This painting is available and is part of my current series of wildlife portraits. Getting up close and personal with some of my friends around here.
Rose hips from Nootka roses are seemingly everywhere right now. It’s an important winter food for many birds during the colder winter months. Swainson’s thrushes are favorite birds here, but usually only in the summer. Here’s the thing: Swainson’s aren’t supposed to be here in winter, but I saw one around our little pond recently – which fits the fact that we haven’t had winter yet. Birds are opportunistic, and why endanger oneself flying south if it’s not really necessary. So here it was, staying put and deserving of a little portrait.
This is a framed acrylic original painting, 11″ x 14″ frame and painted on paper board. The painting itself is 7″ x 10″ and we’re offering it for $195, including the frame – plus a bit of UPS Priority shipping costs depending on your postal zone.
Thanks for reading this week. Just send me an email at larry@larryeifert.com if you’re interested in the painting.
Click on the painting to enlarge it. I like the textures on this one.
A little songster portrait today. This varied thrush painting is framed as you see it below in an 11″ x 14″ frame with acrylic plexiglass for easy shipping and less reflection than glass. The painting itself is 7 ” x 10″ on paper board and is $395 framed plus a bit of Priority Mail shipping depending on your zone.
We’ve watched countless families of varied thrushes raise their young here along our meadow’s edge. Varied thrushes are in the same family as robins, another singer of great ability, but the varied has a song like it came from a flute – as if Pan is out there drawing you to him with a tempting tune not yet played. There are other, lesser little notes you can hear if close enough, but it’s that single loud note that gets me every time. We hear them singing just at dusk in our patch of forest, and see them coming to the feeder near our pond. They’re what birds should look like, colorful and yet blending in with the forest bark and dark shadows. Once they land in the duff, they seem to just disappear.
Here it is matted and framed, definitely not invisible.
Thanks for reading this week. Just send me an email at larry@larryeifert.com if you’re interested in a nice Christmas present.
We live in a forest, beside a meadow. Every time I leave the house, go down the back steps on my way to the studio, I see a little flash of tail scurry by – swish, and it’s gone. It’s like a mouse, but with wings. I think this little Bewick’s is a pretty good reason to live here and I’ve painted images of them often. After getting bird drawn, I simply went a few feet from my studio steps, snatched up a fern frond and grabbed a bit of branch the last storm blew off one of the alders. Right there, the makings of ‘still life with little bird’, a painting was born.
I’ve always painted this way, taking careful notice of what’s around me, piecing together a design and putting it down on paper. I can do this at my home or in some alpine meadow, and it always seems to give me a thrill to see it come to life.
Here’s one of the oldest efforts I have record of doing this routine. Someone sent me this painting from 1979. What was with all that black? I don’t even own a tube of black paint today. I don’t have the foggiest idea, but this has been a long journey of trying things out, refining my efforts and trying to make each one better. This little hummingbird painting is 41 years old now! It was painted in opaque watercolor, a paint I worked with for a couple of years while trying to figure out how to use this stuff most call kid’s poster paint.
And just one more showing a section of this new painting – I have improved a bit. Maybe.
Click images to enlarge. A 35-foot long wall doesn’t shrink well to a little screen.
I finished a fun project this past week. I got to create a little world of it’s own on what will be a 35′ wall. I grew up in a museum, you see, where both my parents worked with a staff of curators and writers, artists and generally amazing people. The museum staff that made huge wall dioramas were my babysitters. And here I am, decades later still deeply passionate about this stuff.
So, I was tasked with coming up with the conceptual design for a new park visitor center, but can’t tell you where it is because this drawing hasn’t even been presented to them yet. Cart before the horse, I know, but it’s the way things work at this level. I still wanted to pass this around because who knows what will happen with potential changes – but I like it just as it is now. And this is just the concept or design phase. There’ll be another contractor doing the production phase where I hope to be the painter. It IS my drawing, after all.
The story I was tasked to create was of a summer fishing camp on the Salish Sea some time,or ANY time within the past 8,000 years before pre-white contact – meaning before 1775.
This means no iron or steel tools, no European clothing. Tribes would have come from miles around to fish here in summer as huge salmon runs hug the shore, so there would be fishermen using reef net style techniques, drying racks on shore and baskets full of fish. Summer is also the time when camas bulbs would have been harvested, dug and then baked for later consumption. Both dried salmon and baked camas were the prime staples of life here. I’ve actually been to this exact place in the 1980’s and watched modern seiners catch tons of salmon so close to shore the wives and girlfriends would yell out the egg their men on. I have a connection here.
So, with all that in mind, I just started drawing, left to right so as not to smudge the paper:
And then all this next.
On this left side, racks of drying fish, visiting people chatting it up, wool dogs hanging out. These dogs, a breed now extinct, provided wool for weaving, and tule or cattails provided clothing and tarps for temporary summer shelters.
The rectangles are for interpretive text panels, the long horizontal thing is a reader rail with real examples of tools – matching the tools I used in the mural. I added a wool dog watching a baby strapped up in a papoose bag down low so real kids can see them at eye level. These white woolly dogs were family pets that were sung to and treated as family members. It was fun to find a few photos actually showing them.
I gained valuable references online from Curtis photos, public in the Library of Congress image collections. Here’s one that shows the summer house style and canoe, clothing and baskets all in one image. I used all these parts across the wall.
In reading references for all this, I learned that black-bellied plovers begin their winter migrations from Alaska in summer and stop here to eat the drying seeds of prairie plants, so I added this below the reader rail for kids to see.
On the far right, behind the real paddles, I drew a plank showing the various wood-working tools and someone actually shaving a paddle.
And here’s the reference below for the camas processing, shown in the mural both on the center prairie and in camp showing the underground baking process.
And here’s the entire wall again, 35′ wide. Oh, those moons are the 13 Moons in much of tribal spoken history, representing each moon of the year – and providing (I hope) for a thoughtful reference to the thousands of years this scene took place, again and again during the 8,000 years of tribal life here in the Northwest.
Thanks for reading this week. It was a fun project, probably more fun than actually painting the darned thing.
You’ll see I enjoy painting water, figuring out how motion looks in a stop-action moment as it falls over a rock or crashing onto a shoreline. Harlequin ducks evidently like it too, because you’ll never see these guys anywhere but around water. In winter they’re on saltwater, in summer they migrate up into the mountains to nest in streamside tree cavities. In the Olympic Mountains near where we live, I’ve seen them sleeping on river rocks, the water roaring around them. They seem to enjoy the most whitewater available, because I’ve often seen them riding the waves downstream. I’ve read that Harlequins often break bones doing this, and they often heal in badly misshapen ways – but they still do it.
I last saw one of these beautiful ducks up Heather Creek, a fork of the Olympic’s Dungeness River at a stream crossing. The duck was next to my ‘bridge’, a log jamming up the river’s passage. She was sitting on the bank under some willows, and I blundered out of the forest right next to her. I stopped, grabbed my point-and-shoot. She looked up at me, then just ignored my presence as she studied the stream for small fish.
What really got to me was the seeming frailty of this little creature, a small duck the size of a shoebox, alone here, by herself in the wilderness and intent on making a living. Here I was, an old guy intent on staying alive so I could come back to these places as many more times in my remaining years as possible, just happy to be standing right next to this beautiful animal. She had no idea, of course, of her importance – which continues here.
This painting is now for sale. It’s framed and the outside measurements are about 20″ x 24″ matted and under glass for $3450 total for both frame and painting. The acrylic painting is on board and is 10″x14″, the glass is 16″x 20″. We have this frame on it now, but others are available. Shipping is a bit more. Let me know if you’re interested with an email at larry@larryeifert.com.
Thanks for reading this week. Oh little duck, where are you today?
Shouting out, because we didn’t have ANY summer puzzle season since all National Park Visitor Centers were closed – you know, where most people buy our puzzles!
But now: Just in time for the holidays, we have four new puzzles. And not just new puzzles, but new designs, smaller boxes for easier storing and mailing as gifts, and a free reference poster included in each one. The reference poster makes it easy for two people to work on a puzzle at once, and each can have a reference image (the box and the poster). The boxes are now about 60% of the size of the old ones, but the puzzles are still 500-pieces, 18″ x 24″ finished size, same sized pieces and clean cuts on the pieces. It’s a nice improvement, and we’re aiming to remake all our puzzles like this as titles run out.
Puzzle pieces in a bag, reference poster, box top and interpretive stuff on the box back. Species list and even my ink drawings on the box sides.
Olympic High Country is a painting that’s never been seen or used before for a puzzle. It was painted because this place means a lot to me, and those rare endemic animals and flowers of our local mountains are really interesting. It’s a good image for a puzzle. Here’s the link to the puzzle in the store.
Killer Whales of the Salish Sea
I painted this Orca Whales image for a park on San Juan Island, and the complexity of the background instantly made it a candidate for a jigsaw puzzle. Here’s the link to this one in our store.
Two Sides of the Sea
A new design of our best-selling image. This colorful mural is now enhanced with the reference poster and smaller box, just like the others.
Old-growth Forests of the Pacific Northwest
The fourth image is a redesign of my Mount Rainier mural at the Ohanapecosh Visitor Center on the southeast side of the park. We’re at the end of our run and thought we’d start fresh with this instead of just reprinting it. Same reference poster and smaller box as the others. The detail in the foreground makes for a really complex and entertaining puzzle that’ll keep you up all night.
Two new published stories, both in 48 North magazine a couple of months ago, the summer of 2020. This first story was about possibly the showiest and most colorful rockfish in the Pacific Northwest. It is sort of rockfish heaven here, with 17 different species, all somewhat different.
Here’s my sketch before the color version.
My story was about rockfish that can live to be over one hundred and how conservation can actually work using science. Imagine that, using science! BELIEVE IN SCIENCE! By the way, DID YOU VOTE?
Just as their name suggests, these guys prefer to live around rocks. 28 species of rockfish live in the Salish Sea, from 3-inch tide pool dwellers to 3-foot lunkers that live in deeper water and weigh in at 25 pounds. Most are slow-growing and long-lived, some live to be more than a century old. They have a completely different lifestyle from live-fast and die-young salmon. Foraging for other fish, they may swim only a few hundred miles in their lifetime. Rockfish tend to hang out together in groups around rock pinnacles or cliffs, places with lots of tidal current (which helps bring meals to them and not the other way around). Canary rockfish usually have three stripes angling down and backwards on the head, the middle one often runs across the eye. This is a very bright and distinctive fish.
The conservation of this fish is a real success story, and one that shows how science and government work together to make our lives, and the fish’s lives better. After discovering how good rockfish tastes, a definite over-exploitation of these tasty fish began in the 1800’s until canary rockfish were declared overfished in 2000 when it was discovered that rockfish had declined 70% since the 1960’s. Fish and Wildlife submitted a petition to have 14 rockfish species listed under the Endangered Species Act (eventually, all these were not listed). Enter science-based studies of them, plus just plain asking fishermen “where are you catching canary rockfish so we can have you fish elsewhere”. Fishing rules were changed, different gear was introduced and suddenly, in half the time it was thought it hopefully might happen, we have plenty of rockfish.
My second story was about another Northwest creature, one that has adapted to its environment in a beautiful way, but hiding underground from its predators.
A delicate flower-like anemone that is actually an animal. Yes, an animal that you’ll find just beneath your keel in sheltered mud-bottomed bays. While it looks more like a tube worm, this creature is actually related to jellyfish. Confusing, but to me it just shows the complexity of the underwater world we rarely see, and why I enjoy writing this page. These animals appear to have stout tubes below their tentacles waving in currents as they search for bits of food to snag, but they are actually soft and vulnerable. To protect themselves, they burrow into the mud and generate a fibrous string-like material they weave around themselves, almost like they’re knitting a sock. This can extend from above the surface down beside them into the mud as deep as three feet, a woven structure they live in, safe from predators. When one threatens, the anemone quickly pulls itself down into the protective tube.
While many anemones have stout fans of tentacles and large bodies holding them up into the current, this species relies on the mud substrate and a house of its own making. When its main predator, the giant nudibranch, grazes on the anemone’s tentacles, it also lays its eggs right on the outside of the anemone’s tube, putting the young’s first meal close at hand. You might think this would be the end of the anemone, but nature has evolved tentacles aplenty so both species survive. The anemone commonly lives up to 10 years and often congregates in colonies that resemble flower-filled meadows, the tenticles waving as blossoms in a gentle breeze. Flowers they are definitely not, animals are certainly are.
And here’s my original sketch before the color was added. Notice the unfinished part on the right, just part of the process.
I’ve written for this magazine for over a decade now. When it was a sailing journal, they used my art on the covers and published many of my longer stories. It’s a broader publication now, trying to a bigger audience, and it still gives me pleasure to contribute. It was sold to the Port Townsend Northwest Maritime Center a couple of years ago, bringing it closer to my home port where I continue to sail and kayak. It’s a meaningful bit of life to me, experiencing nature here at home and then writing and painting it for others to enjoy.
Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.
Yellowthroat warblers 1983. Now in Wellington, New Zealand, Melanie Murray
THIS, is just a bit of going down memory lane. It’s also a chapter of how I got here today after painting for over 50 years.
I receive a lot of emails from people who own my old stuff. Sometimes they just let me know, others want to know how much it’s worth (it’s worth what it’s worth to you) or who gets it in the divorce settlement. Some of these I honestly don’t remember even painting, like this one. It now resides in Wellington, New Zealand and the owner, Melanie Murray has no idea how it got there. It was in a store, she bought it, looked me up. It was painted 37 years ago. I think it looks pretty good, considering, and so does the frame and mat (which I recognize, too, but also don’t remember). The info on the back reveals more. That’s my handwriting, my rubber stamp. I mis-named the painting on the back compared with the front (laugh), and it was painted when I was 38. It was the 209th painting of that year. That’s about one per day, seven days a week, and if you want to know how to paint, that’s the secret right there! You just PAINT!
And if you do that, you’ll forget some of the ones you did, or maybe a few hundred – or thousand.
Trinity Alps of California, 1982, owned by Sue Shakespeare
Below is another painting I received this last year. It DO remember this as it shows a favorite place. I backpacked here often, but I honestly don’t remember which mountain or which lake it is, doesn’t matter anyway. Both of these are opaque watercolor, a sort of kid’s poster paint that creates both vibrant colors and deep washes. At 38 years old, it still looks pretty good.
And two more from the mid-1880 that arrived in emails. The boat was my own, the first big boat I had that I restored and sailed to Alaska. Seeing this little painting caught my breath, mainly for seeing the boat again. For some years, I’d spend summers up British Columbia’s Inside Passage painting, sailing, painting – and then mailing these back to my gallery in California. By fall, they’d all be sold – so I never saw them again. Except this one when it was emailed to me. It was likely painted on the cockpit table, drawn while sitting in the dingy floating around while “October” was at anchor. The painting says 1984, San Diego, showing I sailed thousands of miles aboard that boat, a floating studio. I was painting a diary, and then sold the pages as soon as I made them!
And finally, this old historic barn that was painted in 1977 in the Eastern Sierra Mountains of California. Still loved by the family who bought it back then, just another generation going forward. At that time, the Eastern Sierra was full of these hay barns, hand-made with split wood. Many were on their last legs and were great subjects to paint. I had met a very good painter who knew opaque watercolor inside out, Sherry Gribben, who had won the Death Valley Mule Days art show. We painted together for a bit and I learned much from her. I don’t have many mentors, but Sherry certainly was one, as brief as it was. She’d laugh at my lame attempts, but I look at this painting now and think it’s not too bad. Really.
I freely admit it, I can’t make big mileages hiking if I stop to do these paintings. I’m fast, but not THAT fast, so, I’ve learned to shorten my goals, keep it realistic – and enjoy myself. For this, I get art to take home, my old body thanks me for slowing down, and by taking care I get to come back again and again to do this. And one more perk that is the difference between hiking and making art. I get to actually LOOK at the landscape, see how it’s built and has evolved. I see and understand how the flowers grow beside that dainty little brook where it spills out of the lake. Or how the trail crews have built a little path of rocks hauled over from a scree pile possibly 50 years ago. Putting in mileage sure doesn’t get you this close connection – but making trail art does.
Fleabane-beside-the-creek
These paintings represent places that moved me enough to stop and draw. On this trip, fourth of the season, I didn’t take my paints, but instead just a pencil, long point pencil sharpener and some water color paper. The color was added back in my studio, and I loved reliving the trip in this way. It took less art-making time on the trail, yet provided a ‘second adventure’ for me here at home reliving the same places again. I recommend it, really!
Sunset-trail-toward-the-peak
In this painting, I liked the way the soft light from distant fires softened up the sky, made companion colors in the willows fit perfectly as they yellowed for fall. The fleabane flowers beside the creek were about spent, with only a few yellow and white petals remaining – but it was a beautiful little place with water gurgling by. Willows, their leaves chomped on here and there by the black-tailed deer, were sporting galls and little caterpillar cocoons awaiting first freeze so they could spend their winter safe under snow on the ground. The place looked felt very soft and settled. Both these paintings were created at places where I was also tired of walking, so it was good timing to take time, calm down, make some art.
As I hiked along and came into a big meadow, the vertical peaks of the Olympics really contrasted my view. Flat and stable, then vertical and jagged, rising fast and steep. That’s what these Olympic Mountains are, really steep. The Dungeness River starts up here and drops 7600 feet in only 28 miles to the Pacific Ocean, one of the steepest watersheds in the country. Ah, but those first dozen miles at the top, they’re just pure magic. One of the side secondary rivers begins here in this valley, surrounded by snowy peaks and a chain of lakes. Not a single lowland trail comes here, they’re all high subalpine or high-elevation trails that drop down into this magic place, giving it a Shangri-La feeling bounded by barriers on all sides.
Mountain-Gentian
Gentian : gen shenGentians are fall-blooming plants of subalpine wet meadows. They’re one of my favorite flowers because they start blooming as summer is fading, being downright gutsy about their timing. They grow in clusters from a solitary root, and are at first tightly zipped up, a dark midnight blue that is truly rare in color. I don’t know another alpine flower with this amazingly vibrant blue. As they open, the insides begin to show lighter shades of cobalt, and again this is color not often seen in the wild, anywhere. They’re spectacular, to say the least I can about a plant that’s learned to flower just before first frost. What timing!
Orange Mountain-dandelion
On the other side of the color spectrum, a nose-up look at these plants that were upslope and out in the open from the gentians showed an orange mixed with white, just a tad of white to tone it down. And a little bee getting a meal. This was an upclose and personal painting – the flowers are only two inches wide, max. Orange mountain-dandelion has a hyphen, meaning it’s not a real dandelion, but one that looks similar to it’s backyard relatives. I found these in a much drier place than the gentian but still beside the trail. Both give great color to a drying meadow in late August.
My Six Moon Designs Lunar Duo was a bit too spacious for just me, but I luxuriously lounged in it, spread my stuff all over the place like I lived there. I guess I did. It’s an amazingly big tent for its 45 ounces of weight. This tent, and the other ultralight gear is what’s getting me into these places these days, and allowing me to do it in comfort.
At this campsite, an outcropping of boulders provided some really good reflections in the little lake, and so a painting was needed. Oh, I could have just turned the paper upside down and drawn it a second time, but that’s cheating, and not very accurate. Beside me while I drew, this Olympic chipmunk joined me. The Olympic Peninsula has several endemic mammals that live only here. This is one, and possibly my favorite. It’s small, even looks small with its short nose. This moment, with the chippy and me, my pencil and paper, are what makes my hiking complete – close connections with nature that will remain in my mind throughout the winter.
Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.
These two stories were published back in early summer in 48 North magazine. I always give the magazine first showing, wait a bit and then publish here, too. This first story was about a rather amazing little bird that migrates 38,000 miles each year, circumnavigating the Pacific, and in early summer they stop by here. Take a minute and read the brief little story after the paintings. Times are tough for wildlife, but this guy makes me want to make sure they continue their solitary lives in a healthy way. I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but this means: VOTE! All of us, you and me, and these little birds will have a better chance if you do. For the first time in my long life, I see an election that is truly critical to our continued existence.
Published in a magazine that has sailing stories, I wrote about what you’d see offshore west of my home in Port Townsend, Washington. I’ve been out there and seen these little birds myself.
I hear you’re voyaging to Barkley Sound or Down-the-Outside this summer! When you’re out there, keep a sharp watch for this little crow-sized bird soaring past, sailing along like a miniature albatross. If you see one, you’ll be getting to know a REAL voyager. These small birds fly with quick stiff wingbeats and soar low over waves, using the uplifting power of air coming off the swells to expend little energy to keep aloft. They need that, because these oceanic aviators go astounding distances. Each year, they fly from nesting burrows or rock crevices on islands around New Zealand, Australia and South America, and head north, following a figure-8 pattern. Passing Japan in April, they head to the arctic and then pass us in the Northwest on their way back home.
In all, that’s 38,000 miles, or 1.5times the distance around the Earth. (Only arctic terns make a longer flight each year.) While doing this, they only rarely meet other shearwaters, and yet there are 20 -30 million of them doing this – and there’s a second race in the Atlantic flying a similar route. Imagine! When they all get back home for nesting season in the Southern Hemisphere, they get together, sometimes in massive flocks (probably to catch up on things). Watch for the silver wing flashes and a dull brown coloration – stiff wings and a plump body. Shearwaters are proof to me that, while we’re generally busy goofing things up, there are creatures out there that are pretty much oblivious to our presence.
Tracks in the Sand
This second story, published this summer, isn’t about the wildlife as much as it’s about the tracks left by them. You don’t need to ‘see’ the otter to know it was just there, ambling down the same beach you’re on now. And, if you know what you’re looking at, you realize it might not be an otter, but something else. The tracks in the illustration were life-size.
Here’s the story that went with the paintings:
Land your boat on a sandy beach and you’ll probably soon see animal tracks in the sand. The most common are dog, bobcat, mountain lion, river otter and people. If you’re lucky, it’s a mix of all four. River otters remind me of an extremely hairy dachshund, same size (to 30 pounds and 3 to 4 feet including tail. Their fur is long and thick, keeping them warm swimming in our cold waters. The long and strong trail helps propel them like a sculling oar, but they are also at home on land and can run up to 15 miles an hour. I’ve been cornered in a parking lot by an entire family of them.
The tracks in the sand you see could very well be river otters, but not sea otters that rarely come ashore and aren’t common in the Salish Sea anyway. Look for details. The hind feet show a single claw apart from the other four. Front feet show all five like a dog. All will show front claws and you might even see the connecting web between the toes. Dogs show claws, but not the separated hind toe. Cougars have huge prints like big dogs, but don’t show claws. Bobcat track: only 1.5” across and only four toes show. Here’s the thing to remember. It matters little that you actually SAW the critter that made the track, because you saw proof it was here. I’d say that’s good enough.
I have a long history with 48 North magazine and their parent organization, The Northwest Maritime Center, based in Port Townsend, WA. In the 90’s and early 2000s, I was on the board of the Wooden Boat Foundation, Nancy was store chandler selling all manner of wooden boat equipment – and now here I am, still plugging away at making art for the same group – but these days it’s published in their magazine. I enjoy these brief monthly forays into aquatic nature. I learn a lot.
Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.
