Category Archives: New Painting Post

Blog Posts by Larry Eifert

Murals, New Painting Post, Wildlife

El Malpais mural

El Malpais National Monument mural painting completed

I finished my El Malpais National Monument mural a few days ago. Of course they don’t know about it yet because the park staff is shutdown, but I thought I’d post it here to let everyone else know that artists don’t get sent home – we ARE home. Park staff isn’t getting paid, and neither am I.

Enough of that! The progressive steps of this painting are shown below, from the concept sketch created on location in Grants New Mexico, to the refined sketch and finally the painted version on top. Scroll to the bottom to see the chronological progression in reverse. 

This painting shows the rather amazing and pristine high desert plateau landscape right on the Continental Divide in central New Mexico. This giant park has over 400 lava caves, ancient pueblo ruins, sandstone cliffs, vast lava flows, cinder cones and some of the oldest Douglas-fir trees on the planet. The painting shows most of these components, and also several cave entrances, bats emerging for the evening, a ringtail watching them pass. There are two tinajas, or waterpockets with frogs and others coming to drink after a hot day in the desert. This part is on sandstone, like the background cliffs. There are ancient junipers that were probably here 1000 years ago when the pueblo was occupied, and lots of pot shards are littering the ground. We saw all this, and much more I couldn’t get in while on our site visit last spring. 

The design for the park’s map brochure.

This painting will be going to the main visitor center in Grants, but a larger copy with also be produced for an exhibit there. The real reason for this, however, is that it’s going on the back of the new park map brochure, so each year over 100,000 people get to take it home with them – along with this painting of mine. This part of the project is being produced by the excellent staff at the National Park Service’s Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia. They always do great things with my paintings. I know the production will be top-notch.

Super-refined sketch prior to painting. This one was drawn in the studio here in Port Townsend and was the final draft before painting.
Refined sketch number seven, also drawn on location.
ELMA sketch #7

Above is the initial sketch photographed for big screen presentation at the park. I did this on the pavement at the hotel in Grants New Mexico, then loaded into my laptop and piped it onto the big screen for the park to see and comment on while I listened and wrote comments. This is sketch #7, the final one attempted and it was heartily approved. Even the superintendent was there, which is a rarity for me.

This was drawn on location, along with half a dozen others, but wasn’t a specific place. It has all the ‘elements of El Malpais, but doesn’t hold faithful to any ‘stand here and see this’ location. I think I nailed it pretty well.

El Malpais means Badlands – they sure are.

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 here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Ginkgo Petrified Forest

Gingko Petrified Forest Museum

Earlier this year I completed a bunch of paintings for Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park near the Columbia River east of Seattle. In many ways, the project took me back to my kid-life when both my parents worked for the Illinois State Museum. I remember being with them and finding ginkgo leaf fossils in northern Illinois, and now here I was painting them for exhibits in a very old and remote museum in Washington State. This building was built by the CCCs in the late 1930s and is just a very beautiful and classic example of those epic times. With the place closed when we were there, the only sounds we heard out on these ash slopes were the wind through to trees and crunch of our footsteps on the trails. The ginkgo and other tree fossils are big, like full-grown old-growth. You can even count the rings showing how old they were when the volcano buried them.

New Front Door – Gingko Petrified Forest State Park
Gingko Petrified Forest State Park
Gingko Petrified Forest State Park – complicated maps turned out pretty well.
All my paintings ringing the exhibit room.

These paintings tell a super-complicated story of how this place came to be in its present state. Countless lava flows, mud flows, ash drops and Ice-Age floods involved trees from another time. They all were stuck in this mess and became fossilized. The trick, for me, was to figure out how to compress giant geologic events or Climate Change into smallish, understandable paintings. Some of these needed maps, some needed a few extra words of explanation, but somehow I think it all works. It was a fun project for me, different than what I normally paint.

All images enlarge with  a click. Not all the paintings are shown – thought I’d save you from too much geology.

Thanks for reading this week – and the entire year for that matter. This  year, especially, has been an amazing ride of art being created in public places.
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 here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Commissioned paintings, New Painting Post

Ozette Loop Trail

Ozette Loop Trail, a boardwalk journey into the green tunnel. Yes, I paint private commissions that interest me – and this one did.

This is a recent commission that traveled across the country. The lovely question: “My daughter and I came to the Northwest to visit family and we hiked the Ozette Loop. Could you paint something to help us remember our fantastic trip?” – or something like that. Anyway, I wanted to share the painting here because, while it certainly IS the Ozette Loop, as anyone who has hiked that world-class trail will agree, it’s actually what I THOUGHT that 6 MILES of boardwalk feels like. It just goes on and on through the green wall of ancient old-growth, cedar, spruce and alder. Sometimes it’s a hand-split cedar boardwalk, sometimes it’s new stuff, sometimes you think you’ll fall through and sometimes even plastic Trex appears momentarily (how COULD they have done that?).

Nancy Cherry Eifert paying attention. One wrong step and a busted knee at least.

There are places where this path is really old, like the section in the photo. You need to watch it carefully, not gaze around at the canopy overhead. It’s a leg-breaker awaiting. Sometimes it’s gravel, but not so much considering it’s 3 miles on each of two sides of the triangle. The middle side, of course, is 3 miles of wilderness beach, boulder and gravel walking down the coast – and the real reason most of us go there. That part feels amazingly remote but it’s really too good to share. It’s a place stories come from. It’s a place to camp, sit beside a beach fire and watch the sea otters play in the shallows. Maybe another hike’s in order next summer.

Thanks go to Jennifer and her family in Connecticut. I got to make a painting for you – and me.

All images enlarge with  a click. Yes, I paint commissions.

Thanks for reading this week – and the entire year for that matter.
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 here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

Lime Kiln Point – Orca Wayside Art in the San Juan Islands

This painting is one of four for Lime Kiln State Park, west side of San Juan Island and Friday Harbor. If you want to see whales in the Northwest without getting on a boat, this is the place. Well, technically, you have to get on a ferry to get to the island, but you get the point. On a summer day, there can be hundreds of people lined up here on the cliff to watch the killer whale show right in front of them – and soon they’ll also be immersed in my paintings as well. 

After adding the text to the panel, words and art go together fairly well on this one. Two panels are in the six-foot range, but this one is half that. The others are coming soon and I’ll try to post them as we go along.

I lived six summers in Friday Harbor when my first bigger boat, 40′ sloop “October” was here – and I had my gallery in Ferndale, Ca. This was in the 80’s, and I learned to paint the Northwest here. I’d go out to Lime Kiln Point and watch these big guys come right up to shore. Later, when Nancy and I lived on our 45′ Monk “Rumpy”, we’d come up from Port Townsend and lucky timing once put us here when an entire pod was too. We stopped the boat, turned off the engine and watched, shocked, as the entire family casually swam under us. The big male was bigger than the boat, or so it seemed. No one touched, we were thrilled, dry mouths and all. And now my art goes on shore. Paint hard, live long and connections like this happen all the time. I’m constantly thrilled at this life-long deep connection to nature. Not much matters more except the lovely person I share this with!

Thanks for reading my stuff this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web. And 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 here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post, Wildlife

Acorn Woodpeckers – Waka Waka Waka

“Tending their graineries”.  I haven’t painted these interesting birds in years, and a private commission presented an opportunity to that just that. I was first made aware of these crazy guys when I was teaching painting at the Yosemite Association back in the early 80’s. A big deal for me, I was in the old historic railroad building at El Portal to meet the Executive Director and try to make a decent impression. He had a marvelous second story office, old wood paneling, a big railroad desk, casement windows. In the middle of the conversation, he suddenly got up and started pounding on the walls, first one then another. No explanation and he didn’t even break up a sentence. Later I found out it was acorn woodpeckers trying to store nuts in the knotholes, probably been doing it a hundred years! And I’ve been in love with these clown-faced birds since.

And then the buyer, who has been trying to get another original painting from me since, he says, 1990. What took so long I’m  not sure, but I’m glad to help out. Yes, these birds actually drill holes in dead snags and dry their acorns, hundreds of them and often in drilled rows like sapsuckers do as well. Yaka, yaka, yaka. Once heard, never forgotten.

Yes, I do private commissions on occasion. If you’re interested, just let me know, and be patient (but not 30 years).

Thanks for reading my stuff this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web. And 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 here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

El Malpais National Monument sketch #2

Revision time – stay with me on this. I know this isn’t in color, but pencil drawing is almost a lost skill, and I’m still fairly good with it. Lots of people ask me how it is to work for the National Park Service. Well, it’s like a bunch of bananas, there’s good and bad, sometimes in the same bunch. So far, this project has been all good!

A few posts ago, I showed the first detailed sketch for this New Mexico painting, the one below. Now the park has made requests for changes, with plenty of ‘please’s. An entirely new sketch was called for.  No complaints, all their thoughts were valid, and some things I just plain forgot to add. The top sketch was submitted this week for a second review. What’s the difference? Bigger cave, straightened the right tree, removed the left tree, cliff bigger, and most of all, an aspen – Douglas-fir grove on the left with plenty of a’a lava. That’s the lava that looks impossible to walk on, and is (see the photo below). At El Malpais National Monument, it’s mixed with lots of pahoehoe, the ropy lava that flows like water in its molten form. This place, west of Albuquerque, has 400 lava caves, so it was important to show more of that, too.Below, our guide-ranger in a mass of a’a lava. Impossible to walk on, impossible to paint! Somewhere in this mess is my phone, still sitting where it fell out of my pack and, for me, gone forever! And below a pot shard from one of the almost-invisible pueblo ruins. They wanted more of these, which is shown in the new sketch along the foreground. This piece was just sitting on the ground and is probably over 1000 years old. The hand-painted lines are far more skilled than modern pots from the same tribe that are made for tourists.

Soon, I’ll get either a go-ahead on the final art, or a request for some additional changes – not likely anything imposing. Too many pronghorn, a smaller peregrine falcon, stuff like that. I’m eager to paint this because, as usual, I’ll get a chance to relive the very tasty experience of going there this past summer.

Thanks for reading my stuff this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web. And 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 here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post, Wildlife

Chickadee and Our Apple Tree

{sorry, it’s sold}

This painting is now available. We have a half dozen apple trees in our little meadow. They were planted by the original couple who built the place, and I’d guess they were set in the ground in the mid-1980’s. All are reaching maturity at 30, and starting to look very artistic with twists and turns, tortured branches and mossy parts. The deer yank on the apples and lower branches and we used to try to fend them off – but we’ll take the deer over apples any day, so now we just enjoy them all.

Our local chestnut-backed chickadees and nuthatches also enjoy the trees as well for the bugs that come in for the fall sweetness, so I wanted to show that in this painting. The original idea was to have an apple or two, fall red and contrasting with the chestnut colors of the bird, but the apples are just too big. So, the leaves took the apples place. I can stand right next to these trees and the birds don’t notice, or at least mind. They’d probably sit on my finger if it had an insect.

Here’s the custom frame and mat for the painting. It’s about 12″ x 15″ on the outside and a triple custom mat. We’re offering it for $195 with a bit of shipping (usually Priority mail). If you’re interested, just email me at larry@larryeifert.com.

And this is one of the branches of this tree, the one by the pump shed. Almost ready to eat, whoever gets there first, the squirrels, deer, thrushes – or us!

Thanks for reading my stuff this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web. And 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 here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

American Goldfinch – Sunflower

2018-8-25 American Goldfinch

{This painting is sold}

A new painting. A little story to go with it. We have American Goldfinches here in our meadow that come to the seed feeders. Red squirrels, gray squirrels and Townsend’s chipmunks are here as well. Some get a mouthful of seeds and run over to Nancy’s summer flower pots – bury them for some later meal – first-rate horders. Some seeds grow, most don’t, but of course Nancy doesn’t uproot them – every plant gets a chance around here.

Recently, a goldfinch decided to short-cut the process, forget the feeder and come straight for the giant seed-grocery.  The sunflower just dwarfed the bird and smaller flowers beneath it, and I think this shows the collective and frantic growing energy of the Northwest in summer – grow fast and die, or head south. Soon, this bird will head for warmer winter digs, the sunflower will be toast, but for now, it was a painting waiting to happen.

2018-8-25-Goldfinch-and-Sunflower-framed

This painting is in a custom pecan frame, has a triple mat and is  under glass. It’s outside measurements are 12″ x 15″. If you’d like this painting, just email me at larry@larryeifert.com.  It’s $195, framed and shipping is included if shipped within the U.S. Yes, freight free, usually Priority Mail!

If you’re Facebook friends with Nancy, you’ll likely notice an almost identical painting on her feed. We painted these two together on the same table – and we’re still married!

Thanks for reading my stuff this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web. And 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 here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Jigsaw Puzzles, Murals, New Painting Post, Wildlife

The Salish Sea – a New Jigsaw Puzzle

A new puzzle arrived  yesterday, called The Salish Sea. This is a section of a painting I did for the Whidbey Island Land Trust and shows the rather amazing underwater (and normally unseen by us) ecosystem just offshore between Port Townsend and Coupeville, Washington. There are a LOT of critters stuffed in this painting and it should make for a good puzzle. Below is the box back, as interpretive as I could get it. The puzzle is 24″ x 18″ and has 500 pieces. 

This place, a stark and diverse shoreline, gets the full brunt of storms and waves coming right down the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It’s part of the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area and has a harsh vibrancy about it that I just love. It was fun to paint.

People send us these photos from time to time.

All these images enlarge in your browser if you click them.

You can order from our online store here: or by emailing us if you want to send a check here: larry@larryeifert.com.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web. And 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 here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Little Chickadee – Giant Trees

{this painting is sold – thanks, Michael}

A new painting, a portrait of one of the ‘cloud’ of chickadees that gather regularly here each day – right outside my studio. Each bird is slightly different in personality – each slightly different in ‘flitterings’ and all are a joy to watch. In these Northwestern forests, where the trees are giants and organic matter constantly rains down, these little birds have evolved to fit their world perfectly. Nuthatches, creepers, chickadees of three varieties, they all ‘hang’ together for safety. When you’re a tiny bird, there’s safety in solidarity.

The branch this chickadee is on sports lungwort, a lichen that grows into lettuce-like sheets of ‘air plants’. Some fall to the ground each winter during storms. They don’t have roots or solid attachments of any major sort, but exist by taking nutrients and water from the air. Some loberia can be a square foot in size. Once on the ground, they leach nutrients into the soil, then used by the very trees they once grew on. You won’t see these plants in a younger forest as it takes many years for them to grow – so if you see lung wort and chickadees together, you’re in an old-soul place.

Too much science? How about a nice painting?

If you’d like this original painting, an acrylic on board, it’s outside dimensions are about 12″ x 15″ and has this pecan frame. It has a custom triple mat and is under glass. We’re offering it for $195 including the frame and shipping is free within the US (usually Priory Mail). We take all sorts of payment types, just email at larry@larryeifert.com if you’re interested.

If I stand still and watch these birds, and get close, I’m struck by the noise they make when flying. “Whirrrrrrl” or try rattling your tongue, it gets pretty close to how it sounds for them. It’s relatively loud, all that air rushing about. Think what the bird hears, with ears within an inch of all that feather-flapping. It must be deafening and I wonder if that’s why they only fly short distances, to land and be able to hear again – to check if life is still safe.

Thanks for reading this week – and the entire year for that matter.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web. And 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 here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.