Tag Archives: Big Walls

New Painting Post

Swan Song for Necedah

This should enlarge if you click it. You can also see it on the blog at http://larryeifert.com/wordpress

Just one last post with the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge murals because I think I’ve messed with this as much I can possible can. A month ago there was a beautiful clean and white wall. Perfect! Or at least that’s what I always think at that stage – and then I started painting the darned thing. March vanished, along with the white wall. On the last post I said the reception would be March 6th (tonight 5-7 at Union Bank), and I think everyone knew I was mentally-strained because no one called me on it.

Someone once asked me how I knew when a painting is finished. “When I’ve spent the money!” But that’s not really a decent answer, because the money-thing has never been that much of an issue with me. The real answer might be: It’s finished when I can’t stand to look at it anymore – and after 35 days, I’m at that point, so it’s time for a divorce. As Dan Hicks sang: “how can I miss you if you don’t go away.” Sometimes it takes me years before I can stomach to look at something like this again, but sometimes when I see it again (well, sometimes), I actually like it. Sometimes I look at it later and I wonder who painted it. Sometimes I look at it and wish I could try again. Who knows that this one will be.

Whichever this is, it’s finished so let’s move on. At 130 feet, it’s one of the most complex big walls I’ve painted in awhile and it was a bunch of fun. Thanks, Nancy, for holding the fort, the business, the house, the meals and all the rest together for the month. Oh, and she did a bunch of painting too. I gauged it at 40 days. I finished 5 days less than that, mainly because of her.

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. There’s a good essay there on her anniversary of being a runner for 36 years!!

New Painting Post

Necedah Murals – Into the Forest

Yes, I’m into the forest and final week of this project – woo, woo.

Or not! At the moment I feel like I’ve lived for the past month in this beautiful place, surrounded by wolves and deer, woodpeckers and sandhill cranes. Like our own place here in Port Townsend, I know each and every tree, fern and critter – and don’t necessarily want to see Necedah National Wildlife Refuge leave my life – but it is leaving.

WEDNESDAY: 5-7pm FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY (for local readers of this blog)
Nancy and I are hosting a little openhouse this Wednesday evening as a going away party for the painting  as well as a thankyou to the bank for studio space. Wednesday, March 6 upstairs over Union Bank (formerly Frontier Bank) 2200 Sims Way in Port Townsend – from 5 to 7pm. That’s right next to Akamai Art – the best art store in Washington where it’s been so great to walk next door for that next round of #2 brushes.

It’s been an interesting project and it looks like this is going to work. The sketch was 15 feet long, painting is about 40 feet. The final digital imaging will be 130 feet – a far better experience for me than my usual scaffolding – up-down, up-down climbing around like a monkey – process. There are some changes I’d make for the next one, but I’d do it again tomorrow. I just love creating an entire world first in my head and then making it come alive on the canvas. I think it keeps me young, fresh and relevant. I was wondering how my 64 yr-old fingers would survive a rather long month of 6 days a week, but they did just fine. I’ve always heard that painting was an old man’s game – now I’m sure of it.

Our local paper, The Port Townsend Leader, did a very nice front page feature story this week, and you can see it here with some good photos. (thanks, Kathie – you did good)

Thanks for reading this week. Next week I’m back to projects for Mt St Helens, Mt Diablo and the new visitor center at the Schulman Grove of bristlecones. Never a dull moment around here!
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’s been posting some Necedah mural images on her blog too.

New Painting Post

Day 12 – Necedah Refuge murals

Here’s the next installment of the progress on the two murals for Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin. This photo represents about a tenth of the entire project. On the final installation, the image you’re looking at will be about 10 feet tall and 25 feet wide. Click the image and it should enlarge.

 This area is pretty much finished (the color’s a bit off since I photographed it under evening lights – sorry).  As a studio visitor said when I was working away on another section “while you paint, you don’t ever want to glance left or right down that long expanse of canvas, do you?” Right! Way too depressing – like I’m painting the Great Wall of China. Nancy’s been a true painter-partner on this project, doing the thankless duty of painting base textures and background – like millions of blades of grass. It truly steps up the pace – hear that, Michael? These big paintings, at least for me, are all about texture – fuzzy, messy and subtle colors that start from a very dark and stack up to a final highlight on top. Lots of layers! As it goes on, there becomes a mysterious point when it almost becomes a real place when you’re standing right on top of it.

Thanks for reading this week. Stay tuned for more progress.
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

Necedah Refuge Mural Sketches

This week it’s another sketch for the Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin. (this image should blow up larger if you click it) I begin the painting on this next week, and I’ll make sure I send some in-progress images as things progress. I must be getting better with my habitat knowledge, because of the entire 140 feet of sketches (no, I didn’t do them full-sized), I only had a half-dozen things that needed fixing.

That’s a lot of critters! I loved doing these drawings – it’s art that really can’t be sold very easily, but I sure like to do it. It’s also a skill that’s critical to all else that follows, like the painting itself. Without a good foundation sketch, the painting would fail, or at least take much longer as I fumble around with it.

This is a landscape I know pretty well. I grow up just a few hundred miles south of here, and my family often went north past here to the boreal forest of bogs, lakes and pines, the closest really good “nature” to the kingdom of central Illinois. It’s a wonderful transition zone of grasslands, marshes, uplands prairies and open softwood forests. It’s a mix I enjoy painting, because there are few broad-leaved trees. South from here you leave the pines behind and get into all those broadleafed oaks and open prairies -which means TOO many leaves and TOO many blades of grass to paint.

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.

New Painting Post

New Mural – Exploring the Nearshore

Nearshore of the Elwha River

For the past few months I’ve been working on some projects centering around the dam removals on the Olympic Peninsula’s Elwha River – located about an hour west of here. This painting has just been finished, so I thought I’d pass it around. You and the clients are both seeing it for the first time! It shows the shoreline, Olympic National Park behind, the Elwha River delta on the right – and of course the critters and plants that call this place home.

This is a collaboration between Olympic National Park and Feiro Marine Life Center in Port Angeles, just to the east of where this scene is. One of the big beneficiaries of freeing the Elwha will be the unrestricted flow of nutrients, sediments and drift material from the river into the ocean and then along this shoreline. The river has been blocked for almost a century and this beach is pretty starved, not only because of the dams but also because the shore is ‘armored’ with boulders (read: very bad for critters). In this scene, I’ve hopefully given you an idea of how dynamic and complex this place should be. The painting is destined for the Feiro Center, along with other panels that will tell the story of this, the largest dam removal project in our history. I’m pleased and proud to be part of this forward-thinking environmental project.

These big paintings are always fun for me. I just never get tired of figuring out how to somehow ‘build’ all these 3-D plants and critters into a somewhat realistic and complex world of only two dimensions. It’s a real puzzle. If I continued working on this painting, it would become a very tight and almost photographic work, but I’ve always thought they should be more an “impression” of a scene, and so I try to paint them that way – in an impressionistic style. While it might look realistic on your screen, it’s actually fairly loose in technique.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to. If you know others that might enjoy my musings, they can sign up on the blog page – or by sending me an email.

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, Uncategorized

An Eifert Look to the Marine Life Center

Feiro Marine Life Center gets a dozen Eifert exhibit panels and new “look”.

 (Click the image and it should enlarge)

The Feiro Marine Life Center in Port Angeles Washington. We’ve been working on this for a seven months now, and it’ll be probably another year before it’s completed, but I thought I’d pass some of it around here today.

The place needed some freshening up, so they asked us to help. Much of this is centered around the ‘big deal’ that’s coming down locally in Olympic National Park – the removal of the Elwha River dams, largest dam removal in the US to date – and it really is a big deal, at least around here and at least for me. I’ve been involved with the dams project for several years now as a provider of art showing what the river will look like post-dams, so it was logical I also help create some exhibits about it at the Feiro. Here’s a link to some of that other Elwha River work.

The image above is only the quickie-watercolor concept sketch, but I thought it interesting enough to pass around. Everyone sees the finished products – complex paintings or big visitor center exhibits – but few see where it starts, the basic skin and bones of ideas. And while it may (read: probably) not end up this way at all, it’s a good view into the creative process. So here goes: This wall is actually three times longer than this. It goes off to the left where there are also windows, so to keep it simple, I just focused on this area for a concept sketch. The sign is all they really requested, which includes a changing banner up top for programs. I’ll do all that here in the studio, but the rest will likely be done on-site. We went to the big Seattle Aquarium for some field research into how kelp and fish look underwater, how fish circle, and how light filters down into the ocean. The two herring balls – thousands of little fish circling for protection, will mimic the oval sign, and the octopus encircling the sign shows a popular critter they have in their tanks. There will be more and larger fish, likely salmon, and more extensive bull kelp, but this shows the basic idea.

Stay tuned, I’ll send more as this goes along.

For local readers: Nancy is opening a show of her photography at Gallery Nine in Port Townsend Saturday night, 5:30 to 8pm. Come on down and see her new work.

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.