Category Archives: New Painting Post

Blog Posts by Larry Eifert

New Painting Post

Bagley Creek Meadows


Bagley Creek is what you’d call the perfect “river runs through it” stream. It meanders out of a high alpine lake and into this narrow glaciated valley past basaltic cliffs and meadows. Our trail was along the west bank – the morning sun casting long shadows on the far cliffs. Nanc and I could have sat in these meadows for hours, listening to the bumblebees making slow passes on September pearly everlastings and watching a northern harrier canvas the grass for mice. On the slopes above these meadows, blueberries were everywhere, and with the warming sun each one turned into a little berry tart.

There’s a favorite essay of mine by Virginia Eifert (yah, mom) who wrote “I stand by the river and I know that it has been here yesterday and will be here tomorrow and that therefore, since I am part of its pattern today, I also belong to all its yesterdays and will be part of all its tomorrows. This is a kind of earthly immortality, a kinship with rivers and hills and rocks, with all things and all creatures that have ever lived or ever will live or have their being on the earth. It is my assurance of an orderly continuity in the great design of the universe.”

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed. If you’d like to add the gold frame, that makes it a total of $180 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame.
Sonja (who bought one of these small paintings) says I need to say this: This is an original painting, 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.

SOLD

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.

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

New Painting Post

Black-tailed Deer – Port Townsend Trail

Eifert_Deer_Larry_Scott

Just west of our marina and downtown Port Townsend, an old railroad grade goes along the bay before turning inland. This is now a public trail, part of the great Northwest Trail that goes from Cape Avala, west of here, all the way to Glacier National Park in Montana – three states and 1200 miles away. And while it’s a hiking trail like the John Muir, Pacific Crest or Appalachian Trails, here you have to climb on our ferry for a few miles to keep going east.

Coming into town, there’s one place under the bluffs where, late in the afternoon, black-tailed deer like to congregate. You eyes focus on the marvelous views ahead and they often miss the fact you’re being watched yourself – but Port Townsend deer are pretty tame, having been raised from birth on the garden roses, apples and all manor of tasty plants carefully bought and planted by the locals.

This is a larger painting today. This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on archival board, 14″ x 10″ and $650 unframed. If you’d just like the painting framed, that makes it a total of $690 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is an ORIGINAL painting, NOT a print. Email us for details.

To check the availability of the other originals I’ve blogged about the past few weeks, check the blog here and go down the listings.
Thanks for reading this week.
Larry EifertClick 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

Our Road

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Clicking the image should enlarge it for better viewing. If not, go to the blog here.

This week, it’s sort of a Hudson River School painting. Or it could be the 17th-century painter, Paul Rubens, didn’t paint landscapes as much as he painted people, but the colors and mood here are the same (at least that’s the way I see it). I learned early-on that painting dark colors and textural shadows around the edges helps brings the viewer’s eyes quickly to the center focal point – and away from the painting’s edges (where they just might wander off someplace else). I like all these textural effects, slamming wet and goopy paper towels, dry brushes and even the back of my hand into the canvas. The back of my hand: that part of my body has rarely been completely clean of paint now for decades.

“Our Road” is just that, it’s our street right in front of our studio. There are only three addresses on the entire stretch plus another that’s not legal, and it deadends into a saltwater swamp where there are more salmon then people. Hilton Avenue sounds pretty ritzy, but, hah, it’s just a little dirt lane the county sometimes thinks to grade (or not).

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.
Like last time, this one isn’t going on the main website, but will be only on the blog.

We’ll be gone to the mountains until Friday evening, but I promise to contact everyone who wants this in the order we received them.
Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

New Painting Post

Easy Trail

Easy-Trail-framed

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Level, easy and hopefully endless. Now, that’s my idea of a trail. It meandered through ferns for awhile, then came out into this glade filled with false lily-of-the-valley and scattered trillium. All these flowers had long faded, but no matter, it was just a nice place to be. Filtered sunlight came through the upper canopy, casting strong shadows behind the tree trunks. And, as usual for me, I thought this seemed like a good place for a painting.

So here it is – the Easy Trail. It’s always my hope that paintings, like photography, can bring something fresh to eyes that will never see it. It’s my joy to say that, indeed, I saw, and now you have too.

This original painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed. This is an original, not a print.
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, like several others this month, won’t be listed on the main website, but will be only on the blog.

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.

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

Log Jam

If you click on the image, it should enlarge for a better view.

Someone called me to ask if these small paintings were actually prints. Nope, these are originals. We might make a few prints later, but these on the blog are the real-deal. I’ve always enjoyed doing these smaller studies and have painted thousands of them through the years.

This huge pile of cedar and hemlock trees, a log jam, was across the Nooksack River from a campground we stayed in. Placid water was there at the time, but I’ll bet the river that created this wood pile was something else again when the Nooksack built it. Imagine the power it took to pile these huge trees up against the shore. These log jams are now understood to be critical to healthy fish habitat in mountain rivers, and in some restoration projects, log jams are actually artificially created. On their upstream migrations to spawn, adult salmon rest under these branches and trunks, safe from predators. Young salmon and trout safely hang out here while they’re growing up and kingfishers sit atop the branches waiting for a smallish morsel to swim by.

As a painter, my eye was attracted to the color values and shadows. I liked the way the sun lit up the riverbed gravel with warm yellows and browns – and the way the cool blue foreground shadows colored the same gravel completely differently. Finally, I added the background log jam and standing conifers as the focal point shining brightly in full sun. So even if they’re a bunch of dead trees, this makes for a pleasing and complex composition, don’t you think?

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, like several others this month, won’t be listed on the main website, but will be only on the blog.

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.

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

New Painting Post

On the Trail to Lake Ann

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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

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.

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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