Tag Archives: Alaska

New Painting Post

Glacier Bay National Park aquatic painting

Images should enlarge if you click on it.

Here is the second painting for Glacier Bay National Park. Two weeks ago I posted the first one showing an above the bay – below the bay painting of the same ecosystem. Both paintings will be made into outdoor panels and installed on the dock at Bartlett Cover in the Park.

Both of these have been fun and interesting for me, because there are great similarities as well as great differences between Glacier Bay’s aquatic landscape and ours right here in Port Townsend a thousand miles to the south. Some of the critters on these pilings are much bigger, some are smaller, and some are different colors and shapes. It takes some close study to figure it out, learning about one species at a time.

And here’s the preliminary sketch. I get a lot of mail about seeing the evolution of these paintings from concept to sketch to final painting. This one started out with a dock and gull, railing and all sorts of stuff hanging underneath. They even found the blueprints for the dock so I could see what it looks like underneath, but in the end all that was nixed for a cleaner design. What a difference, 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. She now has more sea otter pup images posted.

New Painting Post

Wilderness Art for a Wilderness Park

90% of the people who visit Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park come on a cruise ship, and most never get off their boat. But those few that do come ashore get to experience a fantastic ecosystem so complex as to boggle a nature-painter’s mind. This painting and exhibit will get front-row seating in Bartlett Cove, the main staging area for people who have the mind and spirit to personally experience this pristine place – and it gives me a permanent little art gallery on the dock! How cool is that?

I just finished this painting two days ago – so it’s still out for approval. This is the first of two images I’ve been working on for Glacier Bay. They both show the critters living between one of the biggest tidal ranges on the planet. Tides here can swing as much as 25 FEET in one cycle, and all that rushing water makes for a pretty rich table, or, as the caption says: “When the tide is out, the table is set”.

I’ve always loved working with the National Park Service. Unlike many, these folks are not in it for the money – but for the good of nature and society, and I just don’t see much of that anymore. As an example of the lengths they go to so I get the best information for a painting, they sent me a little video link a couple of weeks ago. Photographed in a BLIZZARD and with the staff on skis, it showed where this installation will go! Don’t tell me these folks don’t have their hearts in the right place.

Thanks for reading this week. The second painting will be ready soon.
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. Sea Otters, oh my.

New Painting Post

Exit Glacier – Kenai Fiords National Park

Commissioned by the National Park Service and funded by Alaska Geographic for the new nature center in Kenai Fiords National Park. My task here was to show the ecosystem of this emerging landscape so recently covered by the glacier. You can see the trail winding through a young forest populating the outwash plain of the giant glacier connected to the even bigger Harding Icefield (bigger than the state of Rhode Island). Just a few miles from Seward, Alaska, this is one of the few glaciers you can actually walk up to and touch. It’s a bright summer scene, the way most people see it, but when we were here in September everything was already turning ochre and there was a rain and flood-event going on. I blogged about that on September 14, 2011 when I got the location sketch posted here. A few weeks later I posted the finished sketch here. It’s fun to see the evolution of the painting from concept to finished mural, but I know you guys don’t like to click through, so here’s the concept sketch again, but this time as it was happening (photo by Nancy Cherry Eifert over my right shoulder).

 And here’s the sketch drawn back here in the studio.

Soon there will be a high-pressure laminate panel of this painting for the center. Since it’s closed in winter, no heat, and it IS Alaska, it was decided that the original will hang downtown in the main offices. Next spring we’re hoping for puzzles and other products, so stay tuned.

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

Tern Lake – Kenai Peninsula

While on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula recently I did some preliminary stuff for a few paintings when I returned home to the studio. Here’s the second one, inspired when the late afternoon light was streaming through a mountain notch and lighting up this marshy lake. The golden atmosphere made the air really glow. These mountains were so high and steep I just couldn’t get their tops in the painting, but the blue atmosphere up there gives you a hint of what’s high above. We saw mountain goats in the upper meadows up there, tundra swans and green-winged teals on the lake. It was a soft environment just holding its breath for winter to begin.

What always strikes me about Alaska every time  I’m here is the pure enormity of it all. I live next to Olympic National Park, and it’s a big park – but if you took the time to walk across it, you’d eventually come out and find towns, streets and stores on the other side. It’s like an island of wilderness in the midst of civilization. But Alaska isn’t like that at all. If you walked into THAT wilderness, you simply wouldn’t ever come out the other side. Civilization is a small island within nature. One trail we were on there had a wildlife sightings list at the trail head. It said:eight bears, one moose and calf. So, as we started down the trail Nancy noted that we were 9th on the food chain. It made for a much more heightened and self-aware hike.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $140 unframed. Now click on the framed image and it should enlarge. Notice this version doesn’t have the trees on the left. I added those today, so the painting below no longer exists exactly like this. Notice the difference? No, you don’t get it without the trees!

This mahogany frame with a custom linen liner makes it a total of $165 (and we have other frames) and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details. SOLD, SORRY

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

Red-legged Kittiwakes

I’ve never painted this bird species, and in Seward Alaska recently there were lots of them at the SeaLife Center, so, I just had to take a stab at a painting. We heard someone trying to describe the white on kittiwakes as “the whitest white.” I’d go farther. To me it is so white as to be a void, as if touching one would put your hand into a cosmic hole so deep and profound is that lack of color. They’re a very localized species, nesting on offshore islands of Alaska and spending winters in the Bering Sea, and their populations are down by about a third in recent decades as are most pelagic birds and sea animals around there. Black-legged kittiwakes were there as well, and we saw them on rocks just like this out out in Resurrection Sound with the Stellers sealions near the caving glaciers.

It’s always thrilling for me to see a creature as soft and vulnerable as this making a home in such a forbidding and harsh place. I tried to show that in the colors. Glacier-sculptured rock, windblown and water-blasted cliffs are this creature’s life, never mind the winters of driving snow, ice and hurricane-force winds. And we complain about so many unimportant  and casual things. What do they complain about?

 This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $160 unframed.
A mahogany frame with linen liner makes it a total of $180 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print, but prints will be available soon.
Email us for details.

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

Field trip to Alaska’s Kenai Fjords

We spent this past week in and around Seward, Alaska, and let me tell you about glorious! I’m to paint a mural of the ecosystem for Exit Glacier Nature Center at Kenai Fjords National Park, and time was running out – our window fast-closing for a snow-free field trip. We made it! And in all our travels around Alaska, we’ve never seen it more stunning. Fall was passing with each day, and the colors, well, the colors were pastels of every shade from pale emerald to cottonwood golden, alder ochre to raindeer lichen gray. We couldn’t get enough. You know those rare moments with nature when everything seems too perfect to be real? This was a week of it.

The sketch here was drawn on location beside a raging river at flood stage, but the painting will actually be about the emerging forest ‘downstream’ of the glacier and how it’s evolving out of the glacier’s rubble. For us, the real story here was how far the glacier has receded since our last visit in the late 1990’s. Climate change is seen everywhere here and so obvious and evident that anyone who doesn’t believe this is happening at a very great rate is dumber than the dirt the glacier grinds out of the mountainside. When we got there, a huge hurricane-sized storm had rivers ragging and roads covered (another sign of climate change is abnormally large storms) and with the park road closed we had a rare tour of tourist-central without any tourists.

Everyone complains that we never publish photos of ourselves together, but we’re always photographing nature and not us. Well, here’s one I took in the Seward SeaLife Center. The camera was on the head of a sealion sculpture and the monitor right below my camera. Good enough? Thanks for a very wonderful field trip goes to Kristy and Christina, Doug and everyone else who helped for making us feel very much at home. The painting will come in a few months and I’ll post it then. For now, we’re still enjoying memories of golden mountains and gilded glaciers. And yes, we saw enough Steller sealions, bears, moose, sheep, goats and whales to keep anyone happy.

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.