Tag Archives: Easel Paintings

Hiking, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Wildlife

North Fork Nooksack River – a new painting

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.

Thanks for reading this week.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

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 stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

National Park Service, New Painting Post

Bounced Light – Sol Doc River

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.

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.

Hiking, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Wildlife

North Fork Sol Duc River – a new painting

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.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

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 stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

New Painting Post, Wildlife

Owls in The Alder

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.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Commissioned paintings, Murals, National Park Service, New Painting Post

Glacier Park sloppy mural details

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.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

New Painting Post

Wet Winter Road

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.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

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 stunning photography

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

New Published Story

Tidepool Sculpin – My 48 North story for September 2018

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

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 stunning photography

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

Waysides, Wildlife

Dismal Nitch – Chinook Salmon Story

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

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 stunning photography

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

New Published Story, Wildlife

Anemones – My monthly magazine story for August 2018

I’m a bit late on posting some of my 48 North magazine stories. Just too many interesting paintings happening that always seem more current. This one was the story pages back in August, so that meant I painted it in June. I promise, I’ll catch up to current soon.

And here’s just the art. It’s watercolor and pencil, brightened up with the computer before assembling the story with a readable font. I’ve tried this with my own lettering but it’s just not nearly as readable. 48 North magazine is here.

I have over 70 stories in past issues and you can read them on my website here.

I did another plumose anemone story before this one. Here it is from 2027,

And here’s the story:

Plumose Anemone

Look down the closest piling at low tide and chances are good you’ll see these animals. Yes, they animals, animals that look like flowers. Animals with deadly stinging tentacles that can move around and even grab, kill and eat small fish. There are many species of anemones in the Salish Sea, some tiny inch-wide creatures that congregate in colorful crowds, others can be two feet tall. The plumose averages a respectful 12” tall and can have up to 100 tentacles that sting and grab any morsel that floats by. The meal, often microscopic, is then transferred down into a waiting mouth, throat and stomach to be consumed. Remember Little Shop of Horrors? This is an oceanic equivalent, except there are millions of them under our docks and floats. Low tide might expose them to air, in which case they sort of fold up like a deflated balloon and wait for the incoming tide.

Anemones can move about, leaving one spot behind when it senses danger or a lack of food. When it does, it simply walks off, but leaves behind some anemone DNA and from this a new anemone will grow. In summer, it also creates and releases sperm and eggs that drift around until ‘things happen’. This animal is well-armed, as I said. It possesses two types of stinging tentacles, the most common is for stinging prey, a second set is for defense. These can elongate 2 or 3 times their length and reach out to attach anything passing by – think stinging nettles on your favorite river trail. Others from inside the body can be shot through the body column or mouth to do the same attacking. Basically, this beautiful animal may look great but it’s a killer if you’re a small witless creature swimming past. So, here’s the drill: at low tide, put your stomach on the dock, peep down the piling well and have a look for yourself. You won’t regret it.

Thanks for reading this week – and the entire year for that matter.
Larry Eifert

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 stunning photography

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

New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

Lime Kiln Point – Orca Wayside Art in the San Juan Islands

This painting is one of four for Lime Kiln State Park, west side of San Juan Island and Friday Harbor. If you want to see whales in the Northwest without getting on a boat, this is the place. Well, technically, you have to get on a ferry to get to the island, but you get the point. On a summer day, there can be hundreds of people lined up here on the cliff to watch the killer whale show right in front of them – and soon they’ll also be immersed in my paintings as well. 

After adding the text to the panel, words and art go together fairly well on this one. Two panels are in the six-foot range, but this one is half that. The others are coming soon and I’ll try to post them as we go along.

I lived six summers in Friday Harbor when my first bigger boat, 40′ sloop “October” was here – and I had my gallery in Ferndale, Ca. This was in the 80’s, and I learned to paint the Northwest here. I’d go out to Lime Kiln Point and watch these big guys come right up to shore. Later, when Nancy and I lived on our 45′ Monk “Rumpy”, we’d come up from Port Townsend and lucky timing once put us here when an entire pod was too. We stopped the boat, turned off the engine and watched, shocked, as the entire family casually swam under us. The big male was bigger than the boat, or so it seemed. No one touched, we were thrilled, dry mouths and all. And now my art goes on shore. Paint hard, live long and connections like this happen all the time. I’m constantly thrilled at this life-long deep connection to nature. Not much matters more except the lovely person I share this with!

Thanks for reading my stuff 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 stunning photography

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