Tag Archives: 48 North magazine

New Painting Post

Harlequines Are This Month’s Sketch Page

 Just click on the page and it’ll enlarge.

 

What to paint for my December 48-North magazine page? Well, I was hiking on the beach trail in Port Townsend and two beautiful harlequin ducks were just sitting there on a rock, eyeing me carefully and getting nervous. I stopped – they looked. I immediately wondered if these were the exact same ducks I saw in summer up on the Dosewallips River? Could be, but not likely. After that day on the river, I painted this 24″x48″ acrylic of that spot where the river was roaring in full spring run-off and the alder leaves still in bud.

 

If you read the magazine page at the top, you’ll see that harlequins spend their summers up in the mountain rivers diving in the near-freezing glacial melt waters for insects. Winter comes and here they are in our backyard (well, almost) doing the same in the Salish Sea  -where waters are considerably warmer. I’d like to think I saw the same two birds, but the best thing about birding is that I’ll never know.

 

I’m still rebuilding the web store for jigsaw puzzles, posters and prints and it’s coming along. If you try to purchase something and it doesn’t work, just email us.

 

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

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

New Painting Post

48 North Magazine Cover for November

 I write a monthly feature page for this magazine, 48-North, and occasionally they put one of my paintings on the cover. This month they have my sketchbook story about moon snails and the cover painting is of our 1940 classic wooden Monk sloop, Sea Witch. Wow! While we sold the boat to a Canadian couple two years ago, I still have vast and fond memories of this craft, and of the four big boats we’ve owned, for me Sea Witch was the best – a perfect boat. This painting is called “Otters on the Dock” and when I painted it, I offered it up as a totem to the two river otters that would occasionally pay us a visit and poop all over the cockpit and bright work with stuff that is too awful to even think about. I thought that maybe if I payed homage to these two, they’d cut it out. No such luck.

As I go down memory lane right now, 30′ Sea Witch is a pretty famous boat in the Northwest, having been used as a floating adventure for not just Nancy and I, but also Jo Bailey, who for decades used the boat to write countless cruising stories and several books. Also in the painting are my summer dockside geraniums. There’s a sweet wooden sloop without an engine that my neighbors would sail in and out of the slip with only an oar to stop them. Sparkle in the back that was by far the fastest wooden sailboat boat in town, and the Portside Deli (a fine place for lunch or afternoon coffee). But marinas evolve, and today the only subjects of my painting left in place are the engineless sloop and the otters. And I’m not sure about the otters.

Here’s a photo of Sea Witch at her launch in 1940 in Seattle, sent by Pete VanAtta, son of the gal christianing the boat. She was the daughter of the builder standing in the back.  These old boats seem to create extended families.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

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

New Painting Post

Moon Snails

Here’s my monthly article for 48-North magazine. This will be published in the November issue in a couple of weeks, and I also get the cover! If you click on the image, it should enlarge so you can read the story easier. Quite some critters, these moon snails.

 

The Twins: Photography by Nancy Cherry Eifert

On another subject: On June 8th, I blogged about our backyard fawns.  We currently have 9 deer that come and go in our little meadow. Some pass through and we only see them occasionally, but thanks to Nancy’s efforts at handing out apples to all comers, this spring we had two moms that produced three fawns. This photo was taken around June 1st. This second photo below was taken of the same twins just the other day, October 16, making them about five months old. That’s the same apple tree as in the first photo. They won’t take apples directly from our hands, but I think they would if we spent some time coaxing them. Mom’s still here too, and the three of them spend considerable time standing in the grass patiently waiting for the next cut-up apple. For East-coast readers, these are Columbian black-tail deer, much smaller and more delicate-looking than either mule or white-tail deer.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

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

New Painting Post

The Porpoises vs The Dolphins

Football! So, that said, this has NOTHING TO DO WITH FOOTBALL. Just a short weekly post about nature.

Here’s my page for October’s edition of 48 North magazine. Sailing off Port Townsend, I often see fins darting about. Not shark fins but more dolphin fins. I know they’re porpoises, but almost everyone else thinks they’re dolphins – so, here’s my bit of interpretive education using art. Nancy says I just can’t let a single person go by me without going into a full-blown classroom session. I admit it, I’m a hand-fed product of Virginia and Herman after-all; she: nature writer, lecturer and he: museum education cureator. The other day at 6,000 feet on top of Hurricane Hill, a couple of hikers were watching a hawk. “Don’t know what it is, maybe a falcon or something” the guy said to his wife. “Northern Harrier, female. Used to be called Marsh Hawk, but they renamed it” I said as I passed them by. He didn’t hear me, so I said it two more times before they both got it. “You just CAN’T let it go, can you?” whispered Nancy. Probably not!

So, click on the porpoises and you can more easily read the text. My parents would have approved! Sure as pigs have wings, it’s not likely you’ll see a dolphin in the Salish Sea.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

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

New Painting Post

Plumose Anemones – Flowers of the Sea

It shouldn’t have happened, but I think a few of you received a duplicate of the last post. Sorry ’bout that. Even after 5 years, Mailpress blogging software is something of a mystery to me.

This is my sketchbook page for  the August issue of 48 North magazine. I hatched this idea a few months ago while painting plumose anemones for an interpretive panel at Glacier Bay National Park and the more I learned about them, the crazier they seemed. We have these critters here in the Salish Sea and Puget Sound too, and they just seemed ripe for another few paintings. I think they’re a most amazing animal and really sensational to paint. That an animal is built like a beautiful flower is tantalizing for a painter of nature.

Here’s the story that goes with with sketchbook.

Next time you’re down on the docks at low tide take a peek down a piling into the water below. See any big white flowers attached to it that are waving in the current? Those are plumose anemones, and flowers they are definitely not! They’re actually animals, predators on the prowl for small larvae and other tasty organisms that pass by.

 While they look permanently attached to the piling or rock, if attacked by a sea star or nudibranch anemones can instantly leap for safety in an ungainly jump. In fact, large solitary anemones can be found far away from the vast gardens of larger family groups, showing they really can do a ‘walk about.’ Anemones begin life when a fragment from the base of a large anemone breaks off and grows into a tiny but genetically-identical new one. These clones start life as one sex but changes to the other when it is older. Quite a critter, don’t you think?

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

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