the Schulman Grove at about 10,000′ elevation. The alpine painting shows 14,252′ White Mountain in the background, only about 250 feet shy of Mt Rainier and Mt Whitney. The painting’s location is placed several thousand feet lower in a land of belly-plants, marmots and bighorn sheep, but still a landscape of stark light. It was not easy to pull this off, as there are very few resources telling me what grows at this high, dry and inhospitable place. With this one behind me, I look forward to the other two coming next along with a series of ink and watercolor images for the other exhibits.

As you all know by now, I tend to paint trees. I’m very pleased the Forest Service chose me for this project as Great Basin bristlecone pines are the oldest trees on our planet. I also love these high mountain tree forests, especially this famous grove. To walk among these ancient and gnarled artistic sculptures we call trees is to walk with nature far beyond what I can understand. There’s a stark quiet here that sustains my thoughts of these living wonders far beyond the initial visit. One of them here at Schulman has been cored to 4750 years of age, a thousand years older than any other known tree species. Other downed bits of wood, branches and trunks long dead, have extended these dates back over twice that far and have actually helped rewrite climate history knowledge. But those are just numbers. How do you truly understand any of this when I will be lucky to live less than 1/50th of that?  And here I am at this brief moment of my life trying to create something that will educate some of us about all this. Daunting.

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

Red-legged Kittiwakes

I’ve never painted this bird species, and in Seward Alaska recently there were lots of them at the SeaLife Center, so, I just had to take a stab at a painting. We heard someone trying to describe the white on kittiwakes as “the whitest white.” I’d go farther. To me it is so white as to be a void, as if touching one would put your hand into a cosmic hole so deep and profound is that lack of color. They’re a very localized species, nesting on offshore islands of Alaska and spending winters in the Bering Sea, and their populations are down by about a third in recent decades as are most pelagic birds and sea animals around there. Black-legged kittiwakes were there as well, and we saw them on rocks just like this out out in Resurrection Sound with the Stellers sealions near the caving glaciers.

It’s always thrilling for me to see a creature as soft and vulnerable as this making a home in such a forbidding and harsh place. I tried to show that in the colors. Glacier-sculptured rock, windblown and water-blasted cliffs are this creature’s life, never mind the winters of driving snow, ice and hurricane-force winds. And we complain about so many unimportant  and casual things. What do they complain about?

 This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $160 unframed.
A mahogany frame with linen liner makes it a total of $180 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, but prints will be available soon.
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

Field trip to Alaska’s Kenai Fjords

We spent this past week in and around Seward, Alaska, and let me tell you about glorious! I’m to paint a mural of the ecosystem for Exit Glacier Nature Center at Kenai Fjords National Park, and time was running out – our window fast-closing for a snow-free field trip. We made it! And in all our travels around Alaska, we’ve never seen it more stunning. Fall was passing with each day, and the colors, well, the colors were pastels of every shade from pale emerald to cottonwood golden, alder ochre to raindeer lichen gray. We couldn’t get enough. You know those rare moments with nature when everything seems too perfect to be real? This was a week of it.

The sketch here was drawn on location beside a raging river at flood stage, but the painting will actually be about the emerging forest ‘downstream’ of the glacier and how it’s evolving out of the glacier’s rubble. For us, the real story here was how far the glacier has receded since our last visit in the late 1990’s. Climate change is seen everywhere here and so obvious and evident that anyone who doesn’t believe this is happening at a very great rate is dumber than the dirt the glacier grinds out of the mountainside. When we got there, a huge hurricane-sized storm had rivers ragging and roads covered (another sign of climate change is abnormally large storms) and with the park road closed we had a rare tour of tourist-central without any tourists.

Everyone complains that we never publish photos of ourselves together, but we’re always photographing nature and not us. Well, here’s one I took in the Seward SeaLife Center. The camera was on the head of a sealion sculpture and the monitor right below my camera. Good enough? Thanks for a very wonderful field trip goes to Kristy and Christina, Doug and everyone else who helped for making us feel very much at home. The painting will come in a few months and I’ll post it then. For now, we’re still enjoying memories of golden mountains and gilded glaciers. And yes, we saw enough Steller sealions, bears, moose, sheep, goats and whales to keep anyone happy.

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

Clipchuck

We somehow managed a couple of partial weeks of hiking in the North Cascades – known as the American Alps and for good reason. When driving over the North Cascades Highway just south of the Canadian border and drop down off Rainy and Washington Passes, there are several USFS campgrounds before you hit the summer heat of Winthrop. Our favorite is at Clipchuck. Each day we’d drive up the dozen or so miles to the cool alpine and hike the lake and pass trails, then return to our campsite high over Early Winters Creek – and this painting is from the picnic table in Site 28. Just walk a few feet upslope and a glorious view of that crashing creek emerges. Walk another step and you’re over the cliff and probably in the creek 100 feet below.

And, yes, the name Early Winters should ring a bell with some older hikers. In the 70’s, it was the first outdoor equipment company that sold products made of Goretex.

One of the hikes here is an 8-mile loop gaining over 2000 vertical feet. Half way around we came to the North Cascades NP boundary and this sign is firmly planted in a snowdrift on Horsefly Pass (click to enlarge it so you can see). I’d love to know who thought it necessary to state in 5-inch letters that hunting isn’t allowed here. Am I missing something? Who would do this climb equivalent to two Empire State Buildings to kill something and then carry it (and the gun) back down the 2000 feet?  But then I’ve never understood the concept of killing wild animals anyway.

This ORIGINAL painting (not the photo) is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $125 unframed.
We have some custom wood frames that makes it a total of $140 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

2011 Olympic NP Bugler cover

Summer’s almost over and I almost forgot to post this while it’s still current.

On September 17, the official ceremony for the removal of the Elwha River dams will kickoff, but I’ve been involved with this for several years now. I was pleased when the park’s summer newspaper (the handout at the park gates) featured a section of one of the two murals I painted showing what this big river might look like a few years from now. In the upper left corner you can see what will remain of the upper Glines Canyon dam when the river will hopefully become one of the largest salmon producing streams (again) on the peninsula.

My task for these paintings was to show how the river and its salmon influence everything else there. Many plants and animals rely on a healthy salmon runs for nutrients. It’s not just the bears and raccoons, herons and jays that eat the spawned-out fish, but as they drag the fish into the forests, this soon becomes ‘fish emulsion’ for the big trees too. The forests provide a stable environment for a new generation of fish, while the fish give back fertilizer when they return. This cycle has been stopped for a full century by the two dams that will soon be gone.

And I’m affected too. Learning this stuff is the best part of painting nature for a living. It’s not just a painting, but more knowledge I get to cram under that size-8 1/4 hat.

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.