Category Archives: New Painting Post

Blog Posts by Larry Eifert

New Painting Post

Low Water at Point Wilson

Low-Water-at-Point-Wilson

This is, I think, one of the most intriguing places here in our little town of Port Townsend, and I’ve painted it often. Every container ship, submarine, aircraft carrier, sailboat or killer whale going into Puget Sound has to go right by here, and at low tide it’s a pretty dramatic and busy place. On a recent walk, we were here on a minus tide, just before the big rush of water began that would completely submerge this spot, so I spent a few minutes of peace and quite, unusual without waves or noise -just a perfect moment to compose a painting.

I get LOTS of comments on this blog about my painting process. Do I paint on location (well, certainly not when it’s 45 degrees), do I work from a photo (it’s just a basic starting point, like a sketch where I can remember details)? So here’s the reference photo I took with my phone-camera. An interesting transformation from photo to painting, don’t you think? Where’d the kelp go? Well, after working with it on the sketch, I realized kelp was completely unnecessary and made the rocks look like mush. Better to focus on the luminousity of the water instead. I say, learn to spot a locked door and climb in a window instead!

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on hardboard, 22″ x 28″ and $700 unframed.
We have some good frames for this one, but it’s a big enough painting that we’ll figure that out when you buy it. It’s going into a show at Gallery Nine, so if you’d like it, better jump quickly. Not that I’m bragging, but the last one went in 20 minutes and there were five who wanted it. This is the original painting, NOT a print and it’s being sold without the gallery commission. There will soon be prints of this on the website for our normal prices – here’s an example of another one).
Email us for details if you’re interested.

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’s just posted a blog about the new sea otter pup at the Seattle Aquarium. Amazing.

New Painting Post

A Brown Pelican – Really?

Brown pelican in the Boat Haven!

Thanks to DDT, by 1970 the California brown pelican was almost gone from the West Coast of the United States. Even today, these great fishermen with a wingspan of 6.5 feet only nest on the Channel Islands off Los Angeles. Sometimes, but not often, a few migrate northward during the late summer.

So, imagine my amazement when Nancy spotted one here in Port Townsend in the middle of January – and while it was snowing to boot. There he was, down in the marina right under the fish boat dock awaiting the next toss-out of not-so-good fish. And he probably wasn’t cold either, as the water this time of year is a full 20 degrees warmer than the air.

So, like the journalist that I am, here’s a little painting of Port Townsend’s wintering brown pelican. My hat’s off to him! And my hat’s off to Rachel Carson, an old family friend who stood up to the chemical industry over 50 years ago so this bird could eventually make its way to Port  Townsend in January, 2012.

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on paper, 7″ x 10″ and $85 unframed.

A nice custom frame with a double mat and glass makes it a total of $110 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

Going to Lewis Lake

This is another painting from late summer – and possibly my favorite from the past few months. Just haven’t had time to post it.

“Going to Lewis Lake” not, “Taking the trail to Lewis Lake” – because there isn’t one (the trail, that is). In fact, we didn’t make it to Lewis Lake because the snowy boulder hopping was a bit much and we didn’t have our ice gear. Not that I minded – the view right here was as far as we got and was sure worth the climb, Lewis Lake or not. If there’s anything I love dearly to paint, it’s an alpine landscape with all sorts of craggy angles and snow in both sun and shade. The North Cascades are my idea of  painterly paradise.

I’ve thought a lot about why this is a beautiful image to me, and I’m pretty sure it’s partly the idea that these landscapes are delicately fragile and gigantically solid – soft and deadly, both at the same time. It’s not a place you can relax. Contrast the little soft-stemmed alpine lupine and paintbrush to places still snow-covered – to the ominous sounds of distant rockfall as thawing ice loosens yet another boulder. It’s a place of wildly grand contrasts painters love, at least I do, even if it was difficult to find a place to sit and compose a future painting without squashing an entire little alpine garden.

I’ve decided to hang on to this one for a bit – just because I like it so much. So, at the moment it’s not for sale. We don’t ever really hang art in our own home, mainly because we have mostly big windows and almost no walls – but this one found its way to one of the few spots, and I enjoy reliving this grand hiking experience every time I see 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

Exit Glacier – Kenai Fiords National Park

Commissioned by the National Park Service and funded by Alaska Geographic for the new nature center in Kenai Fiords National Park. My task here was to show the ecosystem of this emerging landscape so recently covered by the glacier. You can see the trail winding through a young forest populating the outwash plain of the giant glacier connected to the even bigger Harding Icefield (bigger than the state of Rhode Island). Just a few miles from Seward, Alaska, this is one of the few glaciers you can actually walk up to and touch. It’s a bright summer scene, the way most people see it, but when we were here in September everything was already turning ochre and there was a rain and flood-event going on. I blogged about that on September 14, 2011 when I got the location sketch posted here. A few weeks later I posted the finished sketch here. It’s fun to see the evolution of the painting from concept to finished mural, but I know you guys don’t like to click through, so here’s the concept sketch again, but this time as it was happening (photo by Nancy Cherry Eifert over my right shoulder).

 And here’s the sketch drawn back here in the studio.

Soon there will be a high-pressure laminate panel of this painting for the center. Since it’s closed in winter, no heat, and it IS Alaska, it was decided that the original will hang downtown in the main offices. Next spring we’re hoping for puzzles and other products, so stay tuned.

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

This Guy Also Lives Here

This is the last post of the year for me, so I want to thank everyone for all your  comments, thoughts and, of course, purchases. While it’s not a-painting-a-day blog like some of my friends, I’ve still managed at least one a week for a lot of years now. It’s been a great way to stay connected.

Downy woodpeckers live here with us in our little patch of forest. They tend to prefer mixed woods with conifers and deciduous trees like our cedars and hemlocks, maples and alders. Here they’ve they set up housekeeping in some of our carefully preserved dead snags we leave standing just for this purpose. We see them on our suet feeder all year where I get up-close and personal views of how they look. This one’s a red-topped male I know well.

The downy is amazingly similar to the hairy woodpecker we have here too – almost identical except a tad larger. They’re actually not very closely related, making the two a great example of convergent evolution in which two separate species that live in the same place and do the same thing evolve, over time, to look the same. When I learn this, I immediately want to know how long this took, and what did the two birds look like originally before they migrated into these great Northwestern forests. Don’t you want to know?

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $120 unframed. A custom wood frame makes it a total of $150 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

Autumn – Still Hanging On

 

Merry Christmas – but where’s winter? Here in the Northwest, as well as along most of the West Coast, we’ve had the driest December on record. Winter just doesn’t seem like it wants to get started. Days have been warm and sunny, nights clear and cool. Sure, it’s not summer when during June you can read a book outdoors until almost 10pm when there are 16 hours of daylight on the Olympic Peninsula – but this is just fine.

I find it just awful for painting landscapes during summer around here. Dramatic light is simply non-existent – sunset lasts about a minute and a half, tops. Sunny, then, wham, it’s dark. But Fall and Winter, now we’re talking. These days it seems like the sun goes on setting for hours and we only get 8 1/2 hours of sunlight each day. I’m not complaining, because finally I have something dramatic and interesting to paint – and it doesn’t take much of a scene to make a light-filled image just bursting with color. Luminous!

Sorry, this painting is not for sale, but we do have custom 8-color prints available either matted or framed in a variety of sizes.
Email us for details and we’ll fill you in.

Thanks for reading this week, and Enjoy Christmas or whatever you’re celabrating – and get outside for a walk.
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 Winter Solstice Greeting for 2012

Just a solstice card from those two traveling artists in Port Townsend, Washington. This wishes everyone a wonderful winter solstice – and toss in a Christmas toast too. We both want to thank everyone who helped support our creative lifestyle this year and allowed us to learn about some new and amazing places. 

For us near Seattle, Winter Solstice is Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 9:30 PM, the exact moment the earth’s northward tilting stands still – just for a moment. Then we begin a reverse back towards sunnier times for the Northern Hemisphere. I like to call it our First Moment of Spring!

So let’s celebrate that. Get outside for a bit, walk into your local park, backyard, forest or beside a beach, lake or stream. Take a great breath of air into your lungs and give some thanks that you can still do this – and still appreciate it. Life is short – but I always think it should be wide – as wide as possible!

We’ve had lots of requests for photos of US, not just paintings or photographs – so this one was taken in San Diego three weeks ago by Steven Cherry. The effects of a few glasses of wine at Casa de Pico seem somewhat apparent, don’t they?

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

Ancient Bristlecone Pines mural

(There’s a lot to see here, so these images should enlarge if you click them)
The third and center painting for the Schulman Bristlecone Pine Grove east of Bishop, California was finished this week. Put together, this wall is going to be about 17 running feet of pure high-country paintings. This final one is 5 x 8 feet on stretched canvas and I was really pushing it to fit into my little studio. Several times I almost gave up and went downtown to a larger space, but I wondered how I’d get it in the car. In the end we muddled through and now it’s great to see all three together. Since there was really no room for me to line them up to check (inside, at least), this is the first time I’ve seen them all together. I think it’s going to work.

Bristlecone forests are a beautiful but stark and colorless landscape because the trees are all bleached out by thousands of years of sun, the rocks are white dolomite – and flowers are few here at 10,000 feet. And since some of these trees are almost 5,000 years old, the oldest on the planet, they really look gnarled and sculptural, so that’s what I ended up concentrating on. Paintings of sculpture!

For those who want to know more about this project, I’ve blogged about it before here:
Here is the post for the pinyon painting on the left.
Here is the post for the alpine painting on the right.
And here are the original sketches. You’re notice some serious changes between the concepts and final paintings. That’s the fun of it – not to mention I just love this place.

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

Brown Creeper

We’ve been in San Diego enjoying family and friends – but it’s so good to be home in our little green and peaceful meadow again with the critters. It was heartwarming to see the red squirrel heading up to his tree-home with a giant wad of our home fiberglass insulation in his mouth!! and this little creeper was on the same tree trunk.

Possibly one of my most favorite birds,we have several resident brown creepers here in our little patch of forest. They’re like little scurrying mice, but instead of being on the ground, we see them on tree trunks. With over-sized toes for probing and poking, their coloration makes them resemble tree bark so much that if they stop moving, they almost disappear. While equally-small nuthatches spend their lives climbing DOWN trees in search of insects, creepers do just the opposite. They circle and climb UP trunks, pocking and pecking away to find the bugs nuthatches missed. In this way, both species can co-exist on the same tree, and while one is watching the ground for trouble, the other watches the sky.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $320 unframed.
We have custom frames that would make it a total of $145 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

Blue Lake

 

 A pretty normal name for a very pretty lake. So pretty we visited it several times this summer, and each time I thought it would make a nice painting. Blue Lake is just barely on the west side of the North Cascade Crest here in Washington, almost exactly 100 miles east of our studio here in Port Townsend. When we first asked about the place, we were told “You have to get up there. This is the sort of alpine lake you want to sit down with your lunch and just enjoy for awhile.” And so it was! We found all sorts of mountain goat hair stuck on branches and pikas yelling “peek” to announce we were there. Pristine High Country always gets me! 

I was looking at the current snow levels for this same area just yesterday, and saw that some North Cascade passes now have 75 inches already on the ground. Seems pretty early for that sort of thing, doesn’t it?

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $120 unframed.
A custom wood frame makes it a total of $145 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.