Category Archives: Posts about other stuff

Posts about other stuff

A New Website For Me – Oh Boy

Eifert-front-page

See it here at LarryEifert.com

I’ve probably spent too much time messing with this instead of painting, but I now have a new website, completely redesigned, lots of new stuff, lots of little interesting corners with new content. And with a total of around 390 pages and posts, things were getting messy with the old one – so, I spent some time over the holidays tearing it apart and rebuilding a more modern version.

 

This one is ‘responsive’, meaning it looks good on your phone and tablet, pc and laptop – all of them at once if you have eight eyes. It still has the shopping cart with all the goodies like the puzzles, but there are new travel albums, 24 pages of murals and park projects that are better laid out. Better search capabilities are there too.  That’s Nancy lurking behind all the backgrounds, she comes, she goes, up and down some of our favorite local trails.

Smaller-Wildlife-Paintings

All my weekly posts are here too – might make a good book someday. There are over 300 of them. The comments are still closed until I can find a better spam screening, but that’s coming soon.

I finally got all the recent smaller paintings into albums there that can be seen as slideshows. There’s a lot of content that’s never been seen like this. Again, here’s the link, but it’s still just larryeifert.com.

Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. I’m trying to expand my list. An email will work.
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 beautiful photographs. We’re redesigning her site too – so check it out.

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

New Painting Post, Posts about other stuff

Merry Christmas and Thanks

Green_Chickadee

This is one of Virginia Eifert’s ‘famous’ hand-painted Christmas cards. Inside is hand-written calligraphy:
Now let the echoes
of the songs of May
Refresh and warm your hearts
on Christmas Day – 1963

I was 17 then and just beginning to sell my stuff at art fairs and local shows. Not very well, I’ll admit, but it was a passionate start.

She sent these cards each year for decades, ending with her death in 1966. I’ve heard from people who still have many of them, some even framed, for she painted hundreds. I did too, until my real work simply swallowed this up. Unlike me, Virginia was legendary for being able to do it all (except maybe clean the house or teach her son to do the same), which brings me around to what I really want to say here.

Merry Christmas and loving thanks to everyone reading this. We’re sending a genuine thank-you to the fantastic group of friends, clients and buyers who have supported Nancy and me as artists all these years. It’s now been over four decades of making a living as a working artist, beginning way back in the 1960’s with a gentle but firm push from Virginia.

Thanks to all of you who have faithfully bought my work, but also thanks to all the people who sell our stuff in park stores coast to coast, in galleries and countless other places. It’s a very wide web these days, and unfortunately I’ll never personally meet many of you.

And thanks, also, to someone I DO know, thanks to my very most important and special person, Nancy Cherry Eifert, who not only has a photo career of her own, but also handles the licencing, royalties, commissions and shipping, including orders from that pesky website that never seems to work properly. She’s an amazing partner that can multi-task with the best of them. They say that, these days especially, it takes at least two people working more than full-time to be one professional artist. We’ll both tell you that’s certainly true.

I know this won’t last forever -I wish it would, but I won’t stop or even slow down exploring nature through my art and words. Like Carl Rungius, the Canadian painter of wildlife I admire greatly, I want to drop dead at my easel a few long decades from now – and we hope you’ll continue to come along for the ride until then.

Thanks again for reading this week, and have a Happy Christmas.
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. Her new website is almost ready, but not quite yet.

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

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Early Paintings, Nature Art, New Published Story, Posts about other stuff

Anna’s Hummingbirds and the December Deep Freeze

This is an older painting of mine, and the rhododendrons certainly in bloom, but I felt compelled to write about this week’s freeze and the little birds in our meadow.

From coast to coast, I know we’ve all had amazing weather this past week. The southern storms drove a giant blast of Canadian air down and west over the Cascades, and here we’ve had record lows for a week. Temps haven’t gotten out of the twenties, with nights down into the lower teens, weather we just don’t ever get in Puget Sound. None of us have clothes for this stuff. And while we’ve all been suffering, that can’t be anything compared to what our two wintering-over Anna’s hummingbirds must be experiencing. For all my decades around the Northwest, I’ve never seen hummers here in winter, but last year we had one stay all season, and we’ve heard we’re not alone with this. We put out a feeder when we spotted him, but it wasn’t because of the sugar water that he was here, because we put it out AFTER we spotted him. This year we have an adult and a juvie, and we were ready with a feeder (and a 150w flood lamp on it 24 hours a day after the freeze hit). So far it’s working.

I wrote about hummers a few years ago, and learned that they have ways to cope with this cold stuff. They have normal body temps of about 105-108F, with a sitting heart rate of about 250 beats per minute. However, at night they sleep normally, or, they can go into a turbid state where they actually drop their body temp to between 30 and 65 degrees (depending on need), and drop their metabolic rate to one-fifteenth of normal. In this way, they can maybe make it through a very long night of 15 degrees.

Before nightfall, they make one extra smart move. They find and remember where breakfast is going to be. Then, in the morning it takes upwards of an hour to fully wake up before flying. This requires a huge energy drain on this thumb-sized bird, and if that feeder is frozen when it gets to it, the bird is in big trouble (like a car on empty that gets to the gas station and the pumps are locked).

Temperatures are warming up now, but we’ve felt a great privilege to keep tabs on these two intrepid birds this week. Snow and hummingbirds just don’t go together, but if this is a sign of Climate Change, I’m happy with it.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff. We’re still shipping Christmas puzzles.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing with her photography.

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

Comments are good. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

Posts about other stuff

Sea Witch – One heck’ofa boat

Eifert_SWTyler-St

This week, I was going to send out a painting I just finished of Sol Duc Falls, but I received so much good mail last time about the saga of Rumpy, our old boat, I decided to tell you about the boat we now have (another art project). It’s a pretty interesting tale, and the past few days I’m giving her fresh paint in the boat yard, only a few hundred yards from Rumpy.

We bought Sea Witch 10 years ago, soon after giving up Rumpy, because, well, you just can’t be Boatless Near Seattle. Built in 1939 in Tacoma, Sea Witch was designed by Ed Monk Sr, probably the most famous boat designer in this part of the country, and in fact Rumpy was designed by him too. For the boat’s first 25 years, things went along in fairly normal style until the Bailey family bought her in the 1960’s. Five kids, dog, cat and both parents Jo and John would all stuff themselves aboard this little 30′ boat and sail off for the summer. According to the kids (who are all adults now), things never went all that swimmingly, but something must have clicked because most of them still love to sail and the boat lives on in iconic family history.

Then things got serious! In the 1980’s Jo went started writing sailing stories and cruising books, and because of this, just about everyone around the Northwest knows about Sea Witch. I had even purchased a signed book with Sea Witch on the cover back then and still have that copy. Jo continues to write today and occasionally includes Sea Witch in her tales.

So a decade ago it was our turn with the old girl. She needed a complete restoration which took me several years – and was quite some job. All this is well documented with scads of photos on our website if you’re interested (click here), but what I want to really show is that this boat and its dingy (shore boat) has since become the subject of an entire portfolio of my paintings. Not only that, but I’ve also written Sea Witch stories for the Seattle Times and supplied covers and stories for Seattle’s 48 North magazine. This beautiful and graceful shape, a classic example of form and function combined, doesn’t have a bad view. This is not so with modern boats sporting reverse transoms and plastic hulls. Sea Witch not only sails well but is a joy to portray. Like the graceful curve of a beautiful woman’s back, this boat’s shape gives me great pleasure to look at. For that matter, she’s a joy to slap paint on too.

Here’s a favorite image of mine showing where she lives. If you look closely, you’ll see two river otters on the dock. While they’re cute, these little bandits come on board and leave amazing messes you can’t even imagine. I was sure if I painted this as homage, they’d leave me alone. Hah!

Eifert_Otters_Dock

So here’s the pitch. If I sell a couple of prints or a painting this week, I can pay for the haulout and maybe a can of paint – and one of you could own a piece of Sea Witch. (maybe that’s too shameless a pitch.)
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 still available for $700 unframed. Email us.

Or, you can go to our Giclee Print Index here

Here’s our main website address where lots is going on.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us. I promise I won’t be so wordy next time.

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