Category Archives: New Painting Post

Blog Posts by Larry Eifert

Commissioned paintings, New Painting Post, Sailing, Waysides, Wildlife

Orcas Landing Waysides – San Juan Islands

This was the Orcas Landing in the San Juan Islands of Washington State a couple of years ago, cleaned up from when there were giant fuel tanks here. In the 1980’s I tied up at this dock, and did it again with another boat in the 1990’s. Now the tanks are gone, a new dock that’s not falling apart is there and, some of my art.

I received some photos of the final installation and it looks very good, so I thought I’d share it here. It took three years to get this figured out, but my part was just a small piece of it. If you’re waiting in line for the ferry, just walk down the ramp and enjoy the view.

I did two wayside panels here. One about the rich aquatic ecosystem right under the docks – a landscape few of us ever see.

And a panel about the tribal connections here.  For hundreds of years, the Tulalip tribe would use their canoes with a complicated cedar fiber net system to create an artificial reef to trap salmon. Reef fishing, it was called. Back in the 80’s, I saw some of this actually happening and I’ll bet I’m probably the only artist around that could paint reef fishing from memory. For the bottom part, I used artifact photos from the Burke Museum as references for the tools, and a photo of the planking of our own cedar-sided house as a background. I thought it worked pretty well to tell a complicated story. These two images enlarge if you click on them.

San Juan County removed the wooden decking, added seating and new metal and cement decking, a huge tribal mural painted on the nearby building and some really wonderful iron blacksmithing of bull kelp.

In my mind, this is exactly how public art should be approached. Not ‘art by committee’ where a group selects some strange design by low-bid, but working it out with a broad number of skilled individuals coming together to contribute what they each do best. Check out the seating and native plant garden. I’m proud to have been a part of this, and it sort of comes full-circle for me and my history here.

And here’s a story in the local paper on Orcas Island.

A new experience, three years in the making, awaits you at the ferry landing

This makes a grand total of 24 paintings now installed on Orcas Island as public art. I get around!

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Backpacking, Hiking, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Wildlife

Back to the Beach

Some little paintings of my time there, inside that tent at sunset, and below, low tide watching sea otters herd the kids around the little bay. They’re simple paintings, but make good memories seeing them again here. 

I went back to a wilderness beach hike with my little Six Moon Designs tent and my paints. I had plenty of great nature to worship, including an amazing belly-up humpback whale and a Steller’s sealion, both washed up without much injury as far as I could tell. I’m telling you, it is thrilling to walk up to a 30-foot whale on a wilderness beach, a sort of primal experience I will remember for awhile. As I walked up to it, sounds seemed to become sort of diminished, as if I were walking into a quiet room. It was a long way from the water, as you can see in the photo – a minus tide put the waves very far away and the whale seemed oddly out of place.

Then this guy:Exactly above my tent in the top canopy of a Sitka spruce, this bald eagle started in at about 5:30 am, broadcasting its discontent at not seeing breakfast out in the ocean I guess – or, who knows what. Soon the ravens got involved – and it was all over for a sleep-in morning. The Starbucks was made early! Later, I watched this eagle spot a fish at least 300 yards out from where it sat on a treetop, taking a long glide off the branch and catch it! How could it see that far?

I just recently finished three large paintings for Redwood National Park through the Save-the-Redwoods League. In one, I painted the canopy fern mats that develop in ancient trees (not just redwoods) that come from centuries of needle litter building up on branches. These become pockets of leather ferns, huckleberrys and critters. The wandering salamander live generations in those mats, and marbled murrelets, an endangered sea bird, nest on them.

Walking out of the hike to the trailhead, I spotted this one on an ancient Sitka spruce, not far above my head. It had all the components, leather fern, black huckleberry and maybe some salamanders hidden away in the roots. It all seemed to tie together that my work is my play, my hiking is directly tied to my art. It’s just all one. A symbiosis, if you will, of cause and effect.  Symbiosis is interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association, typically to the advantage of both. Art and nature, I am who I am, therefore it seems I have to paint and write about it, hopefully to the benefit of nature.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

National Park Service, New Painting Post, People Paintings, Waysides

Lewis and Clark National Park – Installation

This is a long post, lots of photos, but I wanted to document this. In 2019, I was commissioned to do a series of paintings for the Dismal Nitch unit of Lewis and Clark National Park at the mouth of the Columbia River. Astoria is just across the river, the huge Megler Bridge is just to the west.  We were recently there and I took some photos of the installation, along with a big bronze sculpture that’s there as well.

This is the spot where the Corps of Discovery, fighting a stormy southerly with huge waves and rain, hunkered down for days. Aptly named, Dismal Nitch, it really is just that, a little nitch in the cliffs. Giant logs were banging together, they were almost out of food, soaked and cold. Their quest, the Pacific Ocean was almost in view, but here they were fighting for their lives.

This is an important place in America’s history, just before Lewis and Clark connected our country together, east and west, in early November of 1805.

Just prior to me in 2008, artists Gareth Curtiss and Bill Clearman installed this 6′ x 4′ bronze at the site, and I fell gratified to have my stuff in the same location. It’s a stunning bit of lost wax casting. My part of this was the design and illustrations of the wayside. Giving credit also to Rosene Creative from Georgia handled the top end of it, Faye Goolrick of Atlanta did the text and Eric Kittelberger from Cleveland did the final maps. It’s how these projects go, a nationwide effort.

To make this project even sweeter to me, in 1963, my mom published a book about Lewis and Clark and The Corp or Discovery for Dodd Mead in New York, 1962. It’s the story of the Corps and all the wildlife and botany they discovered – almost daily – on their three-year journey. And here I was, a half-century later, painting the same story.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Backpacking, Backpacking, Hiking, New Painting Post

Boardwalk and Parkplace

There are trails, good, bad and even ugly, and then there are a few that quality as something more than just a trail. This one is just that, something considerably more. It’s not easy to hike, that boardwalk over the swampy stuff is something you have to pay attention to, and it goes on for miles. I’ve been there before, recently returned and realized I enjoyed it so much I just might go back again soon. I think it’s the variety, miles of old-growth Sitka spruce and red-cedar forest, more miles of wilderness beaches, a deep history lots of wildlife – it’s a package deal.

While there I did some art. Maybe that’s even tougher than hiking a split red-cedar boardwalk. Refining the essence of a place into a few quick pencil strokes isn’t the easiest process. It’s not what you draw, or paint, its what you DON’T paint. It’s just so easy to get clogged up, obsessed with all those tiny but glorious details – and there goes another hour, and another.

Here I am, painting the scene I’m sitting in – a selfie.

I hit it just right to see the northern spring migration of many. Terns, plovers, sandpipers, lots of ducks and ragged geese in lines, all coming up from the south at night, then pacing the beaches during the day to replenish energy. This bird, an American Golden Plover, was with his flock and destined for the far Alaskan Arctic to help raise a family. I had never seen this  spectacular bird in its spring breeding colors and realized how the mottled golden back might blend into these beaches perfectly, camo for safety against soaring eagles looking for a meal. They were stunning.

If you live on the Olympic Peninsula and hike like I do, you undoubtedly know this place. I’ll not name it here to protect what I can of what I consider the finest, most isolated wilderness stretch of Pacific Coast we have left in the lower 48. This was my camp, and not a single other person was in sight. That monster tree butt just past my Six Moon Lunar tent was meaningful. A tsunami would bring it right on top of me in the middle of the night and at least I wouldn’t have to worry if the zipper worked!

I want to thank Six Moon Designs, the fine ultralight gear company in the Portland area for helping with my equipment, and helping an older guy lighten his load. It makes it so I can continue with this passion, of making art and doing it out in the wilderness. I understand now that, if I’m lucky, I might be able to do this for years to come.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Commissioned paintings, Murals, National Park Service, New Painting Post

Glacier Park sloppy mural details

I posted about this painting of Glacier National Park recently, and now I’ve scanned it for the next step in becoming the back of the park map. As I was scanning and then cleaning up the file in Photoshop, I was struck with how loose and abstract my stuff gets when you zoom in on it. Brush strokes, smudges, finger prints, cat hair, my hair (what’s left of it) is all in here, stuck down forever. I think it’s a good view of my painting process, so here are some samples I screen-grabbed as I went.

This first one is the ptarmigan chicks in the center foreground. Notice the while lines around the heads to help bring that out from the background. And the vague indication of the rocks that are only a few brush strokes building from dark to light.  Not detailed at all, none of it, but it still suffices to tell the story. Click on all these to see larger versions in your browser. It helps understand what I’m showing.

And here is the ram’s head on the painting’s right. In the closeup details on the second image, you can see it’s really just a gauzy overlay of white that makes for the final presentation, and you can see again that this entire animal was initially painted dark umber to begin with.

Lower left corner with the snowshoe hare and butterfly, it all works pretty well at this resolution, but blow it up so you can actually see the brush strokes and it’s pretty darned abstract.

And finally, the area around the elk, flowers and sedges, alpine landscape with the stream. It looks okay at this normal resolution.

But as I zoom in on it, the thing falls apart fairly quickly.

If I presented this in a gallery situation, would it work? Probably, because people will buy anything = witness the last presidency. But there’s not much fine detail here except some dabs and dashes of paint. What I’m trying to get across here is that big paintings are really just that, dabs and dashes. I get questions about my process and I’d have to say here that it’s all just dabbing and dashing, splashing paint on a flat surface and standing back every few minutes to see how it’s going. In the end, it’s a huge finished thing that looks okay, but every moment is just abstract art in each very tiny area – then repeat over and over.

What IS this, anyway? What an abstract or maybe even non-objective piece of art.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

New Painting Post, Sailing, Washington State Parks, Waysides, Wildlife

Sucia Island Marine Food Webs

There are 16 paintings here, all in layers!

This is my second effort for two wayside panels at Sucia Island in the San Juan Islands. See the other one here. This one is much more complex, many pieces of art all layered together to tell the story of forage fish, salmon and orca whales.

Here is the initial concept.

And here is the seventh version.

And below are the individual little paintings used to make this final composite.

Many Friends groups often use my final art for other uses. We put the art on posters, jigsaw puzzles, framed art they can use for fund-raising. Sorry to say, but obviously that can’t be the case with this one – but I thought the orca and salmon paintings were worthy of being stand-alone art.

I know lots of Northwest boaters read this blog since I also write a monthly page for 48 North, the Puget Sound boating magazine. Next time you’re anchored off Sucia Island, search out these two installations. They’ll be living their lives sitting beside Mud Bay. I will, too.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

New Painting Post, Sailing, Washington State Parks, Waysides, Wildlife

Sucia Island State Park wayside art

I’ve been busy with no time to post here – but now I’m back with some new stuff. I was commissioned to produce two outdoor free-standing installations on one of the most remote and remarkable islands in the Salish Sea, Sucia Island Marine State Park. This place holds great meaning and many memories for me – I’ve been here countless times. It’s along the US – Canadian boundary north of the San Juan Islands and it takes some time just to get there. There isn’t ferry service, only private boats come here – and maybe a giant barge for this project.

A small muddy bay once had a sand spit beach dividing off a productive and pristine salt marsh with the bay. Years ago, a road was built on the beach top and shoreline armoring with a culvert. This stopped salmon completely from entering the marsh at high tides, a good source of insect food.

With the direction of the Friends of the San Juans and many funders, they brought out heavy equipment on a barge and removed the culvert, cement armoring and put things right again. And, at the end, I got to paint it, twice. I’ll post the second panel soon.

Here’s the original first draft sketch – pretty close to what the end result was, don’t you think?  And below is the final sketch version with text in place and a few things added.

Below is the final art, ready to be put in the design. If this image looks serene, that’s the exact word I’d use for this ethereal place – maybe one of the very best in the Pacific Northwest.

So, doing this made  me remember the history I have here. Many paintings of mine were painted here. THREE boats of mine have been purchased, restored, countless hours spent making them run and be safe – and decades of time has been used to get me (as a painter of nature) to places like this. When Shannon and Tina requested a couple of boats in this painting to show human interaction here, I realized I could put my own experiences in the painting.

So, classic wooden boat memories, all of them, here is “October” in the 1980’s. Then “Rumpuckarori” in the 1990’s. And finally “Sea Witch” in the 2000’s.

This image of Sea Witch, below, was actually taken at anchor right here in Snoring Bay, straight out front in the painting. These three boats undoubtedly helped make me the painter and person I am today. “October” got me to Alaska the first time, and another not shown got me to Mexico. Nancy and I lived aboard “Rumpy” during some of the best times for both of us, and there Nancy is in the cockpit of “Sea Witch”, below.

Thanks to Tina and Shannon from the help in making these paintings interesting and fun memories for me.

If you’re reading this on social media, I, Larry Eifert, paints and sails the Pacific Northwest from Port Townsend. My large-scale murals can be seen in many national parks across America, and at larryeifert.com.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

New Painting Post, New Published Story, Published painting

Northern Fulmar

Several months ago this story and art were published in my monthly page at 48 North magazine.  Here’s how I started, with a pencil sketch of the bird. Notice the ‘tube bill’ air vent. An adaption to keep seawater out of it’s lungs while still holding prey in it’s open mouth.

It was subtitled “A life in the open ocean” because these birds live out in the open Pacific and far from land for most of the time. It’s a good story.

Here is the text I wrote for the sketchbook painting.

You won’t see these gull-sized birds in Elliot Bay, or as you pass Port Townsend on your way to the big sail to Mexico, but once you take the turn at Neah Bay, you’ll see plenty. They vary in color from white to gray or brown, like gulls, but their behavior is very different with stiff-wings and quick flaps to keep them airborne. Flying close to the water’s surface, they grab prey on the wing, or make quick dives for a morsel just below the surface. Fish, squid, and jellyfish are normal fair, but recently they flock behind seafood factory ships. Fulmars use island sea cliffs to breed, gathering in large colonies to make primitive nests where the female lays one egg. Young take their time maturing and do not breed until they’re 10 years old, making them extremely vulnerable to changes.

We’ve all heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the two growing vortexes of plastics floating around the center of the ocean that is currently about 600,000 square miles in size. As all this plastic grinds together out there, it breaks up into ever-smaller pieces, and guess which birds pick up pieces thinking it’s food? Fulmars fly by and grab, and swallow. Some fulmars have been found to have dozens of plastic things in their stomachs, bottle tops, little plastic shards of bigger items, junk someone bought. While the plastic doesn’t digest, it does fill up a limited space in there, making it impossible for the bird to get enough to eat – or, basically it thinks it’s always full, which, I guess it is. That bottle you carelessly toss overboard, or the plastic bag that gets blown overboard – ALL will eventually get small enough to be eaten by wildlife. Maybe a little fulmar.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

New Painting Post

Dugualla Bay Preserve

Last week I posted the other wayside panel for Dugualla Bay Preserve. This second one shows the dike removed to allow saltwater to refill the old shoreline and provide forage fish and salmon new habitat. The photo below is the ‘cut’ and then below that my reference photos to the crab and mussel habitat, newly formed tidelands full of life.

We found many little crabs in these holes, all snuggled up and giving us the stink-eye.

And below in the main channel, the NEW channel created by breaching the dike, a major mussel bed teaming with life had developed. As soon as I saw this area, I realized THIS was the story for the art – new places for life where there weren’t just a year before.


Here’s the process of developing this panel. I started with a really rough concept sketch, a few blocks with ‘x’s showing where the text overlay might go. It was fairly close to the final design, right out of the box. From this rough draft, you can see the process.

And the final art featured the mussel beds, crab caves and broken dike. A good story.

Thanks to many groups and individuals, I’ve had the wonderful adventure of doing dozens of these Pacific Northwest salmon and orca recovery panels over the past couple of years. Always challenging, always different, it’s been great fun to take a muddy shoreline or messed up culvert and make some art about it. Stay tuned, there’s more on the horizon – a LOT more.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings

Commissioned paintings, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

Dugualla Flats Preserve

Just finishing up two new paintings for outdoor wayside exhibits at Whitbey Island’s Dugualla Bay Preserve.  This is another project for the Whidbey Camano Island Land Trust and, as always, it was a pleasure to paint for them.

This recently restored wetland is on both sides of a dike road a few miles north of Oak Bay. One side is fresh water, the other is a salt marsh salmon habitat area. First it was bay, then farmland with nature shut out. Now it’s back to nature. The bay side is very good forage fish and salmon habitat.

This first painting is the freshwater side, a rich habitat of cattails and critters from western toads to trumpeter swan – and I can’t say I’ve ever painted THOSE two in one painting before! The wetlands have water levels that rise and fall with the seasons and on a site visit a few months ago I took some reference shots, not very good as you can see, but somehow I built an interesting painting with what I had.

I started with a quick gesture drawing, a concept sketch showing cattails on the right, map and text on the left, maybe wildlife in the center. It’s sort of amazing to me that the final painting was very close to this.

Then a more refined drawing came with a better understanding how the wildlife fits in, getting their sizes and spatial separations set for a good piece of art. The toad couldn’t be down with the rest of them in the marsh since they’re up in the drier meadows, so I just floated it in midair – a toady blimp.

And this is how the final painting looks. Click on it to enlarge in your browser. These things are certainly not just a nice painting like my days of gallery painting. It takes a bunch of planning to get the other components to all fit.

It all came together with the text, a map I did in Illustrator using the National Park Service’s map software – and the text the Land Trust supplied me. Very skilled efforts go into doing text for these panels and these are really well written. Too many words it becomes a ‘book on a stick’ and no one reads it. Too few words and no one learns anything. And this type of art is all about learning something – which I hope you did with this blog. I hope you liked it.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.