I painted this underwater landscape a few years ago for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust. It’s a large wayside that lives on the top of that bluff in the painting at the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area.
Now, a group of budding artists from Sherman Elementary School in Tacoma, Washington have taken that art and made their own rendition of it. I think it’s wonderful and wanted to show you the process and finished project.
The 5th grade class and their Makerspace Coordinator, Julie Ross, started it by dividing the painting into squares, each student taking on a portion of the painting. They used pipe cleaners, corks, beads, balloons, ceramic tiles, pom poms, yarn, fabric, noodles, recycled materials and many other unusual things. (heck, I just got to use a paint brush.)
A printed copy of the art was sectioned off.
And so it began with a few squares.
And advanced to filling in the larger area, just like I paint these big paintings.
The final effort is really quite striking, with more detail than the original art ever had.
Here it is about half finished. I can actually see pieces of the painting beginning to appear.
And one more time showing the finished collage. Pretty fun.
Makerspace is a collaborative work space inside a school, library or separate public/private facility for making, learning, exploring and sharing. It certainly looks like this project succeeded with the very definition of collaboration, something sorely lacking in this country these days. I’m proud to have been a part of it.
I just polished these three outdoor wayside panels for Washington State Parks. Soon they’ll be installed at Rosario Beach, Deception Pass State Park near Anacortes, right on the beach at one of the most heavily-explored tide pool areas in Washington. The three paintings tell the stories of how the tide works to create this amazingly rich ecosystem, how people messed it all up with boots and flip-flops – and finally how to walk here without screwing it up again.
I want to show you the third panel, the one about their rope path. These tide pools were decimated by thousands of feet, but the park stretched a yellow rope out to the best pools and signs (like this one) tell people to ‘Follow the Ropes”. It worked, amazingly enough, and the tide pool life returned – crabs and anemones, kelp and sculpins. It was such an easy idea, and now the place is returning to normal. Seeing this is one of the many reasons I still get a charge out of painting art for public places.
These panels are 36″ x 24″ and will be made of high-pressure laminate and probably last longer than I will.
I received some installation photos for my Lime Kiln Point Lighthouse paintings. Everyone seems to like them, so I thought I’d share it all here for the record. I painted these last winter for Washington State Parks with EDX Exhibits in Seattle. Installation and these photos were by Marius at Doty Signs in Seattle.
This lighthouse is THE place to watch orca whales up close in the wild. There’s possibly no place on Earth you can get closer to wild whales without getting on a boat, and in summer, people line the shoreline here to watch the killer whale families feeding on salmon right in front of them. This is a big deal since the southern population of orcas is endangered and it’s not looking good for a recovery. It’s a thrilling experience to see them, and I’m proud to say my stuff now explains what people are looking at. Plus, there are one or two really nice looking pieces of art!
This is sort of a big deal for me, too, as new rules don’t allow boats to approach these endangered animals, leaving Lime Kiln as the best viewing in the Northwest. It’s also a place I know well, since I had “October”, my 40-foot sloop tied in nearby Friday Harbor in the ’80s – my ‘painting platform’ as I sailed from San Diego to Alaska and most places in between. I have history here. Nancy and I, decades later aboard our 45′ floating home ‘Rumpy’ came by here one afternoon and watched in amazement as an entire orca family slowly swam directly beneath our boat (engine off). One of the big males was bigger than our boat, but they minded their manners and didn’t touch us.
Not so fast, a painting first: we’ve been in Hilo again for awhile and I did some opaque watercolors, some on location. This one maybe needs some explanation. It’s an old pahoehoe lava flow, so old it’s been bleached smooth and now reflects the tropical sun as almost white. Above it is a patch of Naukapa-kahakai. Come on, you can say it – just pronounce each vowel separately – there’s only three of them. We saw these little yellow-billed cardinals everywhere in the lowlands, and some were even on our porch each morning, feeding their non-red headed youngsters within arms-length of us. I’d call this a red-headed cardinal, but there’s another bird here named that. This painting isn’t for sale. I just don’t think it’s ‘presentable’ as it’s more a field sketch.
This happy and beautiful place, Hilo, the rainiest city in America (up to 15x what Port Townsend gets) shows, to us, what a healthy and diverse society is all about. Mixed race: 32%, Asian: 34%, Hawaiian: 14% and white: 17%. Let THAT sink in a moment. There simply doesn’t seem to be any social conflict here, just happy and kind people living life in one of the oldest cities in the country. Sure, it’s a very liberal place, but there’s more to it than that. We’ve been here many, many times, bought a house once that fell threw, keep coming back to enjoy the culture and beauty of an real American tropical rainforest and a town that is over 1000 years old.
Okay, here’s mom’s book, or at least she’s inside. Mom is not on the cover! As many of you know, Virginia Eifert, Illinois author, photographer, painter and poet somehow found time to make me. She died in 1966 at the top of her game and was one of Illinois’ best writers, publishing 20 novels and founding and writing the Illinois State Museum’s magazine for 326 issues. And now, here she is in a new book 53 years later. The woman has ‘legs’.
This book is a series of stories about the early environmentalists of America, and included are some good ones, some of Virginia’s friends. Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Mardy Murie and Sally Carrighar. Others include John Muir and Ernest Thompson Seton. Most interesting to me, Teal and Peterson didn’t make the cut, and those guys were above her at the time, Teal even hired her to be an ‘assistant’ for field classes. She’d have loved this. The book will be on Kindle and Amazon, but hasn’t been released yet. Clifford Knapp was a naturalist and educator from the Midwest who died in 2017.
I paint moving water as often I possible. I find it immensely challenging, confusing and yet interesting to paint a constantly changing abstract ‘thing’ that, in itself, is colorless and lifeless. Yet wild water is so alive you can’t keep track of it, and reducing it to two dimensions is tricky. When it happens in a painting is more luck than anything. No reference photos for this painting, I just went for it in the studio. This board was primed with Mars Red and you can see that dark dried-blood color peeking through the other colors, providing a solid warmth behind all the rest of it. It’s a powerful color that requires some careful use.
I did say I didn’t use a reference, but the spark for this painting came from this photo I took while on the Tunnel Creek Trail in the Olympics. Can you see it? Not really? I can see water running over a log, green bounced light – and then I built a painting around it like a songwriter makes a song.
Here’s how it ended up with a frame and mat, and sitting on my studio deck.
This painting is sold. It’s framed like it shows here and the outside measurements are about 20″ x 24″. The acrylic painting is on board and is 10″x 14″. I only say this about the measurements because I’ve been getting requests for commissions for paintings SIMILAR to ones that have sold from this blog. Happy to try it if it interests me. Let us know if you’re interested by emailing me at larry@larryeifert.com.
A big flash of red, black and white – one of the most striking birds in North America. We see these guys often here in our forest on the northeast side of the Olympic Peninsula – two were actually on our tray feeder not long ago and they dwarfed the chickadees that fled as they landed.
To me, pileated woodpeckers represent my vision of old-growth forests and a time when there was much more of that around here. These are complex conifers, moss and ferns growing high on the trunks, a tangle of branches and twigs that took centuries to grow. I’ve tried to express that in this painting, as if we’re looking up a the tree, seeing a flash of bird and the feeling of bigness. Painting with some abstract qualities also helps, I think, and gives it a messy feeling – just the way nature is.
Most woodpeckers, but especially this one, drill holes in trees to find insects or create nesting sites for themselves. The holes then provide homes for many others, both birds and animals. These are truly important creatures for the health of a forest. You won’t find them in tree farms, just like you won’t find an elk in a cornfield.
This painting is now for sale. It’s framed and the outside measurements are about 20″ x 24″ matted and under glass for $295 total. The acrylic painting is on board and is 10″x14″, the glass is 16″x20″. We have this frame on it now, but others are available. Shipping is a bit more. Let me know if you’re interested at larry@larryeifert.com.
I’ve been painting imaginary scrapes of landscapes for a long time. I find it very rewarding to take a moment in time and build a little painting around it, a memory for me of ‘being there’. This one is actually a streamside rock pile up the Big Quilcene River on the Olympic Peninsula, Olympic National Forest. I remember, it was raining, had glistening rocks, lots of varieties of color and texture, a few bits of wood as well. It was near the old log bridge at Bark Shanty. These are cold waters, so I primed the board with Mars Red to give it all a warm cast.
The spotted sandpiper is the same, a nice memory for me of bumping into this little guy on a hike. They’re around most Western mountain streams throughout the summer, but head south to Argentina when the snow flies. You might normally think of sandpipers as birds that flock for safety, but this one is always singular. They poke around stream and lake shores, banks and beaches for lunch and have a curious habit of teetering up and down as if it’s lost its balance.
The first time I ever saw a spotted sandpiper was in the High Sierra. I was walking along a meadow bank beside the river above Tuolumne Meadows a few miles south of the campground. What a place! And here was a sandpiper, just meandering along and minding its own business as if I didn’t exist. It spent time, and so did I. Those memories make for good paintings, no matter if it’s decades later.
This painting is now for sale. It’s framed and the outside measurements are about 24″ x 20″ matted and under glass for $1295 total. Shipping is a bit more. Let me know if you’re interested at larry@larryeifert.com.
American dipper working the Upper Dungeness – but it could be any clean mountain stream hereabouts. A little space between projects, so I painted my favorite bird – John Muir’s favorite bird too. No secret why, this little bird lives where Muir felt most at home, and I do too – next to a clear rushing and wild bit of water in the high country. Dippers are so connected to this singular habitat that they’ll fly around a stream bend instead short-cutting across a meadow. ‘Dine in’ for a dipper means diving into a waterfall and walking around underwater, kicking stones around and eating insects.
Painting moving water is always a joy for me, but also has some mental anguish. It’s not easy to define what it looks like – something that is more a feeling than a fact. There is lots of bounced light, reflecting off the sky, nearby trees, sunny patches of moss that is getting direct sunlight. It’s not what I see, but more what I think I feel that is important. Did I get it on this one? I’m never sure.
I realized at the beginning that this would be a gray and green painting, cool colors. So, I started it by priming the board with Mars Red, a very brilliant purplish-red that you can see hints of all over the painting. Look carefully, you’ll see what I mean. It warmed the entire painting up a lot.
This painting is still for sale as of January 31, 2019. It’s framed as you see it here, outside measurements are about 20″ x 24″ and is $295 total, with shipping a bit extra. Email me at larry@larryeifert.com if you’re interested.
Sorry, this painting sold a few hours after posting.
A new easel painting appeared between a couple of larger park projects. I continue to happily paint all these big public art pieces but it helps to create a bit of of whimsy on a smaller, looser scale. So, here’s a happy little place, at least for me.
This painting is already sold, sorry. Just a show-and-tell here.
This painting was a collaboration with Nancy. We’ve never done this before, even after 25 years of working together on giant walls and making a living selling our individual efforts. We painted this together, each of us doing some, then the other moving forward and fixing the other’s deadends. I think it resulted in a refined and well thought-out painting. We might even try it again. Maybe next time I can get her to sign her name.
Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about color values and painting low winter light. It’s far more interesting than painting anything in summer – absolutely anything. It takes some time and thought to keep the image slanted over into a monochrome pallet of similar values, mix each with a bit of all the rest, and save the center-of-interest for the only intense place to blast away with slightly more color.
There are lots of layers in this painting, as you can see, but they’re all on a level of dullness to not get excited about. The road beckons the viewer to join us in a walk up the road, dodging puddles, to discover what’s just over the ridge.
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.
