Category Archives: New Painting Post

Blog Posts by Larry Eifert

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

New Publications for Capitol Reef National Park

About ten years ago, Nancy and I did two publications for Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park, and they were both illustrated throughout with lots of my ink drawings. They looked good, but this time around, we upgraded it all with watercolor and ink sketches, and if you’ve been reading my blogs, you’ll know why. I was just in the mood to do more of these colorful images, so the wonderful folks at Cap Reef let me do it. One is about Cathedral Valley (above), the big road loop north of the visitor center, and the other is for the Waterpocket Fold loop, that famous road that loops down into the Staircase-Escalante and up the Burr Trail. They’re both wild rides, and very exciting to to drive – true American West stuff. Here’s a page from the second guide. The images should enlarge with a click. I think there are about 40 of these little watercolors scattered throughout.

But there’s a little more to this story.When Nancy and I were down there a decade ago researching this, we had just been officially married, and the wonderful folks at the park put us up in a little honeymoon cabin complete with a gift basket (and where you’d even get a gift basket in that very remote park of Utah, I still don’t know). We had Nancy’s almost-new BLACK 4-runner (black is so great for desert off-road driving, isn’t it?), and the very first day of research, and the very first few feet of the Cathedral Valley road, we were required to ‘ford’ the 100′-wide Fremont River. We could see the road going into it, and see it coming out the other side – so what the heck, we went for it. Water OVER THE HOOD – and by the time we reached the far shore, we had it coming in the doors too. It was a ‘family’ moment for sure, but we all got calmed down and continued the 60-mile heavily rutted dirt road in somewhat strained but  peaceful silence. After 60 miles, the car was NOT black, but more a muddy brown. Oh, and amazingly, we’re still married.

Thanks, Shirley and Diana -the Elegant CapReef Ladies, for letting me whack away at this.

And, 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

Finding One Square Inch of Silence

No painting this time, instead it was a treasure hunt. After five years of reading about it, Nancy and I set off to find the now-legendary “One Square Inch of Silence”. Ever heard of it? Designated on Earth Day – April 22, 2005 – to protect and manage the natural soundscape in Olympic Park’s backcountry wilderness, OSI is an independent research project that has a website and board of directors – and has been in the national news on occasion. As the website says: “if a loud noise, such as the passing of an aircraft, can impact many square miles, then a natural place, if maintained in a 100% [human] noise-free condition, will also impact many square miles around it.” In support of this crazy idea, all Northwest commercial airlines have pledged to not fly near it. Gordon Hempton, a acoustic recording engineer and author dreamed this up – and I think it was a great idea waiting to happen.

So, off we went in seach of a little red rock that represents – the one square inch of silence. Beginning at the Olympic National Park Hoh Rain Forest Visitor Center (which is already way the heck up a remote valley and fairly free of human noise anyway) we hiked a little over three miles. Past huge trees, hanging moss, occasional views of the blue-gray glacial-fed Hoh River we went until we reached a significant-looking octopus-hemlock (that’s the top photo). The instructions are to climb through the hole and immediately take a faint elk trail to the left for a few minutes, climbing over blow-downs and then circle a swamp – we did, and there it was:  a little red rock on a mossy log symbolizing much more than it appeared.

The whole point of this is, to me, the sad fact that while we stood beside the log and its sacred rock, we heard people talking far down the Hoh Trail and were aware of a very distant small plane somewhere. And if we experienced that plane and were offended by it, how many other wilderness travelers heard it too? If there isn’t pure peace from human sounds even here in this remote place, a spot people actually work at to make pure, I think it’s hopeless. We’ve lost something we didn’t even realize we had – a place we can go to listen to nothing. On the other hand, the experience of just going there and being aware of all this was immensely rewarding.

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

Backwater on the Hoh

We’ve spent the better part of two weeks camping along Olympic National Park’s Hoh River, and I have a bunch of fun mixed media paintings to report. We’re home now, watering some very thirsty tomatoes, yanking out the gone-to-seed stuff we forgot about – and trying to figure out how to return to the West End for a few days more. Probably won’t happen soon, because there are some very patient people waiting for us to do our art-tricks – and we thank you. What? This little watercolor and ink created on my lap in the camp chair while I was being eaten alive by the moskies isn’t art-trick enough? Well, the spash of paint followed up by a dead run to the camper was a pretty good trick. “Moskies” was what I heard a Brit call the evil Hoh River mosquitoes. Pretty good name.

This ORIGINAL painting is watercolor and ink on paper , 8″ x 10″ and $140 unframed.
The dark mahogany frame with a double mat and glass 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.
Email us for details if you’re interested.

AND……………..

 

Here’s a friend that came by the campsite to visit one evening. We’ve not seen such a perfect bull elk  up close and personal in years. Had to have been 1200 lbs and not a mark on him. I guessed from ground to antler top was at least 8.5 feet, and you sure didn’t want to stand in his way as he came past. At the closest point he was about 15′ from us, and the tree I was hiding behind seemed pretty darned small. Olympic NP has the largest unmanaged elk herd in the country, and this guy truly seemed ‘unmanaged.’ Whooie.

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

Twilight on the Hoh River

We’ve been camping along Olympic National Park’s famous Hoh River this past week, and the next few  posts will be watercolors I did out there, mostly after hikes in the late afternoon. I could have spent the time soaking my feet in the 49-degree water coming straight off the Blue Glacier, but thought better of it. It’s an amazing valley, that quintessential Rain Forest Experience, surrounded by miles of giant 250′ Sitka spruce, red-cedar and hemlock. The visitors are all pretty civilized there too. It’s as if they realize they’re in a special, almost sacred place, and treat it (and other visitors) that way. There’s a lack of amenities, to be sure, no water in the restrooms, no power, no showers, and the park store seems to always be out of our puzzles and books – but it’s also pure clean ancient forest an hour drive from the nearest stoplight. Wonderful.

And speaking of the nearest stoplight, that would be in Forks – the little bedraggled West End logging town that has fallen into a Hollywood gold mine. They should make Stephenie Meyers, or maybe Hollywood location people, the patron saints of Forks for their gift of filming the Twilight Series there. We delight driving through it nowadays, seeing every store in business and the town full of vampire-seekers (or maybe vampires themselves). I’ve never seen so many dark haired, pale makeuped teenaged girls with cameras in my life. Stores: there’s ‘Dazzled by Twilight’, and ‘Twilight Natives’, and even ‘Twilight Firewood.’ We saw a rows of girls all lined up in front of the closed-up high school, pulled over waiting their turn in front of the town sign, even photographing the Twilight Gas Station sign. Amazing!

So, here’s my Twilight take on it with this little watercolor of the Twilight on the Hoh River. Nancy says I’m trying to cash in on the Twilight Craze, but I know who has all the money – pale-skinned teenage girls, and I just know one of them will buy this. Oh, no vampires in it? Well, you never know. There could be one lerking behind one of those big spruce.

This watercolor and ink painting is on cold-press paper, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
A nice mahogany frame with a double mat and glass 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.
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.

Next time I’ll tell you about the “One Square Inch of Silence” 3.5 miles up the trail on the Hoh.

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

Otter Tracks

River Otter Tracks on the Beach are a fairly common sight around here. In fact, otters are, themselves, a really common sight right in downtown Port Townsend. Recently, there’s been a big one down there on Water Street, dodging cars, running around and looking in the open door at Gallery Nine (where both Nancy and I exhibit) – and causing all sorts of photo-opportunities for the tourists who all think they’re just wonderful. Yeah, well …

There used to be a restaurant in PoTown (my word – and Nancy thinks it might be pronounced PooTown) called The Otter Crossing, with a whole little band of otters-guys that consistently hung out underneath the building. Recently it changed hands and is now renamed something fruity and upscale. Wonder if the otters know? Wonder if the new people who bought it knew what the name meant? I walked by there recently and a stong fishy aroma was still wafting around the place, but maybe it was just low tide. Otters can be over four feet long – meaning, to put it mildly, a lot of seafood goes through them.

I’ve painted otters before, paying homage to them so they wouldn’t come aboard our boat and make a big gooey mess, but it didn’t help, didn’t deter them in the slightest. Some boaters hang little bags of weird coyote urine on their lifelines, others sneak go down at night and use their own urine here and there, still others pay huge sums of money on otter-proof netting that never really works. Sheesh. To me, they’re just part of living with nature around here, and, as we say fairly often, sometimes it isn’t easy.

Now, don’t get me going on the red squirrel babies in the attic.

This painting is watercolor and ink on watercolor paper, 7 1/2″ x 10 1/2″ and is $139 unframed.
A nice mahogany frame with a double mat, outside measurements of about 13″ x 15″  makes it a total of $179 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

Here’s the website link for the new bristlecone pine. It’s been pretty popular all ready.

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.

Clickhere to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography. There are some nice images of our recent Glacier and Waterton National Parks visit a couple of weeks ago.

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

Hale’iwa Cottage

Back in March we stayed on Oahu’s North Shore, and now I’ve gotten around to painting a little  “thank you” watercolor for the family who graciously allowed us to stay there. The house is an interesting place, and so I thought I’d post it here. The place is about 3 miles or so north of Hale’iwa, that North Shore wide place in the road that’s famous for the shave ice, odd people and giant surfing waves. How big are the waves? Well, right down the road a local surfer was sleeping in his beach-side cabin when a rogue wave came in, smacked the place apart and he awoke to find himself behind his home, surfing up the hill on his bed. He’s lucky to tell the tale.

This little cottage, also oh-so-close to the giant waves, had its lower front windows boarded up because of the same problem. Try sleeping soundly at night with THAT knowledge running around in your head. We were told the place was originally an old WW2 army barracks that was moved here after the war, then remodeled endless times to become a truly old-Hawaii experience. This means it’s a mixture of everything that’s available yet nothing that’s entirely permanent. Nothing fancy, no granite countertops, just a tidy little place like the summer cabins I stayed in as a kid. There’s a long sand beach just down the block where green sea turtles haul out to rest, but the ‘beach’ out front is mostly lava rocks and remnants of an ancient coral reef when sea levels were a bit higher.

For the most part, the entire 808-State (Hawaii area code) isn’t like this anymore. You have to really look for the old Hawaii Nancy and I love – but it’s still here in bits and pieces. The family who remains true to this small and simple old place on the beach is pretty savy, I think, of realizing how to enjoy life.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Here’s a link to our new Bristlecone Pine jigsaw puzzle.

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 images from her Glacier National Park trip are featured. Bears, peaks, loons and foxes, oh my.

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

Penstemons in the Alpine

 

While we had an amazingly warm winter, the warmest on record, it’s now Junuary in the Northwest. There is still TOO MUCH SNOW in the Olympics for any descent hiking, and we were just over in Glacier National Park in Montana, and the Going-to-the-Sun Road is STILL closed with 20′ drifts in the upper pass.  It’s driving us crazy, and I’m eager, no, almost frantic, to get into some summertime alpine meadows again.

I want to sit down on these rocks next to this little stream (wherever it is) and listen to the sounds of the slow-moving bumblebees making the rounds of spring alpine flowers. I want to take it in, each subtle color and texture on every alpine sedge and lichen, flower or glacier-smooth rock with its Ice Age grooves aiming downhill. Smells, those alpine smells – flower perfume of paintbrush and cornlily. Sour aroma of Sitka valerian. The tangy bittersweet of alpine willow in sun. You know this stuff too, or should, and once you’re bitten by the alpine meadow bug, winters become unbearably longer and hiking books burden your shelves. At least it does at our place.

Penstemons  – This original painting is watercolor and ink, 6″ x 9″ and $125 unframed.
A dark mahogany double-matted frame makes it a total of $149 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

I left this out of the last post, but if you’d like a direct link to buy the new Bristlecone Pine puzzle, here it is.

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

Bristlecone Pines Jigsaw Puzzle

Bristlecone Pines puzzle box

Bristlecone Pines – The Trees That Rewrote History
 NEW jigsaw puzzle

I was commissioned for this new mural by the Crater Lake Institute, a most forward-thinking and generous bunch.  This painting is one I’ve wanted to do for years, and now, with the mural complete, we’ve also created a puzzle of the image.

If you don’t know, and many people don’t, bristlecone pines are high elevation mountaintop trees of the Great Basin in remote areas of Nevada, eastern California and Utah. I think they’re the most beautiful trees on the planet, and the starkness of their high-elevation surroundings just adds to their appeal. We’ve studied them in Bryce Canyon and Great Basin National Parks, and the famous Schulman Grove in the White Mountains east of Bishop, CA on Forest Service lands. In all these places, we’ve felt a reverence, an almost religious experience in even casually walking among these ancient trees. How ancient? Well, some still-living trees have been dated to having begun their living journey from a small seed almost 5000 years ago, making them the oldest single plant species on the entire planet. Branches and downed trees have been dated to almost twice that age, and have helped scientists better understand climate data since the Ice Age. That’s what the title, “The Trees that Rewrote History” refers to. With few wildfires and a high-desert arid climate , downed bristlecone wood stays around. To put this into a perspective we can maybe grasp better, these trees began life when there were woolly mammoths walking around North America!

Now, I just have to add this extra bit because it’s eaten at me for decades, and made educating people about bristlecones with my art a mission for me. This is a direct quote from Wikipedia: “In the Snake Range of eastern Nevada Donald R. Currey, a student of the University of North Carolina, was taking core samples of bristlecones in 1964. He discovered that “Prometheus” in a cirque below Wheeler Peak (in what is now Great Basin National Park) was over 4,000 years old. His coring tool broke, so the U.S. Forest service granted permission to cut down “Prometheus”. 4,844 rings were counted on a cross-section of the tree, making “Prometheus” at least 4,844 years old, the oldest non-clonal living thing known to man. … He never cut down another tree in his life.”

Enough said: you guys understand, and I think some of you might have actually known Mr. Currey, who died in 2004. It’s a sad tale, is it not? Why is it that we keep repeating needless destruction of this little planet? Well, I think it’s because we simply don’t appreciate something until it’s gone or screwed up beyond repair. Like Prometheus – or the Gulf wetlands we were in only six weeks ago.

So, my bristlecone image is now a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle (made of recycled materials, I might add) with a good interpretive essay on the box’s back along with a species key. You can buy it online or by email or call us at 1-888-437-2218 and we’ll ship it with an invoice. We’re trying to make it easier for readers who have difficulty with the web ordering-thing. If you’d like to bundle up several puzzles, it saves you shipping. Just tell us what you want.

Thanks for reading this week. This one meant a lot to me to finally see it in print – and it’s already selling – and educating – at some of the bristlecone parks.
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

Road Trip – The Big Easy

St Charles Street Car – New Orleans

We could have ridden this all day long! First operated in 1833, New Orlean’s St Charles Street Car Line runs from Canal Street near the “Quarter” all he way out past Uptown, the Garden District and Magazine Street. When it gets to the end, the conductor simply turns all the seats around, goes to the other end of the car and off it goes in the other direction. For most of the way, the line goes down a grand oak-shaded boulevard with grass under the tracks and branches brushing the car’s top. The driver is loud and verbal, yelling out the names of streets and how “they’s lots of really stupid people, you know”.  One time he picked up a rider but said: “Don’t you dare think I’ll stop here again. Next time, you march yourself down to the next stop”. He was yelling, and they have to yell, because the trucks (yes, train car wheels are called trucks) are screeching and grinding into turns that thousands upon thousands of other wheels have rolled on, and the brass and hardwood construction isn’t what it used to be (but we think it’s better than it used to be). All the windows open fully, so you can hang  out and watch the stately homes going by – no guard rails, no ADA compliant, just great experiences without the Nanny State reeling you in.

And, to finish the story, the neighborhood street car dumps you in the French Quarter where you can buy a hand grenade to finish up with. It’s simply one of the great rides in America, and it’s only a buck and a quarter. Oh, and a hand grenade? It’s a frozen fruit slushy with pineapple and lime … and four shots of Everclear. Don’t know what Everclear is? It’s 185 proof pure grain alcohol, the French Quarter’s most powerful drink (outside of paint remover).

So that was the good news. The bad: It is just heart breaking to see Katrina’s footprint, the ruined and abandoned stately old houses in the Seventh and Ninth Wards. We camped in an RV park in the Seventh and each morning going into downtown on the shuttle we’d pass blocks of century-old smashed up homes, which is tragic, but I’d say 80% are now coming back to life. And they aren’t just replacing them with plastic sheetrock wonders you see across America, but they’re carefully putting the old ladies back together. Most of the old oaks are still here too, unlike my town of Port Townsend where they seem to hate an old tree. Here’s they’re treating the big trees like injured old-timers, which of course they are. “Hell of a job, Brownie” is the phrase that kept going through my head, that insane Bush statement that things were just dandy in the Big Easy after the hurricane passed. It might have been a big hurricane, but it was a man-made disaster because we didn’t maintain the levees properly.

If you get a chance, I’d recommend a little vacation to this amazing city on the Mississippi. It’s worth the effort to help retain a truly special place that belongs to all of us.

Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

New Painting Post

Carson River Mural Unveiling

This week I finished up another large-scale habitat mural for a new visitor center along the Carson River in Nevada. This vibrant place, just below the High Sierra front and southeast of Lake Tahoe, has always been important to wildlife, and to me. I consider it one of the most beautiful and interesting places in the West.

As the winter snows melt off these great mountains in spring, this water runs off into the valley and eventually out into the Great Basin where it evaporates with summer heat. Along the way, vernal pools and backwater pockets are filled with rushes and cattails, providing fabulous habitat for birds that make wildlife-watching wonderful. I’ve gotten to know this area pretty well, as I’ve also painted another, similar painting just north of this for the Lahanton Valley National Wildlife Refuge. In some small way, I’m always hoping my work will open some eyes, change some hearts and minds and possibly, just possibly, make it so these beautiful landscapes (and fictitious paintings) will both continue past my lifetime.

I wrote two other posts for this one as the project progressed. Here’s the original sketch (these open in separate browser windows) and here’s the half-way image showing the development of details. It’s kind of fun to see all three stages because things always change as I go along. For example, I added a yellowthroat and a Savannah sparrow to the final – and they’re not in the second stage painting.

And below is the initial reference photo I developed the painting from. Supplied by the client (and, thank you, Anne), you can see how far from reality these big paintings stray. Still, there are basic elements here that remained the same, making it a recognizable place. I like to say this photo was the launching pad, but where the final painting landed, no one knew – especially me!

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff. To see more than 50 other murals like this, click here.

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