Category Archives: New Painting Post

Blog Posts by Larry Eifert

New Painting Post

Salmon Cascades – Olympic National Park

Salmon-Cascades
I spent the entire week drawing concept sketches for a new project, and I couldn’t have imagined a more fun time. And since I have graphite all over the place –  drawings for 130 running FEET of new murals and am completely disorganized, I thought I’d just post this finished painting here instead of showing you the sketches. Maybe it’ll calm me down. When I get the pencil drawings pasted together in some sort of publishable form, I’ll post them.
This painting is of Salmon Cascades – just west of us in Olympic National Park. It’s a favorite for many locals, because in Fall huge salmon come right up along the rock cliff on the left as the big fish prepare to jump the cascades. You can be within two feet of a very powerful fish waiting for just the right moment to make the leap, and it’s pretty thrilling. In late afternoon, the sun comes around to illuminate the mist from the falls, bathing the entire area in silver light.
This painting is acrylic on board, 12″ x 20″ and we’re offering it for $700 unframed. Email us for details. Click the image to enlarge.
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

Where Are The Black-tails?

Deer-Wet-Meadow
 Where are all the deer? I asked that yesterday, realizing I hadn’t seen one in our meadow for a long while. (click the painting and it should enlarge.

We’ve created a pretty critter-friendly habitat here in our little patch of forest and meadow, and the wildlife know it. We’ve kept a count of our critters over the years and now have a ‘yard list’ of over 80 species. A salt lick for the deer, a couple of feeders, no outside pets (especially cats) and over the years we now have Douglas squirrels patiently waiting right on the feeder while we dish out the morning seeds. Two hummers are still overwintering. The Cooper’s hawk juvies still fly around overhead freaking out the towhees and chickadees. But the deer? Don’t know!

All summer we had two families of deer – multiple fawns in tow. We’re in a no-shooting zone around here, so when Fall safely progressed, alters appeared on the bucks and lots of coy antics went on it the meadow – lots of racing around like they were all schoolyard kids. But then (with hunting season the last two weeks in October) the deer just vanished. It must just be habit. They’re safe here, and they seem to know it, judging by their ‘almost’ taking our homegrown apples out of our hands, but, poof, they were gone anyway. Now, in a couple of months I know they’ll be back, females with a new one or two in their bellies. It’s a cycle of life I know I can depend on – but what’s the deal? Why don’t they just stay?

Black-tailed deer in a wet meadow:

No deer, so I painted one. This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
The gold frame 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, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

To read my other blog entries, check the blog here.

Thanks for reading this week. It’s a window into our little artistic world here.
Larry Eifert

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

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New Painting Post, Posts about other stuff

Merry Christmas and Thanks

Green_Chickadee

This is one of Virginia Eifert’s ‘famous’ hand-painted Christmas cards. Inside is hand-written calligraphy:
Now let the echoes
of the songs of May
Refresh and warm your hearts
on Christmas Day – 1963

I was 17 then and just beginning to sell my stuff at art fairs and local shows. Not very well, I’ll admit, but it was a passionate start.

She sent these cards each year for decades, ending with her death in 1966. I’ve heard from people who still have many of them, some even framed, for she painted hundreds. I did too, until my real work simply swallowed this up. Unlike me, Virginia was legendary for being able to do it all (except maybe clean the house or teach her son to do the same), which brings me around to what I really want to say here.

Merry Christmas and loving thanks to everyone reading this. We’re sending a genuine thank-you to the fantastic group of friends, clients and buyers who have supported Nancy and me as artists all these years. It’s now been over four decades of making a living as a working artist, beginning way back in the 1960’s with a gentle but firm push from Virginia.

Thanks to all of you who have faithfully bought my work, but also thanks to all the people who sell our stuff in park stores coast to coast, in galleries and countless other places. It’s a very wide web these days, and unfortunately I’ll never personally meet many of you.

And thanks, also, to someone I DO know, thanks to my very most important and special person, Nancy Cherry Eifert, who not only has a photo career of her own, but also handles the licencing, royalties, commissions and shipping, including orders from that pesky website that never seems to work properly. She’s an amazing partner that can multi-task with the best of them. They say that, these days especially, it takes at least two people working more than full-time to be one professional artist. We’ll both tell you that’s certainly true.

I know this won’t last forever -I wish it would, but I won’t stop or even slow down exploring nature through my art and words. Like Carl Rungius, the Canadian painter of wildlife I admire greatly, I want to drop dead at my easel a few long decades from now – and we hope you’ll continue to come along for the ride until then.

Thanks again for reading this week, and have a Happy Christmas.
Larry Eifert

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing. Her new website is almost ready, but not quite yet.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our emails – or just ‘talk’ with us.

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New Painting Post

Wish I Was On This Trail!

With rotten weather and the short dark days of Winter Solstice upon us, I just felt an urge to have a summer walk in the woods – so I painted one. It’s no place in particular, but it’s also every place I’ve ever hiked on the West Coast – redwoods, Doug-fir, silver fir, maybe Sitka spruce trails. It could be the Trinity Alps, Olympic’s Hoh, Mt Rainier’s Carbon River or possibly the Dosewallips right near us. It’s all those late afternoons I’ve spent lingering on a trail in the warm sunshine not wanting to head home. It’s smelling ancient forest duff, filled with centuries of life that are slowly decomposing into the next generation of trees. And, for a painter, it’s the way the light bounces from tree to tree, warming the colors of some, cooling others, hinting at more detail than I could ever paint.


Email us for details.

To check availability of the other small originals I’ve blogged about the past few weeks, check the webpage here.

Boy, I sure got a lot of mail last time with the hummingbird-thing. I heard from people all over the country who have hummers attempting to stay the winter – really cold places too, like high mountain communities and along the Canadian border. Come to think of it, WE’RE along the Canadian border. We can see it from the beach. If you wonder if Climate Change is upon us, these hummers are great local examples. I’ve also heard from a fair amount of doubters, saying the BECAUSE of the feeders, these birds are here, but we didn’t feed them until AFTER we spotted them, months past when they should have migrated to Mexico. One writer said she had a hummer outside trying to get something out of a frozen feeder. Maybe we’ll never know for sure, but it’s plain obvious to me.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing. We’re working on a new website for her work that should be very interesting. Stay tuned.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our emailings – or just ‘talk’ with us.

New Painting Post

Red-breasted Nuthatch

If you click the image, it should enlarge. If it doesn’t click here for the web blog.
SOLD. Sorry to say, I sold this before I could get it up here. Thought I’d send it out anyway. I think it’s a nice little painting.

These little birds are constant neighbors here. I’ll bet we have at least five families around our meadow. We watch them from our dining room windows working the feeder, daintily picking at the suet cake and carrying away one sunflower seed at a time up to the safety of the nearest branch. Their voices are so thin and sweet as to sometimes sound like fluttering leaves. These guys normally feed by circling down tree trunks as in the painting, gleaning insects from bark crevices. They then fly over to another tree and start again. We have another bird here, the brown creeper, that fills just the opposite niche. It circles up the trunk, catching bugs the nuthatches miss.

 Did I ever say I take commissions? Lots of them. If you liked this one, I won’t do it again, but it’s always a treat for me to try a subject in a different way. This painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and we offered it for $140 unframed. The gold frame 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, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week. Nuthatches: It feels like I’ve just painted a family member here.
Larry Eifert

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing. She has some interesting new work from the Seattle Day of the Dead Festival on her blog.

I recently put up a web page of many of my murals. I think there’s about 50 of them here. Check it out.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

New Painting Post

Ancient Bristlecone Pines mural

Finally, I got this puppy finished up. It was quite a handful with lots of other work coming and going through the studio. If you click on the image, it should enlarge. If not, go here to the blog.

This is destined for The Crater Lake Institute, that, through the years, has commissioned me for many of these types of paintings. Next summer we’ll have products like puzzles available, but there’s lots of design work to do before that happens.

When I sent out the sketch for this awhile ago, I received lots of mail about where to see these trees and just how to do a painting like this. The 3′ x 5′ painting is on hardboard so I had a smooth surface to begin with. I primed it with dry-brush latex to rough it up slightly, making for good textural effects. These are worked up from the back forward, so the foreground flowers are the last to go in, and there’s lots of hidden stuff in that foreground. I recently put up a page on the main website with a page of murals. There’s currently about 50 for you to see, so check it out here.

SO: Where can you see these bristlecones (that DO have bristled cones)? Well, you’re not going to this time of year, but if you’re looking for a great trip next summer, check out the bristlecones east of Bishop CA in the Whites or at Great Basin National Park way out near Ely Nevada, or Brice Canyon National Park in Utah. They’re high-elevation trees – at 10,000 feet or so on dry windswept ridgetops in limestone, a place where nothing else can easily grow. It’s worth a trip to walk beneath the oldest trees on the planet, some dated to almost 5,000 years of age. Even the downed branches are beyond my comprehension – some have been dated back 9,000 years from the present. To put that into context, the woolly mammoth was still around then!

Here’s the original pencil sketch:

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing. There’s some good new stuff here on her blog about the Day of the Dead Celebration in Seattle.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us. If you know someone else that might enjoy this, let us know. Our list is growing.

New Painting Post

Riverside Red Alders

I’m still whacking away on the bristlecone painting for Crater Lake Institute, but here’s something I did yesterday just for the pleasure of it. If you click the image, it should enlarge. If not, just go to the blog. I have more of these, but my web server has been ‘migrating’, so the blog has been shut down this week. Just what ‘migrating’ means, I’m not sure, but I wish I was doing some of that myself. Avalanche warnings are up in the mountains already.

For those reading from other parts of the planet besides the Northwest, red alder is a common lowland tree found in moist Northwest stream-side forests. They often appear after logging to revitalize trashed-out land and conveniently add nitrogen to the soil by ‘fixing’ it from the air. Our woods are full of them, so I know the tree well. In fact, there’s currently a red-alder log in the fire as I write this. It’s a very beautiful tree to paint because of the gray and brown, speckled patchwork trunk patterns. There are other alders, but this one has a sure identifier. The edges of each leaf curl under slightly right along the edges – a little fact that most field guides don’t tell you.

This original acrylic painting is varnished on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
The gold frame 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, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing on her blog and website. Pretty interesting stuff on the blog.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

New Painting Post

First Serious Snow – Olympics

Click the image to see a larger version.

Boy, we’ve had some weather lately. Going into town yesterday, the eastern Olympics showed their best with fresh snow. Strong westerly winds were blowing it off Mount Townsend in great banners, and the clouds were alive. Mile-high Hurricane Ridge was supposed to have gotten 18″, and you can see this for yourselves here at the park web cam mounted on the visitor center roof. The camera lens is currently 90% plastered with snow and you could barely see anything. At night, even on a cloudy evening, you can still see the unearthly glow of the snow, but seeing it on a normal clear day (without the snow on the lens), the view of Mt. Olympus is stunning. The little thumbnail next to the web cam is what you’d see in the summer. This is only about 45 air miles from here and we go there often. And with the web cam, now so can you. Check back to see it ‘unclogged’.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $420 unframed.
The gold frame makes it a total of $445 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original, NOT a print.
Email us for details. Sorry, this painting is sold.

To check availability of the other small originals I’ve blogged about the past few weeks, check the blog here.

Thanks for reading this time.
Larry Eifert

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

New Painting Post

Snow Creek Estuary

Happiest Halloween, Everyone. Tonight we helped hand out 40lbs of candy in downtown Port Townsend at Gallery Nine. 40lbs from our gallery times about 40 stores is a LOT of sugar! It was a wonderful home-time event for a bunch of very cool kids from towns as far as an hour away. My favorite was the H1N1 pig costume.

This week I was supposed to have the bristlecone mural all finished up and ready to show you – but other life got in the way, including new keel bolts for the boat and a maybe never-ending exhibit project now almost in its fourteenth month. But who’s complaining. Both those diversions were artistic in their own ways. The keel bolts kept that 70-yr old boat from sinking in the slip, so you could call it art-rehab.

I did, however, find some time to do this little acrylic of Snow Creek Estuary. (click on it to enlarge. If not, click here.) This place is very close to our studio, right here on the ‘back’ side of our local Quimper Peninsula. Snow Creek comes down from the eastern Olympics and drains into Discovery Bay, the site of George Vancouver’s first anchorage here-abouts in 1792. Few live here, and it still has a pretty healthy run of chum salmon. It was from here that ‘our’ Chimacum Creek got a hatch box full of these genetically-similar salmon eggs about a decade ago. Nature worked her wonders, and now there are over 1000 chum salmon that come home to Chimicum to spawn each fall, right below out house.

Just at dusk a few weeks ago, we stopped here for Nancy to do some photography, and while out in the meadows, we discovered a giant population of garden spiders, all sitting patiently in their webs for some insect action. These are some serious spiders, so we backtracked gingerly the way we had come. We felt we had intruded into their world – which we had.

And now, back to the studio and the bristlecones of the Great Basin.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
The gold frame 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, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

To check availability of the other small originals I’ve blogged about the past few weeks, check the blog here.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

This week I also remodeled the Interpretive Section of larryeifert.com and added some new projects.

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

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

New Painting Post

Late Afternoon – Lillian Ridge Trail

Lillian-Ridge

SOLD
Obstruction Point area, Olympic National Park.
Acrylic on linen canvas – a small easel painting this time.

This trail is a favorite – I can’t paint it enough. It’s about 35 miles, as the eagle flies, west of our studio in the eastern Olympic Mountains – a serious set of rocks. I painted another version this last spring and posted it here in March. It’s not the amazing scenery or that it’s an almost level trail (well, that might be part of it), but it’s also the fact that, at over 6000′, it’s above any glaciation that’s ever occurred there. To walk here is to trod on the exact same stones and sit on the very same overlook that the mammoth hunters did during the last Ice Age. The shattered shale that crunches under my boots is unchanged, and I could very probably be the very NEXT person since that Pliocene hunter to sit on that rock and look for Olympic marmots, those alpine animals that are only found here. The only difference might be that it would have been the hunter’s dinner and not mine.

For an artist that wishes nature were a bit less mild these days, that wishes he were born a few years earlier so he could have seen more of our now-vanished legacy, this is heady stuff.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
The gold frame makes it a total of $170 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.

Still working on the bristlecone painting, but painting in the boatyard (our boat) has gotten in the way.

Thanks for reading this week. For new readers, I try to alternate between park interpretive stuff and easel paintings, but they’re all about nature. It’s what I’ve done for over 40 years.

Larry Eifert

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

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

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of these emails – or just ‘talk’ with us.

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

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