Tag Archives: Deer

New Painting Post

Ratfish – My 48-North Page for May, 2014

2014-5-Ratfish

This is my sketchbook page for 48-North magazine for May. Almost forgot to post it while it was still relevant. I caught one of these crazy-looking fish a few years ago (while I was still fishing), and hauling this over the gunwale made me wonder why I continued to sit there with a pole in my hands. They’re pretty crazy-looking critters. Below is the story that went with it.

“Have you ever seen a ratfish? Odds are you haven’t, and yet these odd-looking creatures make up fully 70% of all the fish mass in the Puget Sound main basin. Their family name, Chimera, was a mythological monster with a lion’s head, goat’s body and serpent’s tail – pretty close if you toss in a rabbit’s nose with two incisor teeth. Where are they? Rats like it deep, looking for clams and worms on the bottom at 250 feet, which probably accounts for their covert lives, but when I caught one once off a dock in Port Ludlow, I thought I’d hooked a space alien. And I’m here to witness that they bite – just like a rabbit does with those incisors.”

“Why are there so many? No one knows for certain, but I’d imagine an unhealthy ecosystem might be a place to start looking, because nature needs diversity, not one species that takes over. I used to think of rats as strange and ugly, but as a painter, I now see they are truly beautiful, with glowing green cat’s eyes, copper orange and blue shades of glimmering white spotted skin and that rabbit nose. Gliding along on bat wings, they’re not speeders like salmon, and yet the ratfish has been around for 300 million years – a true survivor – and as we eat our way down the food chain, the rat will eventually come be on our plates beside cockroaches and algae.”

2014-5-fawns

And I just had to add this of our deer. Our 2014 crop of black-tailed fawns are all over our meadow – two singles and one set of twins. Four fawns, three moms and all jockeying for position, attention and learning how to live together. It’s quite a visual feast.

Thanks for reading this week.
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

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

New Painting Post

Meadow Fawns

Another of my recent “Meadow Herd”, this one was painted from a reference photo from a year ago – but both are still here. This week we’ve seen several females vanish from the backyard-bunch. I’m thinking they’ve found a quiet place to birth the next batch of fawns, and hopefully we’ll see the results soon. One was looking like a definite candidate for twins. The two in the painting are still in the meadow, grown but not willing to take on the big guys for space at the food dish. In fact, there’s a big buck with infant antlers that actively chases them away, snapping like a dog at their hind legs. Yesterday, another buck with budding antlers was eating from the dish while I held it, and that was maybe too close for my comfort zone. A big animal, and I kept remembering a story from Yosemite a few years ago where a buck actually killed someone. While they’re fun to have around, they ARE wild animals.

 

And here’s one of the twins a year later, taken just yesterday. Just growing out of its winter coat, he’s looking a tad shabby. Yes, that’s a backyard swing. It hangs on a big horizontal branch of a big-leaf maple that’s 30-feet up. Quite a swing-g-g-g-g-g.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $140 unframed.
A custom wood frame makes it a total of $170 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. I can email you a photo of the frame if you’d like.
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.

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

New Painting Post

Old Buck

“Old Buck” is the fourth of my “Meadow Herd” paintings. This old guy has been here the longest of all our current dozen Columbian black-tailed deer. In fact, as I write this he’s here right below the back deck. This was painted from a reference photo I took last summer when he had his  horn-hat on, since currently there are only little knobs showing where this year’s antlers will be. I took the photo when he was all excited about a female prospect (who denied him and ran off into the forest seeming either laughing or in a panic to get away, or so it seemed) and I thought he had this look of pure softness, like he was pleading with her for acceptance. I’ve practiced this pose myself, by the way, but rarely need to resort to it!

These deer, Columbian black-tailed, are a subspecies of the more common western mule deer, and are smaller by far – but you’d never know it standing next to one. When a male puts his mule-shaped Roman nose out, he becomes a fairly daunting creature. That ‘look’ doesn’t happen until they’re a couple of years old, and when it does you can really see the genetic closeness to the ‘mulies’.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $120 unframed.

The custom wood frame makes it a total of $140 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.

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.

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

New Painting Post

More Paintings of Our Black-tails

Last week I posted a painting of one of our backyard Columbian Black-tailed Deer. Remember: Apple Please? This week I’m showing two more. (Sorry, but the little fawn above was taken quickly and isn’t available.)  A year ago we had two does that birthed three fawns. There was another mom that showed up occasionally with twins too, and one afternoon they were all here at once: three moms with FIVE fawns! It was crowded, but everyone seemed to get along Okay – but what do we know. The more I watch them, the more I see the social life of these guys seems very complex.

 

This painting is of the dominant doe that’s been here for years – the mother of the fawn above.  She has this look! See the way she just pierces you with that blank stare? She’s checks out the house, circles around it to find out where we are – which room we’re in, then comes right up to one of our big windows where she gives us the ‘stink eye’ for a handout. No movement, no blinking, no acting coy or cute, she just stares until you give in. Cats do this, we know (boy, do we know), but a 160 lb deer doing it is something else again. And Nancy gives in pretty quickly: “okay, okay, meet me at the back door” and it’s as if the deer understands completely. Back door it is!

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.

I have a nice gold frame on it for an upcoming  gallery show, which makes it a total of $160 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you want to take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

 

Thanks to everyone who have been buying my new Virginia Eifert Kindle books. Amazon doesn’t give me a list of buyers, but lots of people are rediscovering her work – including me. Three up, seventeen to go.

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.

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

New Painting Post

An Apple Please!

“Meadow Herd #2 – Second-year Buck”
8″ x 10″ acrylic on canvas. 

I’m currently working on a painting series of our “Meadow Herd” of 12 Columbian black-tailed deer – that’s right – 12! This one is of the sweet but persistent velvet-antlered buck that was birthed two years ago. He’s still here, along with a total of 11 others that seem to never stray far from the house. The other morning 9 were in the meadow at once. When we moved into the ‘Lodge’ back in the 90’s, hunting was still allowed in the ‘neighborhood’. The deer were here, too, but always moving, passing through, edgy. Early mornings, we’d sometimes hear gunshots down in the estuary and figure it was probably out-of-work ex-logger-types in a desperate situation and in need of protein for their families. Now there are no shooting zones here and in Port Townsend, and the deer are everywhere, calm, friendly, stopping traffic, creating gawking tourists who, at first, think they are mechanical yard ornaments (well, maybe they are).
Oh, and then there’s Nancy, happily feeding them apples, pears, buckets of oats mixed with molasses – right out the back door of the barn! The local feed store-guy told her that he sells dozens of 40 lb bags of the stuff each WEEK  to Port Townsend deer-feeders, and she’s one of them. What, you say? You’re FEEDING them? But she doesn’t see any difference between the chickadee feeder and a deer bowl – and I get models for paintings. (The photo below was taken a couple of days ago from the office window.)

 

It takes patience to live with wildlife on the Olympic Peninsula. We sometimes forget that this isn’t just a normal American suburban place – we forget that wildlife is more plentiful here than people. I mean, there are only 9,000 people living in Port Townsend – but there are over 5,000 elk on the peninsula.

 

We have bats in the shingles (I washed the roof and 7 flew off of just one pitch) and we hear them come and go each night. Squirrels continually prob any weak spot to get into the attic or crawlspace. I’ve counted almost 90 different species of birds and critters either on the ground or flying over the property. If you count the deer, snakes, chipmunks, weasels, bobcats, raccoon and the rest, I’m sure I see many more critters than people in my daily life – and for a life-long painter of nature, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Sure the roses get eaten, the bulbs are chewed on, the flowers chomped down to nubs, but we also have 200-lb. deer going nose-to-nose with our freaked-out cat on the inside of the window. It takes Nancy’s breath away when a full-blown bucks just stands there as she brings him a bucket of oats – as he snorts at her from 24″ away. It’s a very high Quality-of-Life thing that I can’t imagine NOT having.

And so, this ORIGINAL painting of “Meadow Herd #2 – Second-year Buck” is an acrylic on canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $125 unframed. The custom wood frame makes it a total of $145 and shipping for either adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print. And I’ll bet that one of you starts a collection of these – especially if you’re from Port Townsend. I have four finished with a fifth almost there.
Email us for details – and I can send you a photo of the frame.

 

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.

Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. We now have three of her books available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Schulman Grove Pinyon Pine Forest

(If you click it, this will enlarge in your browser)

This is the second of the three Schulman Grove bristlecone paintings for the new visitor center east of Bishop, California. A few weeks ago I painted the first one of the alpine area that will go on the far right side. Now this one goes on the left side and shows pinyon – juniper forest. Overall size of these three is about 17′ x 5′. If you look at the upper right of the painting, you can see the bristlecones growing up at 10,000′, where the middle painting is sited. That’s the High Sierra in the distance.

Pinyon pine nuts have provided food for people, birds and animals for as long as they’ve been growing. Because of this, the Forest Service requested a gathering party of Native Americans be added to the mural so they can interpret that on the reader rail below. That seemed awkward to me, because it places it as historic and out of context with the other two. What to do? So, I set an amber value scale to the painting to make it feel like an old sepia-tinted photo. I’m hoping it will still go well with the other two paintings, but there’s a very different feel to it.

A busy time these days as I have a show coming up at local Gallery 9 in Port Townsend. I’m enjoying the back and forth between huge mural canvases and looser easel paintings. There’s a lot of paint being tossed around.

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

Big Ink – Big Deer

 We’ve been getting around. Bishop last week, this week it’s finishing up some art for Mt. Diablo State Park in California. This is one of eight for a wall collage for the historic WPA visitor center high atop the mountain. I did a bunch of art here over a decade ago, which is now completely worn out, so here I go again. Thanks, Karen, for believing I should continue (and even expand on) this legacy for another couple of decades. Last time around, I did the ink sketches, then hand-painted the outside illustrations using airplane model paint. It lasted better than a decade, and if it weren’t for the ADA requirements forcing new exhibits, I think they’d have lasted another few years. This time it’s a bit more modern in its presentation and technology.

As I said, this deer image is one of a group, and it’s not a small painting either – 24″ square. Ink and watercolor at large size takes some time to create. There are about a million lines here, and it’s not for the faint at heart to create, that’s for sure. One slip and it’s in the trash! But if I’ve learned one thing in 40+ years of doing this stuff it’s that good craftsmanship takes time. Lots of time. And today there seems to be a real lack of understanding this. Everyone seems to love reaching the finish line, but no one like getting to it.

Well, I like getting there more than finishing. I like the process.

Thanks for reading about my stuff 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

Where Are The Black-tails?

Deer-Wet-Meadow
 Where are all the deer? I asked that yesterday, realizing I hadn’t seen one in our meadow for a long while. (click the painting and it should enlarge.

We’ve created a pretty critter-friendly habitat here in our little patch of forest and meadow, and the wildlife know it. We’ve kept a count of our critters over the years and now have a ‘yard list’ of over 80 species. A salt lick for the deer, a couple of feeders, no outside pets (especially cats) and over the years we now have Douglas squirrels patiently waiting right on the feeder while we dish out the morning seeds. Two hummers are still overwintering. The Cooper’s hawk juvies still fly around overhead freaking out the towhees and chickadees. But the deer? Don’t know!

All summer we had two families of deer – multiple fawns in tow. We’re in a no-shooting zone around here, so when Fall safely progressed, alters appeared on the bucks and lots of coy antics went on it the meadow – lots of racing around like they were all schoolyard kids. But then (with hunting season the last two weeks in October) the deer just vanished. It must just be habit. They’re safe here, and they seem to know it, judging by their ‘almost’ taking our homegrown apples out of our hands, but, poof, they were gone anyway. Now, in a couple of months I know they’ll be back, females with a new one or two in their bellies. It’s a cycle of life I know I can depend on – but what’s the deal? Why don’t they just stay?

Black-tailed deer in a wet meadow:

No deer, so I painted one. This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
The gold frame 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, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

To read my other blog entries, check the blog here.

Thanks for reading this week. It’s a window into our little artistic world here.
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.

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

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New Painting Post

Black-tailed Deer – Port Townsend Trail

Eifert_Deer_Larry_Scott

Just west of our marina and downtown Port Townsend, an old railroad grade goes along the bay before turning inland. This is now a public trail, part of the great Northwest Trail that goes from Cape Avala, west of here, all the way to Glacier National Park in Montana – three states and 1200 miles away. And while it’s a hiking trail like the John Muir, Pacific Crest or Appalachian Trails, here you have to climb on our ferry for a few miles to keep going east.

Coming into town, there’s one place under the bluffs where, late in the afternoon, black-tailed deer like to congregate. You eyes focus on the marvelous views ahead and they often miss the fact you’re being watched yourself – but Port Townsend deer are pretty tame, having been raised from birth on the garden roses, apples and all manor of tasty plants carefully bought and planted by the locals.

This is a larger painting today. This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on archival board, 14″ x 10″ and $650 unframed. If you’d just like the painting framed, that makes it a total of $690 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is an ORIGINAL painting, NOT a print. Email us for details.

To check the availability of the other originals I’ve blogged about the past few weeks, check the blog here and go down the listings.
Thanks for reading this week.
Larry EifertClick 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.

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

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Uncategorized

Olympic High Country

Obstruction Point – Olympic National Park

This image is destined to be made into jigsaw puzzles, posters and probably cards for Olympic National Park. I’ve wanted to paint this scene for years. From this ridge, if you turn 180 degrees, it’s possible to see our home forest 25 miles below in the distance. This is the dry side of the Olympics, and because of its isolation, there are many plants and animals that have to evolved to grow only here – the Olympic Marmot, Olympic Chipmunk, Olympic Weasel and others.

It’s a special place for Nancy and I that few ever see. The original painting is 24″ x 36″ and is acrylic on paper board. It’s currently available for sale.