This second round of little oil studies are mostly sold, but the top few are still available. Drop me an email at larryeifert@gmail.com if you’re interested. This probably won’t be a Christmas gift unless you live on the Olympic Peninsula.
They’re either linen canvas board or stretched canvas, mostly 5×7, framed outside measurements are 7″ x 9″. Shipping isn’t much as they’re small paintings. Email me if you’d like: larryeifert@gmail.com
Nuthatch Nest Hole sorry, it’s sold.
Song Sparrow portrait study. sorry, it’s sold.
Red-breasted Nuthatch still available at $95 framed. Oil on canvas board.
Olympic National Park alpine meadows SORRY, IT’S SOLD
Brown Creeper portrait study: Oil on canvas board 5″ x 7″ $95 framed.
Chestnut backed Chickadee – Sorry, it’s sold.
Oregon Junco on yellow willow leaves. Sorry, it’s sold.
11″ x 14″ Song Sparrow in winter twigs. Sorry, it’s sold.
After a very long time, I recently circled back around to painting with oils. Here are some that are currently available. I started with this medium a half a century ago, and I just thought it was time to get back to it. There’s a color glow with oils that acrylic can’t get, at least I don’t think so.
I’m still making paintings in acrylic and watercolor, still have a bunch of new projects scheduled for parks (Hawaii Volcanoes right now). But these little 5″ x 7″ paintings (that’s the canvas size) are using various fluid mediums as I’m trying to find my footing with this. For some, I used linseed oil, some with odorless turpentine or a mix of both, some with an addition of either cobalt drier or Liquin (a dryer). All are now far enough along to offer them here in a series of blog posts.
This one is a black-capped chickadee on a lichen-covered branch. SORRY, IT’S SOLD.
Barn swallow in flight, as I worked out painting wet on wet.
Golden-crowned kinglet from our little forest here, taking a winter nap in the leafless branches of a willow. SORRY, IT’S SOLD.
It’s been a few months since I posted my recent paintings here. Some of my subscribers have written asking what’s happened, but it hasn’t been for lack of work to show – I’ve been busy. In fact, it’s been on of the busiest years in decades for both of us. I’ve decided that’s really no good excuse, so expect to see more soon.
This painting is 16″ x 20″ acrylic on canvas, and is available. Email me if you’re interested at larryeifert@gmail.com. It’s also available with the nice Taos school inspired frame (like you see here) and I already have a shipping crate ready to go. The offering price framed as you see it here is $950 – shipping cost is extra but it will go double boxed UPS.
The Nooksack River, just south of the Canadian border in Washington State. It’s one of our favorite Northwest rivers because it drains water from two of the greatest Pacific Northwest peaks, Mt Baker and Mount Shucksan. North Cascades National Park: big mountains, big glacial power, and the river valley shows that with miles of beautifully sculptured river rock. I’ve painted this area before, but pulled this painting together after I found an unfinished canvas just waiting for me. For some reason, I started this then it just sat there. I especially liked the way the foreground goes blue at the bottom, showing the sky overhead, the water tinted with glacier flour that always makes these river more aquamarine than cobalt.
Someone already asked me about the ducks in the painting, a pair of common mergansers, male has the green head. In the Northwest, these guys spend winters out in salt water. Then in spring, mated pairs head back up rivers to nest in tree cavities beside their grocery stores – the rivers. Their routine is to float leisurely downstream from pool to pool, diving for fish, sometimes resting on a rock in midstream. Then they fly back upstream and start the routine all over again.
This, believe it or not, this was my model for the painting. I like to take an idea and just make it up into a painting that’s far beyond what I originally saw. Let’s see, bigger rocks, add the birds, make the thing glow with Hudson River School late afternoon light.
Again: This painting is 16″ x 20″ acrylic on canvas, and is available. Email me if you’re interested at larryeifert@gmail.com. It’s also available with the nice Taos school inspired frame and I already have a shipping crate ready to go. The offering price framed as you see it here is $950 – shipping cost is extra but it will go double boxed UPS.
For those not from the Olympic Peninsula, the Sol Duc is one of the most beautiful rivers here, and I’ve painted it many times. In fact, if you drive the 17-mile park road from the gate to Sol Duc Falls Trailhead, you’ll pass 24 Eifert paintings along the way on turnout signs, exhibits and information kiosks. Like an art gallery in the old-growth.
This little painting is actually of the North Fork of the Sol Duc, a fantastic hike that goes up and over a ridge before dropping to a thigh-deep ice water crossing requiring boots and pants off. On the other side, it just doesn’t get any nicer, with plunge pools carved into bedrock and a meandering trail that plows up the canyon to the river’s source. Of course, in the dead of winter, this painting is just a nice memory of it, and that’s why I painted it.
This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $149 framed as you see it. Outside edge of the frame is about 12″ x 15″. This custom frame has a triple liner and glass. Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print. Email us for details.
This painting is 16″ x 20″ acrylic on canvas, and is available. Email me if you’re interested at larryeifert@gmail.com. It’s available with the nice Taos school inspired frame and I already have a shipping crate ready to go. Shipping would be extra but we usually ship UPS so it won’t be much.
This painting was inspired by a day hike up the North Fork of the Sol Duc River in nearby Olympic National Park. Not many hikers get here, as it requires a breathe-taking thigh-deep river crossing, but it’s worth every icy step. Once on the east side of the river, the trail goes for miles along the banks, from pool to pool and finally turns into a vague rambling through streamside brush. In places there are sandstone-scoured potholes, meadows beneath huge big-leaf maple groves, just a glorious Olympic ramble. This place has produced several paintings from me, all similar, all emotional light studies of this pristine river’s journey from alpine down into the main stem of the Sol Duc.
Where does this trail start and end? On Olympic National Park’s Sol Duc River Road there’s a parking area just a quarter mile upstream from Salmon Cascades. The trail heads upslope on the east side of the road, the drops to the North Fork in half a mile past the ford. It’s about eight miles upslope to an old CCC shelter, then a few more miles to Mount Appleton and Blue Lake. While the main Sol Duc trail system is mobbed in summer, almost no one makes it this pristine place, just a raven’s flight of a couple of minutes.
This painting is 16″ x 20″ acrylic on canvas, and is available. Email me if you’re interested at larryeifert@gmail.com. It’s also available with the nice Taos school inspired frame (like you see here) and I already have a shipping crate ready to go. The offering price framed as you see it here is $950 – shipping cost is extra but it will go double boxed UPS.
This painting is for sale, so drop me a note at larryeifert@gmail.com if you’re interested.Click the image and it should enlarge in your browser.
This is an original acrylic painting on canvas, 18″ x 24″. A Certificate of Authentication is included. Outside dimensions with the frame is about 25″ x 31″ The framed painting is $1300. Frame options are available. We have a double-boxed professional box for this to ship in, and it has moulded styroform forms inside for protection.
This painting is about the barred owls that have moved into our little patch of forest. We used to have great-horned owls, saw-whet and western screech owls, but these interlopers have run them off. I’m not sure where the nest is, but it’s close, and we occasionally have these guys on our tray feeder, or attacking our windows when they see their reflections. They can’t seem to get along with anyone, even themselves.
Here’s the presketch I did for the design. You can see my idea of lining up the heads in the upper center-of-interest area, then bringing the alder trunk down into the foreground.
This is a very old alder and it’s right outside the window, so my model is close. I very picturesque tree, don’t you think?
I put together my usual video talking about the painting on YouTube, which is here on my channel. If you want to listen to me yack about this painting, just click:
And below is a previous version. Close – I didn’t feel it was quite right yet. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what’s changed.
Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.
I posted about this painting of Glacier National Park recently, and now I’ve scanned it for the next step in becoming the back of the park map. As I was scanning and then cleaning up the file in Photoshop, I was struck with how loose and abstract my stuff gets when you zoom in on it. Brush strokes, smudges, finger prints, cat hair, my hair (what’s left of it) is all in here, stuck down forever. I think it’s a good view of my painting process, so here are some samples I screen-grabbed as I went.
This first one is the ptarmigan chicks in the center foreground. Notice the while lines around the heads to help bring that out from the background. And the vague indication of the rocks that are only a few brush strokes building from dark to light. Not detailed at all, none of it, but it still suffices to tell the story. Click on all these to see larger versions in your browser. It helps understand what I’m showing.
And here is the ram’s head on the painting’s right. In the closeup details on the second image, you can see it’s really just a gauzy overlay of white that makes for the final presentation, and you can see again that this entire animal was initially painted dark umber to begin with.
Lower left corner with the snowshoe hare and butterfly, it all works pretty well at this resolution, but blow it up so you can actually see the brush strokes and it’s pretty darned abstract.
And finally, the area around the elk, flowers and sedges, alpine landscape with the stream. It looks okay at this normal resolution.
But as I zoom in on it, the thing falls apart fairly quickly.
If I presented this in a gallery situation, would it work? Probably, because people will buy anything = witness the last presidency. But there’s not much fine detail here except some dabs and dashes of paint. What I’m trying to get across here is that big paintings are really just that, dabs and dashes. I get questions about my process and I’d have to say here that it’s all just dabbing and dashing, splashing paint on a flat surface and standing back every few minutes to see how it’s going. In the end, it’s a huge finished thing that looks okay, but every moment is just abstract art in each very tiny area – then repeat over and over.
What IS this, anyway? What an abstract or maybe even non-objective piece of art.
Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.
A new easel painting appeared between a couple of larger park projects. I continue to happily paint all these big public art pieces but it helps to create a bit of of whimsy on a smaller, looser scale. So, here’s a happy little place, at least for me.
This painting is already sold, sorry. Just a show-and-tell here.
This painting was a collaboration with Nancy. We’ve never done this before, even after 25 years of working together on giant walls and making a living selling our individual efforts. We painted this together, each of us doing some, then the other moving forward and fixing the other’s deadends. I think it resulted in a refined and well thought-out painting. We might even try it again. Maybe next time I can get her to sign her name.
Over the years, I’ve learned a lot about color values and painting low winter light. It’s far more interesting than painting anything in summer – absolutely anything. It takes some time and thought to keep the image slanted over into a monochrome pallet of similar values, mix each with a bit of all the rest, and save the center-of-interest for the only intense place to blast away with slightly more color.
There are lots of layers in this painting, as you can see, but they’re all on a level of dullness to not get excited about. The road beckons the viewer to join us in a walk up the road, dodging puddles, to discover what’s just over the ridge.
Never got around to posting this in the midst of a bunch of much bigger paintings, but this was my September magazine page for 48 North magazine. It’s late to post here, but I always want to leave a record of my stuff to keep track of it all.
Sculpins: a quick little color study of these tiny fish that live in rocky tidepools in the Northwest. There are many reasons to make these little guys (smaller than your thumb) featured here, but my favorite is the rather homebody lifestyle they have. Simply put, they like where they live and never stray far. Sure, they can live out of the water through an entire tidal change, and sure, they check out other pools as far away as a football field, but they always return home, and to the same pool!
Here’s a closeup of the little guy, loose pencil and watercolor. I don’t give myself much time on these and I like the process because it’s so very different than many of my bigger projects that are tight and detailed. Compare this with the 500 square feet of Hoh Rain Forest paintings I was doing at the same time I did this little sculpin and you can imagine the relief of starting and finishing something in the same session. Ahhh.
And here is the text that went with it in 48 North magazine:
Go ashore – poke around tidepools, and chances are good you’ll find this little sculpin. It might take a bit of looking, because their habit of secrecy means staying put, not moving a fin and waiting for you to pass by. Superbly camouflaged, these small 3.5” fish settle to the tide pool bottom and blend in so well with sand, crushed shells and bits of seaweed they just disappear. Put your hand over the water and, like a flash, they shoot forward to a safer place. It’s still the same tidepool, so just watch them flash, settle, and then have a good look. As the tide returns, sculpins could move about to other areas, but they have a home pool and rarely stray far. If moved, say 300 feet to another tidepool, they return to their original pool, not unlike salmon returning to spawn to their home stream.
There are five sculpin species here and all are carnivores, hunting small crustaceans and seaworms. In turn, they are hunted by all sorts of predators from herons to otters, so sharp spines that take the place of scales are protection as they live in a confined space with no escape. Sculpins occasionally get stranded out of water at low tide, beneath seaweed or under rock ledges. Not to worry. These fish can breathe air until the water returns a few hours later. Other fish can do this, too, and it begs the comparison to when fish crawled out of the water for good and took to the land in an evolutional move that eventually became us. Think about that next time you see one of these little fish. Is that you, grand dad?
This is the tidepool where I did much of the research for this story, Beach 4 at Olympic National Park. It’s one of our favorites for a low-tide poking around.
Thanks for reading this week – and the entire year for that matter. Larry Eifert
I like this Chinook salmon painting but it’s going to change, so I thought I’d post it here so at least there’s a memory of it. What’s wrong with it, you ask, well, the National Park Service says it’s not fat enough! Welcome to MY life, and I guess I’d agree. They have some compelling reasons – so, back to the easel.
Here’s the entire fish. The final painting will go on one of seven waysides stands at the Dismal Nitch area beside the Columbia Estuary, part of Lewis and Clark National Historic Park. This is where ‘The Corps’, in 1804, spent a week hunkered down, starving, wet and miserable before a group of Chinook Indians paddled by and sold them some salmon. It’s a good story, and one I knew from my childhood when Virginia wrote a book about the wildlife and flora this bunch found and named, not to mention the Lewis River, Clark’s Fork and others. Now, here I am 50 years later painting exhibit art for the same place! The apples didn’t fall far from her tree, did they?
This painting of spawning salmon is one of over a dozen I’ve painted in the past couple of years, most for salmon restoration areas around the Salish Sea where I live. I’ve gotten much better at understanding these amazing fish and what they look like, how they live and suffer in their final days in fresh water. They feed us, they feed the riverside forest trees and all the creatures that live next to salmon streams. They’re not a gift to be taken lightly.
Thanks for reading this week – and the entire year for that matter. Larry Eifert
