Category Archives: New Painting Post

Blog Posts by Larry Eifert

Murals, New Painting Post, Waysides

A National Treasure- Sol Duc Valley in Olympic National Park

National_Treasure

I ran across this post I had originally written last year, but somehow it was never published. I probably had a bunch of posts and this one didn’t make the cut, but it’s never too late for good art, right?

As one drives up the Sol Duc Valley, on the northwest side of Olympic National Park west of Seattle, there are lots of pull-outs with overlooks to the river or trails leading to some of the best forests I know. This isn’t quite temperate rain forest, but it’s close. It truly is a National Treasure, and it’s a big thanks to the folks at Olympic N.P. who continue to allow me to paint my “backyard”.

Readers seem interested in the artistic processes that go into these more complex paintings. It’s one thing to paint a fine-art image of an old-growth forest. I can just be, well, “artistic” and I paint what I see or what I like, but these complex collages with lots of species are a different beast. Not only do I have to paint the bear, but it has to at least appear to be very accurate. It has to be sized properly with reference to dozens of other critters, and it has to be animated and not stiff. I can’t place, say, a bobcat right next to a rabbit, or a shady plant out in the open. Sometimes it’s a real challenge.

Here’s the fourth draft of the initial sketch.

Wayside UniGuide Grid v. 2.0 (September 2006)
Wayside UniGuide Grid v. 2.0 (September 2006)

As you can see, the finished painting ended up being wildly different than this sketch. Critters appeared, then disappeared, then arrived in other locations. (Sort of like the squirrels that continually try to break into our barn. I chased one out today that was attempting to hide in the Fiberglas insulation over my workbench.) I also had to figure out what to paint behind the text, so this painting could also be used for other things such as park publications and exhibits maybe without the text – or maybe even a future jigsaw puzzle.

And you thought being an artist was easy! Well, maybe not easy, but after 40 years it’s still a lot of fun. It’s often said that being a painter is an old-man’s game. I’m starting to believe 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.

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New Painting Post

Acres of Glacial Lilies – It’s Finally Summer

On August 6th, the park finally opened the road out to Olympic National Park’s Obstruction Pass. From the acres of cars and people at tourist-center Hurricane Ridge, as soon as we hit the dirt road we transended into acres of glacial lilies and almost no cars or people. It’s amazing how park visitors all clump together in herds.

With the drifts still melting on one of the largest snowpacks on record, neither of us have ever seen such an amazing display of alpine flowers. It’s not just summer August flowers, but spring glacier and fawn lilies to mid-summer tiger lilies. The place is awash in perfume, and as we sat on the edge of this field of color I watched a big bumblebee slowly weaving around like it was drunk, going from one bisort bloom to the next, completely ignoring all the other species. So, was this bisort Sunday, followed by lily Monday and paintbrush Tuesday?

Click to enlarge both images.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $120 unframed.
The nice wooden 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.

New Painting Post

Mount St. Helens – Meta Lake at the eruption

If you’re reading this blog for the first time, it’s because I shamelessly added your name after a personal contact with you. I’ve published these art posts about once a week for years, showing new work, paintings, park projects and such. You can unsubscribe at any time by telling me in a reply.

Here is another bit of art for wayside panels recently completed for Mount St. Helens. If you click on it, the image should enlarge in your browser.

This shows Meta Lake, northeast side of the volcano near Portland, Oregon in May 1980 just as the blast cloud is approaching (you can see it over the treetops). In a few seconds, almost all nature here will be obliterated and, as you can see in the upper right panel photo, this old-growth forest will be reduced to ruin. But the mice and toads below the snow (shown in the insets) will survive, and in a few months begin to colonize this area again.

Imagining what this was like at that moment was fun. Would there have been snow in the trees? How much snow would there have been on the lake ice in May? What would the blast cloud have looked like at this point a few miles from the volcano? What do mice look like sleeping in their winter dens? How bent over would the little shrubs be beneath the snow? It seems amazingly easy to paint gallery canvases after doing this stuff. It’s the same paint getting splashed on the same canvas, but if it’s for me and not a park, no one tells me what to paint and I really don’t care if anyone likes it or not. That’s satisfying, sure – but this is challenging because I learn something new with each painting. Thanks for SeaReach for contracting me for this, and Becky at Mt St Helens for her skillful word-crafting. If was a fun project.

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

Port Angeles and the Elwha River Wall

 

Not that I’m complaining, but just when IS summer play time? Well, not right now.

I’ve been working on three sizable projects at once. This one is my current midnight-panic-attack. It’s not my usual painterly-project, but interesting as always and I’ll be posting progress in the next few weeks (on the project, not my nighttime worries that it won’t be finished in time).

So… if you’ve read these posts over the past year, you’ll know I’ve created a bunch of art and interpretive panels for the Feiro Marine Life Center in Port Angeles, WA. This is the next phase of that, an outside 39-foot wall collage near the other installation. Opening date is September 17th when all sort of luminaries come to town for the kick-off of the Elwha Dam removal project, the nation’s largest dam removal and river restoration so far. I’ve been involved with this unfolding event in many ways over the past few years, and it’s exciting stuff for both Nancy and I. The very fact that they’re using art to interpret this visionary project is very forward-thinking.

My job this time is to create a dozen panels that tell the story of how the dams changed the region over the past century – and specially the town of Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula. Betsy and Deb are providing the fabulous text like they did on the other installations, while I’m doing the signage, computer design and handling the fabrication and installation. Like a giant jigsaw puzzle, this all has to fit together somehow. For once it’s not a mural or original art, but I’m learning lots about the region’s history at at the Clallam County Historical Society. I grew up watching my mom research history this same way, except that now I have a laptop and flatbed scanner. Times have changed.

I’ll post more as this gets closer and the details are filled in, but for now the photo shows where we are – in mockup stage.

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 Puzzle Release – Elk Prairie

Elk Prairie Puzzle

Nancy and I are proud to announce a new puzzle – Elk Prairie, a 18″ x 24″ 500-piece jigsaw puzzle like our many others (almost 50 now). This one took awhile to produce, but we think it’s one of the best we’ve printed in years. It features the increasingly rare pocket prairie habitat of old-growth forests that are found from Northern California to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. This is home to Roosevelt elk, pileated woodpeckers, bears, bobcats and coyotes. Closer in the foreground, you’ll find snakes, toads, lizards and other plants and animals that make up this interesting ecosystem. It’s a crowded place.

As usual, the box back has all sorts of interesting interpretive stuff on it, and we think it’s a puzzle you’ll enjoy putting together as much as I enjoyed painting it. If you click the image, it should enlarge in your browser.

You can click through to the website and buy it here, or, you can just Email us for details and we can send it with an invoice to pay from.

Thanks for reading this week, and we hope you like the new puzzle.
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 working on a new website that looks great.

New Painting Post

Fort Townsend Old-growth mural – almost in our backyard

 

 

(Lots going on in this sketch – this should enlarge if you click on it)

((Sorry to say, but my server has been playing some evil tricks with me. Hopefully the blog is back in business.))

I paint this stuff all over the country, from Alaska to the Great Smoky Mountains, but very rarely have I been able to accept a large mural commission within a mile or so of our home. Here’s the sketch almost ready for painting – and it’ll be fun for me.

Fort Townsend is an old army barracks that supposedly protected Port Townsend about 150 years ago. In reality, the town protected the fort, and so as time went on the property fell into the hands of the Washington State Parks – and now it’s one of the rarest lowland old-growth forests in Puget Sound. It’s dry country here 40 miles northwest of Seattle (yes, it’s true) and with only 18″ of rain annually, the trees don’t get very big. Because it’s never been logged and the ground has been undisturbed for about 8,000 years, some pretty rare plants grow here. You can find calypso orchids, candystick, gnome plant, pinedrops and spotted coralroot. These are all interesting plants that live off other plants – so they aren’t green, and this painting is all about showing that. Candystick looks just like its name. It’s a colorful stick like something you’d find at the candy store. To get this sketch going, I simply used my backyard plant and bird list for the pileated woodpecker, brown creeper and all the rest. The deer is from a photo from our front yard. The squirrel, chipmunk and most of the small birds could be drawn from life on our feeder every day.

When it’s finished, we’ll develop an exhibit in the park centered around the painting and its story, and each time we go there for a hike (and it’s often) I’ll feel like I’m a small part of this rare place. This project is being funded by a generous grant from the Friends of Fort Townsend (especially Ann and Nancy) and the Washington State Native Plant Society who know the value of art in education. Thanks to them for allowing me to show off  my backyard!

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

Cedar Falls Trail – A Picnic Table Painting

A traditional watercolor painting for today. We spent last week hiking on the east side of the North Cascades and each evening I painted on the picnic table in Site 38, Pearrygin Lake State Park. Like everyone else in the West, they’ve experienced record snowpack and with temperatures in the 80’s, the snow is wasting no time getting out of there. And with spring pushed into summer, the flowers were just amazing. All the alpine lakes are still iced up, but these lower trails along the rivers were stunning, with lupine, paintbrush, calypso orchids, chocolate lilies, mountain ash, balsamroot – all of it in bloom at once. So, back in camp I got out the paints to relive the same experience twice.

While on this trail, I did a short little soundscape recording. I’m trying to figure out a way to easily add sound clips to paintings of these blog trail paintings, so here goes.

If you’re reading this from an email, try this: Cedar-falls-soundscape

If you’re reading this on the internet blog, click this:  Cedar-Falls.amr

Pearrygin Lake is downslope of the North Cascades Highway and south of the Pasayton Wilderness, some of the wildest and most pristine country I know. With over a half million acres, the Pasayton is the northern terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s one of the few places in the Lower 48 where trailhead signs have notices for BOTH grizzlies and wolves. This one was on the South Fork of the Twisp River coming down from North Cascades National Park and caught our eyes. It states hunters need to make sure the dog-species they’re killing is a coyote instead of a wolf. So, why would anyone climb up these steep trails to pull the trigger on a coyote when they’re in most everyone’s backyards – but then hunting anything at all has always baffled me. Doesn’t it seem like we as the now-dominant and planet caretaker species should be beyond that sort of mayhem?

Thanks for reading this week. This painting isn’t for sale just yet. The memories are too good to let it go.
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 Torrent of Mud on Mount St. Helens

This is another in the series of wayside panels I recently finished for Mount St. Helens National Monument. Now, you’ll have to admit I’m not normally posting paintings of mudflows – and I can’t even remember ever doing one. The top bit of art tells the story of the giant mudflow that filled this valley 31 years ago during the eruption. The finished outdoor panel will be placed at the overlook boardwalk above the creek. Linda Repplinger and Susan Jurasz of Sea Reach Ltd, 146 NE Yamhill St. Sheridan Oregon did the layout and design.  Also involved in these panels were Peter Reedijk from Sea Reach and Charlie Crisafulli and several others from USDA Forest Service, Mount St Helens who added additional thoughts and comments on the accuracy of the images.

As it’s not easy to read here, this is the text for the panel written, I believe, by Rebecca Railey, Interpretive Planner at Mount St Helens National Monument: Lava Canyon’s beauty lay hidden for centuries beneath lush evergreen forests until the May 18, 1980 eruption. A surge of hot gas, ash and pumice boiled out of the crater and scoured nearly 30 feet of ice off St. Helens Shoestring Glacier. Water, ash and rock mixed, forming a thick slurry that raced down the mountain and into the Muddy River drainage. A 15 foot wall of mud and rock swept into Lava Canyon. In an instant, the mudflow’s boulders and abrasive ash battered, scoured and swept away the vibrant forest that cloaked this canyon, exposing its beautiful waterfalls and rock formations.

The photos below the painting show what it looks like today, but, as they say “a painting is worth 1000 words” and with only about space for a hundred of them – that’s why they commissioned me. In the process I learned a bunch about mudflows. This version had the mudflow too fluid, so I worked at making it more champagne-milk-shakey. Haven’t seen that final mock up, but only I and a couple of USFS science-guys would know the difference between milk-shakey and fluid-flowing. And since no one actually saw this happening, it’s only a guess anyway.

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

Hole-In-The-Wall at Rialto Beach

We were on the road to Moab, Utah for some business and sunny hiking on the slick-rock. Then – the updated weather report said it was going to be in the mid-90’s, and, not wanting to just be normal people, we turned right instead and went out to the cool, wild and always delightful Olympic Coast. Saved a grand in camping and gas, and how could this be any less amazing than where we were originally going? We’ll get to Utah sooner or later, just not this week. And being able to do these things really is what being an artist is all about.

While sitting on the beach between hikes I did a couple of watercolors. This one was on a partially overcast day, so I kept it to only two colors. This is low tide at Hole-In-the-Wall at Rialto Beach – rated #2 in Olympic National Park sights to see. There were only two other people on the beach!

We continued past this area, past the shipwreck stuff, the eagle’s nest and possible Quileute werewolves left over from the Twilight movies that were filmed here, and in about a mile we came to an amazing place. Most hikers on Rialto Beach only go as far as where the painting was created – a couple of miles through often very soft gravel. But if you go another mile around the next point (low tide only and you’d better plan your escape accordingly), you’ll come to a rocky flat tideland “meadow.” I can only call it a meadow because that’s what it appeared to be, like an absolutely flat (not inclining like a beach) alpine meadow below the high-tide line. (click the photo, it should enlarge so you can see it better) This place was an acre at least, and so full of sea life you couldn’t move without squashing a turban shell, or a turban filled with hermit crab. Eel grass and rockweed covered almost every surface which was interesting because eel grass is normally a sand-thing, certainly not on a rocky headland. We couldn’t count the number of seastars, limpets and mussels. Why this area is so rich we could only imagine. At high tide, it has to be only be a few feet deep, so maybe it’s the extra light, slightly warmer water, who knows – but it was hard Olympic bedrock that was flat. From Cabo to Homer, we’ve never seen anything like it in all our tramping around West Coast beaches.

The original watercolor and ink painting of Hole-in-the-Wall is 8″ x 10″ and $100 unframed.
The double mat with custom wood frame makes it a total of $125 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 – and you get the saltwater smudge on the bottom of the paper (not on the painting) for free.
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

Necedah Wildlife Refuge installation

 Last week, someone asked:“what happened to that last big mural you did in, where was it? Necedah Wisconsin?” And, as life often gets by me, I had to say “beats me, haven’t even seen a photo of the installation.” So, with an email and a little poking around on Flickr – here it is, or at least a part of it. You can only see about half of the 130 feet as it goes around the bend and off into the sunset. If you remember, these were the two paintings that were scanned and printed at 300% from the original, then hung like wall paper. I’d say it looks pretty good – at least in the photo.

Some people are shocked when they find out that I not only didn’t go to Necedah for research (too much snow – couldn’t have seen what I needed anyway), but that I didn’t go there to install it (someone else’s job). I’m not sure I liked that, but that’s the way these things go sometimes. No going for research was difficult and I certainly could have used a few hours on the ground with my camera. It’s the details I just can’t get from a few on-line photos, like how the ground looks, how plants grow out of it, how much downed branches and logs, how varied the plants are between sunny and shady areas – endless stuff you normally don’t notice. Sure, a species list helps, but how many, where do they live and which ones did I need to use? In the end, I just made it up from years of doing this stuff, and everyone seems to like it.

When I was growing up as a backroom brat in the Illinois State Museum where both my parents worked, Robert Larson was museum staff habitat diarama background painter (now there’s a business card title). He was a pretty famous dude – but to me he was just the tall guy that threw paint around. I’d go down there and watch him do his stuff and he painted amazingly artistic, huge yet realistic backgrounds for exhibits that looked so real you’d swear the wolf moved each time you saw the exhibit (turned out they had an extra wolf mount they switched out occasionally). Watching this guy paint was my only training for painting these big canvases, and here it is a half-century later and I’m still at it – so, he must have had the magic that so influences kids they are determined to spend the next 50 years trying to do the same thing.

The huge, really really huge difference is that Bob Larson could take a year to do the painting you see here – and I did it in 35 days!!

Here’s one of the paintings again in full view.

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.