Category Archives: New Painting Post

Blog Posts by Larry Eifert

New Painting Post

Necedah Murals – Into the Forest

Yes, I’m into the forest and final week of this project – woo, woo.

Or not! At the moment I feel like I’ve lived for the past month in this beautiful place, surrounded by wolves and deer, woodpeckers and sandhill cranes. Like our own place here in Port Townsend, I know each and every tree, fern and critter – and don’t necessarily want to see Necedah National Wildlife Refuge leave my life – but it is leaving.

WEDNESDAY: 5-7pm FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY (for local readers of this blog)
Nancy and I are hosting a little openhouse this Wednesday evening as a going away party for the painting  as well as a thankyou to the bank for studio space. Wednesday, March 6 upstairs over Union Bank (formerly Frontier Bank) 2200 Sims Way in Port Townsend – from 5 to 7pm. That’s right next to Akamai Art – the best art store in Washington where it’s been so great to walk next door for that next round of #2 brushes.

It’s been an interesting project and it looks like this is going to work. The sketch was 15 feet long, painting is about 40 feet. The final digital imaging will be 130 feet – a far better experience for me than my usual scaffolding – up-down, up-down climbing around like a monkey – process. There are some changes I’d make for the next one, but I’d do it again tomorrow. I just love creating an entire world first in my head and then making it come alive on the canvas. I think it keeps me young, fresh and relevant. I was wondering how my 64 yr-old fingers would survive a rather long month of 6 days a week, but they did just fine. I’ve always heard that painting was an old man’s game – now I’m sure of it.

Our local paper, The Port Townsend Leader, did a very nice front page feature story this week, and you can see it here with some good photos. (thanks, Kathie – you did good)

Thanks for reading this week. Next week I’m back to projects for Mt St Helens, Mt Diablo and the new visitor center at the Schulman Grove of bristlecones. Never a dull moment around here!
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 been posting some Necedah mural images on her blog too.

New Painting Post

Necedah Wildlife Refuge – Second mural

 

If I have to pick up another paint brush – I’ll just throw up. That’s about the way it is right now. The fingers on this right hand of mine is loose, I’ll say that. And as for how well it’s still functioning, wine probably has something to do with it.

So here’s the second mural completed and ready for shipment. This one is about 12 feet long and 40% of the final size. After digitally enlargement, it’ll be about 29 feet long. What’s that black rectangle you ask? That’s where an underwater diorama exhibit goes. And how long did this one take? Eight days of painting, lots of help from Nancy who’s getting pretty darned good at mud.

And if you haven’t been following this stuff for awhile, this is for the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in central Wisconsin. You can see the rest of the progress at the blog listed below. Nancy’s also been blogging about this too and her link is below.

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 National Wildlife Refuge – Second Painting

Thanks, everyone, for all the good comments of these recent posts. Hope it’s Okay if I don’t answer every one of them. As you can see, we’re sort of busy right now.

While the first painting is at Malone Design in Georgia being scanned and printed at 300%, we’ve now begun the second mural for the refuge in Wisconsin. This one is all wetlands and there’s lots of water and sky, making it qo fairly quickly – at least quicker then the other with all those leaves and miles of grass. I’ve had to do some research on how cattails and bulrushes grow, the details of their rooting systems. Can’t do that in person around here, because it’s spring and there’s LOTS of water in all the local marshes covering them all up, but that’s what field guides are for.

This one won’t be blown up quite as large as the first one, but it’ll still be a whopper of an enlargement at 250% from the painting. It’s an interesting process, but I think I much prefer painting these big wall at final 100% size, even if it takes some ladder work. That way I know what I’m getting when I paint it – there isn’t any vagueness or question about how it’ll look in final form (and I might sleep better at night).

Thanks for reading this week. These both should enlarge if you click them.
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 murals – Day 20

 He looks grumpy, but it’s just concentration flowing to that little tiny brush tip!

Click here for a much larger view on the website. 

Far left side still isn’t finished, but we’re getting close. From right edge to the big tree is about 40 feet on the final 3x enlargement. I’m now beginning an entirely new painting equally as long while this section flies to Georgia today for scanning. After that it’ll return for me to finish the left side for that final 24 feet. We were fading a few days ago, but good friend Jan dropped by twice for some professional arm-twisting and muscle rubbing. I felt like a new man!

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

Day 12 – Necedah Refuge murals

Here’s the next installment of the progress on the two murals for Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin. This photo represents about a tenth of the entire project. On the final installation, the image you’re looking at will be about 10 feet tall and 25 feet wide. Click the image and it should enlarge.

 This area is pretty much finished (the color’s a bit off since I photographed it under evening lights – sorry).  As a studio visitor said when I was working away on another section “while you paint, you don’t ever want to glance left or right down that long expanse of canvas, do you?” Right! Way too depressing – like I’m painting the Great Wall of China. Nancy’s been a true painter-partner on this project, doing the thankless duty of painting base textures and background – like millions of blades of grass. It truly steps up the pace – hear that, Michael? These big paintings, at least for me, are all about texture – fuzzy, messy and subtle colors that start from a very dark and stack up to a final highlight on top. Lots of layers! As it goes on, there becomes a mysterious point when it almost becomes a real place when you’re standing right on top of it.

Thanks for reading this week. Stay tuned for more progress.
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

Day 2-4 Necedah National Wildlife Refuge Murals

After a  bunch of round-and-round about sizes, measurements and materials, I’ve now begun two larger paintings for the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin. Stay tuned for progress reports. These two shots are Days 2-4 on the first painting.

Here’s the deal. It’s a new visitor center at the refuge in central Wisconsin. There are 130 feet of walls that need to show, in an artisitic way, five habitats all woven together, from prairie wetlands to sedge meadows, uplands prairie to oak savanna and finally pine forest. Tallest wall is about 12 feet. Normally, I’d do these on theater canvas and they’d be glued up, but we’re trying something technologically new (at least for me). We’re painting these at 30% of final size on Yupo plastic paper, an ultra smooth surface that’s good for high detail. When finished, they’ll be digitally scanned and blown up 300%. So far, the printed samples look pretty good, and it allows me to paint in a much smaller room, and much quicker – and if the visitor center burns down (which has happened), they can put up a fresh copy.

Thanks so much to Port Townsend’s Union Bank for giving me studio space in a community room. They’ve done this before on large projects and have really helped my painting process. While these two paintings are 30% of final size, I still need much bigger walls than I have here in my studio. Nancy’s down there painting away with me, and she’s helping to speed the process up. So far it’s been fun. The story of Necedah and how it relates to my past is an interesting one, but we’ll save that for another post.

Stay tuned for more soon. 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

Meadows

 

Late winter and all this is under gobs of snow right now, but one of the nice things about being a painter is that I can create a moment in time, even if it’s a fantasy. Each day I receive a bunch of blogs from artist friends around the country, and lately they have been full of wistful wishes of warm beaches, rocky summer coastlines, even one from a desert island. So I created my idea of a bit of summer heaven too.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $120 unframed.
We can also frame this if you’d like. Ask us about details. 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

I Get Some Nice Press – American Forests Magazine

 

* You can check the spelling (or just read the entire story) by clicking here to the website.
I just received an advance copy of this very nice feature article about your-truly. It’s not the cover of the Rolling Stone (thank goodness), but for an artist that’s painted nature forever, I think a two-pager in American Forests magazine is about as good as it gets.

I’ve read the work of this group my entire life. American Forests is America’s oldest nonprofit conservation organization, and has been an influential voice for conservation and the environment since its founding in 1875. I haven’t known about it for that long, but I sure have enjoyed their publications – and now, as they say, I are one. Thanks, Michelle. Decades ago when I was painting in the California redwoods and under the threat of timber company boycotts and watch groups against me and my gallery, I used the information AF published to help me defend myself against cutting those giant trees. It’s a nice circle for me that I am now, myself, in this same publication.

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.

Click here and tell me if you don’t want to receive any more of these.

New Painting Post

Three Blind Mice

I’ve been working on three projects at once, some of them fairly large, so keeping it all straight has been interesting. Oh yeah, then there’s this blog-thing.

Here’s the setup: Imagine you’re a little mouse family living on the north side of Mount St Helens 30 years ago. Meta Lake is just downhill, still snow covered even though it’s May. Life is good, you’ve been asleep all winter, waking occasionally but certainly not leaving your cozy little mouse den. Your little clan found this neat little hole a mole had dug, and in a little side room you set up shop for the winter. It’s May, still a month from being able to leave for a brief summer of munching and gaining back the weight you lost over winter, when you awake to hear what sounds like a 1000 jet planes landing right on top of you. Well, whatever it was, it passes by.

Well, whatever it was – turned out to be the eruption of Mount St. Helens, and because this little family was underground, it survived the almost supersonic blast. After the snow melts, rich ash and a destroyed forest will make for a rich succession of plants with lots of seeds and grasses. And, unlike the elk and deer in the blast zone, the mouse family will survive.

Such is the job of a naturalist-artist. This little painting will be an inset to a much larger painting showing the snow-covered forest and that big ugly blast cloud just arriving. Fun stuff to figure out.

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

Necedah Refuge Mural Sketches

This week it’s another sketch for the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin. (this image should blow up larger if you click it) I begin the painting on this next week, and I’ll make sure I send some in-progress images as things progress. I must be getting better with my habitat knowledge, because of the entire 140 feet of sketches (no, I didn’t do them full-sized), I only had a half-dozen things that needed fixing.

That’s a lot of critters! I loved doing these drawings – it’s art that really can’t be sold very easily, but I sure like to do it. It’s also a skill that’s critical to all else that follows, like the painting itself. Without a good foundation sketch, the painting would fail, or at least take much longer as I fumble around with it.

This is a landscape I know pretty well. I grow up just a few hundred miles south of here, and my family often went north past here to the boreal forest of bogs, lakes and pines, the closest really good “nature” to the kingdom of central Illinois. It’s a wonderful transition zone of grasslands, marshes, uplands prairies and open softwood forests. It’s a mix I enjoy painting, because there are few broad-leaved trees. South from here you leave the pines behind and get into all those broadleafed oaks and open prairies -which means TOO many leaves and TOO many blades of grass to paint.

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.