Category Archives: New Painting Post

Blog Posts by Larry Eifert

New Painting Post

On the Trail to Lake Ann

SOLD

Last week we took our little ferry (locally named Bob, because that’s what it does best) over to Whidbey Island, then drove inland a couple of hours to the North Cascades and Mount Baker. This trail is so high it was still spring, with lupine, columbine and paintbrush everywhere. At one point, there was enough fireweed in bloom to make a scree slope completely magenta. We crossed a side creek by hopping rocks, and I stopped to take a reference snapshot of this scene looking upstream into the glacial bowl. The contrast between blue-sky reflection in the foreground, and the yellow sun-bounced light off distant trees makes for a very interesting scene, doesn’t it?

These little digital cameras have really improved how I can do these paintings. Before, I’d have to stop, pull apart my pack to get at my 35mm, go back and figure the shot out – and then wouldn’t know until I processed the film if the stuff was any good. Now, I pull the camera from my pocket and simply take a bunch of shots – and review them as I go (just like you do too). What’s interesting is that my painting process is still the same. The painting, the end result of all this, always looks very different from the beginning reference shot. I guess I’m not really trying to improve on nature, just rearrange it.

We liked this area so much, we’re going back this weekend for some more trail-miles. Might even result in another painting!

This 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.
Email us for details.
This one isn’t going on the main website, but will be only on the blog.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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New Painting Post

Pink Point

Point Wilson Lighthouse is on the north end of Port Townsend. It’s an old fort too, Fort Worden State Park, where all manner of music and art happens, the largest poetry press outside of New York (that won a Pulitzer this year), a woodworking school and a bunch of other stuff that goes on year-round. I played a mess of blues a few years ago at the Blues Camp, but, it’s the lighthouse that continually draws me in. Maybe it’s because it’s also that living place where the waters of Puget Sound and the great Straits of Juan deFuca meet, a wild and crazy place of currents, wind and waves – and I always like being on the edge of something.

Here’s the point when I sailed by it awhile ago. What a different scene when you’re at the mercy of wind and waves! Tourist kayakers regularly get caught here on a big ebb and swept out into the Straits, causing all manner of Coast Guard rescue actions and heroic photos in the papers.

SOLD

This painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $150 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. Email us for details. This one isn’t going on the main website .

Thanks for looking this week.
Larry Eifert

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

New Painting Post, Wildlife

American Fishers return to Olympic National Park and make whoopy!

Our web host has been messing with our shopping cart this last week. You’d think a company the size of France could figure this out, but not these days. And, I admit it, painted this image last year, but I just had to put a blog entry about it now because the Olympic Peninsula recently got a bit more crowded.

Fishers had been extinct on the Olympic Peninsula for decades, having been trapped out of the entire state of Washington for their plush fir. Last year, Olympic National Park commissioned this painting to coincide with the release of the first groups of fishers seen around here in 80 years, animals the Park resource people brought down from Vancouver Island. The painting was used for a bunch of interpretation, educating everyone about the event. It was fun to attempt to paint something I knew little about. This house cat-sized critter is between 2 and 4 feet in length including a giant tail. All four feet have five toes with retractable claws, and because they can rotate their hind paws 180 degrees, they can grasp limbs and climb down trees head first. So, unlike similar martens or weasels, this allows them to hunt birds in trees.

Disregard the arrow! It was a proofing issue.

So, it’s one thing to reintroduce animals into the wild, but it’s another to keep them there. It appears to be happening. The park set up an automatic camera in the backcountry near a female fisher’s den in the Elwha Valley. It showed the mother taking four babies, known as kits, out of the den, which is located fairly high up in a rotting snag. The animal appears to be moving her young to a new den, presumably closer to the ground so the kits won’t have far to fall as they grow.

I really hope that in a few years there might be fishers all over the Olympic Peninsula, maybe even passing through my backyard (but that’s a stretch).

Currently you’ll have to email if you want something, but we now have museum-quality prints available of the fisher painting available here of three sizes for between $39.95 matted and $239.95 fully framed.

Or, you can go to our Giclee Print Index here

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

New Painting Post

The Chattering Winter Wren

I’m attempting a new and “improved” emailer and I’m a bit worried to hit the send button. If it’s botched, don’t give up on me.

Several have asked if I’m still painting wildlife as stand-alone images. Of course! I’m still hooked on doing these single-focus themes – sort of a wildlife moment.

Here’s a new effort along those lines. This little winter wren and its stump are soon to be on an interpretive panel for Olympic National Park. We have these little birds right here in the meadow below my studio, so studying the real deal was pretty easy. So was the stump. I used a broken and leaning mossy log down by the compost pile as the model.

Winter wrens are about the size of my big toe. They have amazing courage (or stupidity) and come boldly out of the ferns to confront you trespassing in their territory. They’ll let go a stream of sizzling, bubbling chatter that goes on for ten seconds or so, possibly a rapid series of threats in wren-lingo. Recently, I had one fly from a nearby fern frond and land on the brim of my cap. As it landed I could hear the flutter of its little wings, like the sound of a deck of cards being shuffled. To them, that must sound very loud, like an airplane propeller.

Sorry, but this painting already belongs to the National Park Service who commissioned me for it.

Link here to many other wildlife prints on our website.

Or, you can go to our Giclee Print Index here

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

Thanks for reading, now I’m going to start painting.
Larry

New Painting Post

Olympic National Park Bugler Cover

Bugler-cover
We’ve been away for two weeks, so no posts for awhile. We were in Hilo Hawaii, better known as Hi-Town, enjoying sea turtles, Coqui frogs, volcanoes and the most interesting blend of people, music and art we’ve seen in awhile. The Big Island has turned into quite some place.

Meanwhile, the summer visitors are a’comin, and this year’s Olympic National Park’s Bugler cover is a painting I recently finished of the Sol Duc Valley for Olympic National Park, northwest of Seattle on the Olympic Peninsula. It was commissioned for a roadside wayside exhibit, but these paintings often end up doing double duty. Now, I’m pleased to say that, for the second year in a row, the park has used my work on the cover of the park’s summer newspaper (that’s the giveaway publication you often get at most national park’s gate or visitor centers). I heard that the initial spring printing was about 100,000 copies.

Of course there’s a back story:
Here’s one of the many Sol Duc River reference photos I took to get the painting going.

And here’s the draft sketch for this painting. You can see the exhibit text blocks that will eventually overlay the painting, which never makes it easy for the painter. I have to not only create a good painting that might be used for, say, the Bugler cover, but also allow areas for text when it’s used for a roadside exhibit. After decades of doing this, I guess it’s just all in a day’s work – but I continue to be very interested in the serious challenge of making it all work up into a good artistic work of art and not just a photo-like exhibit. Some work better than others.

If you’re interested in more of the interpretive art I’ve completed, click here to see lots of other national and state park art on our website.

If you know someone else that might enjoy these occasional emails, you can always send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

Thanks for reading this post.
Larry Eifert

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New Painting Post

Logging the Redwoods

New Interpretive Panel for Muir Woods National Monument

(Clicking these images should show you a larger view.)

I can say clearly that I’ve never painted anything like this before. For more than forty years I’ve always painted and written about glorious living nature, not the industrial slaying of our national legacy. But this is Muir Woods National Monument afterall, which is turning into somewhat of an Eifert Gallery in the California redwoods. Thanks to the good folks who work there, you’d be hard-pressed to NOT bump into an Eifert on the trail or in the visitor center.

So here’s the set-up. They have an enormous slab of redwood sitting against the visitor center’s wall. An old, worn-out interpretive sign showed how it was cut, and, after many years of duty, it was time for a new one. Here’s what the old sign looked like and a corner of the enormous slab that goes off to the right for many feet.

Now, after looking at the corner of the slab, go back to the top picture and look at the whopper of a tree that this piece of wood would have come from. That was some tree, but not unusual back when many more of these legacy redwoods were still standing. These two guys would have cut it using custom-forged hand saws, first cutting a wedge on the near side, then cutting a second cut above this on the far side. The tree would have fallen towards the viewer.

The painting shows them cutting this slab section out, and it’s been on display here at Muir Woods for many years. Now my painting is part of it too, the ancient tree, the cutting of it, and the history of showing this amazing piece of wood to millions of visitors in what is the busiest redwood park in California. Thanks, Brett and Mia! This is why I paint interpretive art.

Click here to see lots of other national and state park interpetive art on our website.

Click here to see some of the other paintings at Muir Woods National Monument near San Francisco.

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

Thanks for reading. More soon.
Larry Eifert

New Painting Post

Bark Shanty Bridge, Olympic National Forest

Greetings to all our friends: This email begins a slightly different slant of our on-going Blog. For years, Nancy has sent out periodic emails announcing new printed products to our customers, clients, family and friends. While this has worked well, there is much more we’d like to share, such as published articles, fine-art paintings and special interpretive projects for many parks. So, here’s our first ‘edition.’
To opt out or say hello, just click this to send us an email.

Bark Shanty Bridge
Here on the Olympic Peninsula, it’s called the Big Quil River. And this little bridge is called Bark Shanty because many years ago there used to be a squatter’s cabin nearby made of big slabs of Doug-fir bark, probably the easiest building material he could have found here. The shanty is long gone but the bridge remains.

Thirty miles south of our home in Port Townsend, we hiked the two miles from road’s end, a flat and level trail along the Big Quilcene River. The entire trail was in an emerald-green tunnel beneath enormous old-growth firs and hemlocks. This is national forest land, and past administrations have left it pretty much butchered up by a forest industry that cared little for our national legacy. However, here and there you can still find the old lowland forest, and here along the Big Quil life goes on much as it has for centuries. The trail eventually crosses two beautiful wooden bridges, and this one is the second, probably installed in the 1930’s by WPA crews. After 80 years, the two old-growth logs that make most of it are still in fine shape. We stood on these rocks and listened to the rush of clear water. A winter wren competed with a very loud dipper as they both tried to overpower the crash of the river. It was as pure a scene as could be imagined. As a painter, I especially liked the swirling mist beyond the bridge, indicating more whitewater upstream. It intrigued us to go farther.

We have eight-color Giclee prints either unframed or framed, between $39.95 and $239.95 available of this painting and the original painting is available for $700 unframed. Email us.

Link here to the Bark Shanty Bridge print on our website

Or, you can go to our Giclee Print Index here

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

New Painting Post

Salmon Cascades – Olympic National Park

We were doing some research up the Sol Duc River, about 70 miles west of our home in Port Townsend. I was painting some images for Olympic National Park, and we stopped at the Salmon Cascades to see if any fish were there. They were – a group of coho circling below the falls waiting their moment when a big perfect jump would take them to the top and on to the rest of their journey to the spawning beds upstream. It was a thrill to see these big fish, and the scene with the sun shining through the water’s mist wasn’t bad either.

We have eight-color Giclee prints either unframed or framed, between $39.95 and $239.95 available of this painting and the original painting is available for $700 unframed. Email us.

Link here to the Salmon Cascades print on our website

Or, you can go to our Giclee Print Index here

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

New Painting Post

Lillian Ridge – Olympic National Park

Lillian Ridge Trail
To the west of Port Townsend, Olympic National Park fills our skyline. This trail begins at road’s end, over 6000′, at what we hear is the highest road in the state of Washington. It meanders along the ridgetop with amazing views on all sides for miles. To the east, the narrow chasm of Grand Valley shows hints of lakes and waterfalls. To the west, the Mt Olympus complex fills the view. This is Mt McCartney in the distance as one hikes south along the ridgetop spine, often through acres of endemic wildflowers.

This mountaintop has never been glaciated, so walking here means walking in the same footsteps as prehistoric man. I keep looking for mastodons, or at least their tracks.

We have eight-color Giclee prints either unframed or framed, between $39.95 and $239.95 available of this painting and the original painting is available for $700 unframed. Email us.

Link here to the Lilian Ridge print on our website

Or, you can go to our Giclee Print Index here

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

New Painting Post

Sol Duc Water

January 2009

Sol Duc Water
I’ve been painting a lot of the Sol Duc Valley for Olympic National Park. This painting was one was for me. It’s a very wet place, almost approaching to look of a temporate rain forest in places. These season waterfalls come and go, and I loved the water’s plunge over this little shiny rock.
Prints are available, as is the original painting. The painting is in acrylic on paper, and is 14″ x 20″. It’s offered for $350 on this blog, unframed.