Category Archives: New Painting Post

Blog Posts by Larry Eifert

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

An Eifert Look to the Marine Life Center

Feiro Marine Life Center gets a dozen Eifert exhibit panels and new “look”.

 (Click the image and it should enlarge)

The Feiro Marine Life Center in Port Angeles Washington. We’ve been working on this for a seven months now, and it’ll be probably another year before it’s completed, but I thought I’d pass some of it around here today.

The place needed some freshening up, so they asked us to help. Much of this is centered around the ‘big deal’ that’s coming down locally in Olympic National Park – the removal of the Elwha River dams, largest dam removal in the US to date – and it really is a big deal, at least around here and at least for me. I’ve been involved with the dams project for several years now as a provider of art showing what the river will look like post-dams, so it was logical I also help create some exhibits about it at the Feiro. Here’s a link to some of that other Elwha River work.

The image above is only the quickie-watercolor concept sketch, but I thought it interesting enough to pass around. Everyone sees the finished products – complex paintings or big visitor center exhibits – but few see where it starts, the basic skin and bones of ideas. And while it may (read: probably) not end up this way at all, it’s a good view into the creative process. So here goes: This wall is actually three times longer than this. It goes off to the left where there are also windows, so to keep it simple, I just focused on this area for a concept sketch. The sign is all they really requested, which includes a changing banner up top for programs. I’ll do all that here in the studio, but the rest will likely be done on-site. We went to the big Seattle Aquarium for some field research into how kelp and fish look underwater, how fish circle, and how light filters down into the ocean. The two herring balls – thousands of little fish circling for protection, will mimic the oval sign, and the octopus encircling the sign shows a popular critter they have in their tanks. There will be more and larger fish, likely salmon, and more extensive bull kelp, but this shows the basic idea.

Stay tuned, I’ll send more as this goes along.

For local readers: Nancy is opening a show of her photography at Gallery Nine in Port Townsend Saturday night, 5:30 to 8pm. Come on down and see her new work.

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, Uncategorized

Visiting My Old-growth Friend

Ohanapecosh Visitor Center – Mount Rainier National Park (click photo to enlarge)

Last week we were over at Mount Rainier and Mt St Helens for a field trip and stopped by the Rainier visitor center where one of my old-growth murals is installed. We hadn’t been there since the Great Flood of 2006 that closed the park for 6 months, and while there remains evidence everywhere of the 18″ of rain in 36 hours, the v.c. looks great. I have never taken good photos of this installation, so Nancy spent some time there doing just that while I filled out some paperwork on annual mural maintenance for the NPS Rangers.

This mural was painted in the Spring of 1995, making it over fifteen years old now. I’m happy to say it looks just as vibrant as when it was installed. It’s acrylic on MDO plywood, and while it was for Ohanapecosh, the forest itself was modeled after the wetter Carbon River Forest over on the opposite side of the mountain. I involved interpretive staff from the other two ‘big’ parks nearby, Olympic and North Cascades, because we wanted to make sure it fit all three. We also planned to create posters, puzzles and cards to sell at all these parks, so species had to fit for all of them. One park has lots of elk, another none, so no elk. Grouse or not? It wasn’t until one guy saw one on the way to work that the grouse was IN. It went that way with about 30 species until everyone was happy – except the painter who didn’t get to paint any elk.

And me? I’m now happy that after 15 years those posters and puzzles are still selling well in all three parks (and many others, including the major redwood parks in California). I’m sure the Rainier non-profit that funded the original painting (and sells the products) has, by now, actually made a profit off the painting they commissioned. And the Chief of Interpretation that originally gave me the commission? He’s retired and lives here in Port Townsend – and has crewed for me in a few sailboat races. It’s a small world that is endlessly big.

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. You can find this poster and puzzle here if you dig.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

Covergirl Schooner Adventuress

Cover Art Schooner Adventuress

48 North magazine in Seattle has always been very good to me, and this month is no exception. It was Wooden Boat Festival time here in Port Townsend, and so, just as they did last year, one of my paintings landed on the magazine’s cover. They do a good job in these days of struggling print magazines, but now 48 has begun to move into the digital world. It’s now entirely online and free. Check it out. Only thing lacking this month is a story by me. To see past stories, check our website archives.

The timing of this worked out pretty well, because the original painting is still available. SO, I’ll shamelessly pitch it here. You were waiting for that anyway, weren’t you?

Adventuress at Union Wharf is acrylic on board, 14″ x 20″ and $1000 unframed.
A nice triple matted frame and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you want a custom frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print. Lean on me for the non-gallery discount.
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.

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New Painting Post, Uncategorized

The Sound of Falling Water

Sure, the Northwest has all those  grand peaks, glaciers and giant trees, ocean beaches and alpine lakes, but for me it’s these little seasonal waterfalls that always get me going.

I think it’s the fact they’re always different, always changing – and mostly temporary. As winter snows melt, hundreds of valleys, cliff faces and forest slopes echo with a cacophony of pure and cold rushing melt water, all of it seemingly too eager to get down to the sea. This is a very noisy place, and I really don’t care if I sound anthropomorphic or maybe sentimental – for me, these waterfalls are alive. Most of the time these little streams cross our trail under a little bridge or log instead of our having to slog through it, and this gives me a place to study the motion, blur, colors and mossy rocks inthe spray zone. Most of these little channels are dry by mid-August, but, because we’ve had a cool and wet past few weeks, they’ve begun again in earnest. Sure it rains a bit up here, but this is what you get. It’s not all that bad.

So, I’m not there at the moment. And neither are you. Look at the painting again and let’s pretend we’re standing on that nearby log. Close your eyes and listen. Hear it? The rush of water over rocks, a blur of sounds, the smell of nearby warm hemlock in sun. I live for this stuff!

This acrylic is 14″ x 20″ on paperboard and is offered  for $790 unframed, but if you lean on me I’ll toss in a nice frame to boot.
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, Uncategorized

Art in the Old-growth

(Click to enlarge so you can read the text by Janet Scharf, Olympic NP)

‘An art gallery in the woods,’ that’s what I like to call these paintings.

Thanks to the kind folks at the park, I now have 24 paintings, well, reproductions of them, scattered along the road in Olympic National Park’s Sol Duc Valley. This one was one of the first, and until recently I didn’t have a digital file of it for my portfolio. The fabricator finally sent it to me, so now I’m passing it along to all of you. It tells the story of the unseen-by-us happenings in the old-growth when the sun goes down, how all sorts of critters appear and carry on their lives when we’ve all gone home for the day. In the foreground, a flying squirrel is diggin’ ‘shrooms and upon hearing the rustle of forest duff, a northern spotted owl begins its predatory plunge from a high perch. The black-tailed deer is browsing oxalis and isn’t aware of the mountain lion’s stealthy approach. And the marbled murrelet is coming home on the last flight of the day, returning to it’s mossy nest with a load of herring for it’s chick from the distant Pacific 20 miles away.

I’ve always liked the idea of using my paintings to present an interpretive idea or story about nature. I learn about it. I paint it. I pass it along to the next guy. Outdoor fabrication technology is pretty good these days, so this panel will last for decades unless a 500,000-pound tree falls on it (which has happened). I love the thought of a car full of visitors driving up this beautiful road, eyes open in wonder at the scenery and pulling off to read this wayside panel – and suddenly they’re immersed in a painting telling a story about nature they never knew about. I think art should teach and inspire – and then move the viewer to positive future actions. Is this art? I’d say it is.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was posted 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 new work up of her garden after a morning rain.

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

Dipper on the North Fork

A Larger Painting today.We’ve added some names from Gallery Nine in Port Townsend, so if you’re getting this email and don’t know what it is, this is the weekly art-blog for painter-writer Larry Eifert. Don’t want it? Just unsubscribe below. I sent it about once a week.

North Fork of the Sol Duc River. Now this is a special place. No one goes here because the trail doesn’t GO anywhere and today’s peak-bagging goal-oriented hikers  hate that. No lake, no peak, no stunning overlook – just miles and miles of stately old-growth forest and rushing river awaiting. Elk, deer, salmon – and lots of dippers like this one.

The Sol Duc is about 70 miles west of here in Olympic National Park. After hiking over a hill for about a mile from the Sol Duc road, we put on our water shoes and forded the river that was up to our thighs. Cold – but absolutely delightful – and these two natural barriers are what also help to keep most hikers out. On the other side, with hiking boots back on, we ambled up the trail beside the river. Sometimes we were down on bedrock, other times up in maple glades festooned with hanging club moss and occasionally up onto deeply forested benches with enormous trees. There’s a lot of bedrock basalt exposed along the river, creating punchbowl effects and some very deep pools (like the painting). It’s a place to just sit and listen to the endless harmonies of water over stones, wind high in the 300′ hemlocks – and think about how lucky it is we still  have these places.

Click the images to enlarge them.

This original painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 22″ x 28″ and is offered for $790 unframed.
We can custom frame this for you in any style you’d like using our wholesale framing discounts (meaning you’ll save about 75% of what a normal custom framer would charge).  This is the original painting, NOT a print. However, we offer custom prints as large as 50 inches on the shortest side.
Email us for details in your interested.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was published 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, Uncategorized

Four Rowboats – An Interesting Print Project

(You can click on the image to enlarge it.)

Recently, I was commissioned to make a custom canvas print of this painting. It was an interesting process that I want to share.

The original acrylic (in my hands) is only 14″ x 20″, and thankfully I still owned it. This would not have been as easy if I had to ship it back from an owner in, say, Florida. I scanned it in four pieces at 350% and high resolution on my flatbed scanner, pieced it back together in Photoshop, and then carefully cleaned it up at great magnification. It finished out at over 800mbs uncompressed, or MORE than an entire CD’s worth of data in one file. How much is all that? It would mean each person in the country could have about 2.5 pieces of this image with some left over.

My printer-guy, ColorOne in Seattle, said: “just send it over via the web.” Never sent so large a file, mainly because our funky Internet company here can’t even bill us properly, but I compressed it to 577mb and there it went with a button push and the finger’s crossed. FIVE HOURS AND TWENTY TWO MINUTES LATER it made it to someplace in cyberspace. Probably took five minutes to download it over in Seattle, 40 miles away, but they got it in one piece – and matched the colors perfectly. The resolution is so good on the canvas that it’s difficult to tell it’s not an a real painting, and it has a varnished finish like an glazed oil. Amazing technology – and the folks at ColorOne are very good at . Let’s see. The side of a bus for the next one?

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.

If you just hate this stuff and want to unsubscribe, just hit the return button and let me know.

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

Golden Aspen Grove

We were in Glacier National Park recently, enjoying the trails before all the tourists arrived. Late one afternoon we were looping around Swiftcurrent Trail and coming back into Many Glacier and the campground – and came into a very pleasant aspen grove. Now, we have aspen here at home too, just a few that are stragglers probably from the North Cascades, but this was a really old grove. Aspens usually grow in avalanche chutes where they have little competition. They all bond together with a common root system that helps stop the winter snow’s attempts to yank them out. Because of the avalanches, they grow all contorted and never get very big, but here was a bottomland grove of beautiful large trees. It was like strolling beneath a golden yellow canopy of fluttering confetti. Lovely.

This watercolor and ink painting is on paper, 8.5″ x 12.5″ and $125 unframed.
A nice dark mahogany frame with a double mat 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, Uncategorized

A Fantastic River Glow

Sundown on the Hoh River

Sundown on Olympic National Park’s Hoh River.Yes, I’m still finishing up stuff I began while sitting in the lawn chair beside the Hoh River – and why not, it’s a great place. This way I get to experience it twice. And this amazing evening color wouldn’t repeat itself every day. Someone once asked me if I ever did hard drugs in my early days. Nope, I painted. I thought it was better in every way. On the other hand, I AM a child of the 60’s, and, well, you know. …

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas board, 9″ x 12″ and $125 unframed.
The gold or mahogany frame with a linen liner makes it a total of $150 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. Right now, this painting is in a dark frame with a linen liner behind it, sitting in Gallery Nine in Port Townsend. It’s also a bit more if you buy it there.

This is the original painting, NOT a print.
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.

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

Red Alders – Lots of Details

I really liked these trees, and they were right there in the campground, so, of course the paints came out of their box. Red alder is a tree that likes streamsides and damp areas and many times they’ll come in after logging until young conifers take over – like they did here. I think they’re very beautiful trees, with various and interesting bark patterns any painter of nature would find interesting. Red alders don’t live very long – they’re old at 50 – and those rare older ones become very gnarly and shapely, bruised and battered by winter storms.

I tend to get lost in the details, so after this initial sketch was drawn, I turned the chair around so I could paint them in my mind’s eye (with considerably less detail).  There are other alder species here in the West – white alder, Sitka, mountain, speckled and several more, but red alder always have leaves that curl under just slightly along the edges.

This mixed media painting is watercolor and ink on paper, 9″ x 12″ and $125 unframed.
A dark mahogany frame with a double mat 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.