Tag Archives: Easel Paintings

New Painting Post

The Eighth Dipper

Dipper-8

Click the image and it should enlarge in your browser window.

I recently painted another small dipper painting for a very nice client in California. What, another dipper? Yes, and then looking at my dipper reference photos I turned right around and painted this one.

I seem to be evolving into a real dipper-connoisseur.  What’s not to like? This little bird lives only by the cleanest and wildest of mountain streams, walks and flies underwater and builds its nest behind waterfalls. Dippers are equipped with an extra eyelid that allows them to see underwater, and sports scales that close nostrils tight when submerged. Dippers also produce more oil than most birds, which may help keep them warmer when they’re walking around underwater. If they migrate, it’s usually just downslope to open water so they can dive into icy creeks, and given a choice of flying the long way around or over a narrow bend, dippers will always take the long way to stay directly over their beloved stream. I was reminded that another name for them is the water ouzel. My mom called them that, and was known to drive 1200 miles west of Illinois to see one.

And here’s the reference photo I worked from. You guys always say you like to see how a painting evolves, so here’s the beginning – a photo taken with my little point-and-shoot last year about 3 miles up the Tunnel Creek Trail just near the shelter. This little guy was sitting on ‘his’ rock enjoying some sun, and stayed long enough for both Nancy and I to get some very tasty shots. Did I get the values close enough?

Dipper-8-reference

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.
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. She now has her own web domain name at virginiaeifert.com. What would she have thought about THAT?

New Painting Post

Black Turnstone

Rocks-Shells-and-a-Turnstone

Click the painting and it should enlarge in your browser.

So, we were walking our usual route along the beach trying to get the required 3.5 miles in so we won’t die any time soon. Late afternoon light, a pile of beach rocks, scattered shells and a bit of last year’s bull kelp. Then a family of black turnstones drifted by, twittering as they usually do, and when they all landed, it was as if they just vanished. That dark checkered pattern is so like beach stones as to be, well, beach stones. The entire scene felt like it was glowing, both warm and cool at the same time.

 

At first, I thought I’d put the turnstones in here as a group on the beach, but then they’d just disappear – so, I placed one as it begins to land. I suspect they’ve evolved these flight colors so they can see each other in flight, but once stationary, they need camo (which they sure have).

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on birch board 22″ x 28″ and is going in an upcoming gallery show. But, it’s available here without the gallery commission for $1100.
A custom frame is available, as usual, 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

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

Rialto Beach

Rialto-Beach-Sun-and-Fog

Close, but not quiet finished, I still thought I’d post this today. I’m in our library right now, looking up at this grapefruit juice carton we found on the beach at Rialto awhile ago. Tucked away on a bookshelf, it’s all bleached out but clearly says “grapefruit” with all the rest in Japanese. We’re fairly sure it’s tsunami debris. When we opened it, a giant whiff of grapefruit odor poured forth. So, that’s the spark for the painting – a memory of picking that container up last year and wondering who held it last – and are they still alive. In the painting, I replaced the juice container with a red float covered with Japanese characters, which we also found. The location is right at Ellen Creek, where most of the hikers turn around because of the wet ford.

 

grapefruit

 

 

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on board, 48″ x 24″ and is headed for Gallery Nine downtown in Port Townsend. This is the original painting, NOT a print. If you’re interested, email me for price and details. No gallery commission – yet!
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.

New Painting Post

Dipper on the North Fork Returns

North-Fork-Dipper
  • This is not a new painting, but this week we sold a large custom print of it. The painting itself is in our private collection, just because I liked it, and now I think I like it even more.  There’s a quality about the river’s transparency, of water-carved rocks glowing from within – and that reflected glow on the dipper. OR, maybe I like it because of the memory of the moment. That’s important now as spring slowly arrives here and I wish for warmer hiking days. We have 6″ high nettles up in our woods, daffs higher than that, the willows are out – and it surely is an early spring, but not earlier enough for us.
  • That moment: North Fork of the Sol Duc River in Olympic National Park. Hike up and over a little ridge, ford the river up to your crotch in blindingly-cold ice melt – and you’re on a truly glorious and empty trail for miles. In places there are huge water-carved boulders (where we saw this dipper dipping), and in August it’s a grand place for skinny dipping for sure. Thanks, Kevin, for buying the print so these memories could return.
  • I think this is why I’m just a painter of life’s memories. I can paint pretty good non-objective images and commissioned fictitious murals of some detail, but when I look back at all the paintings through the years, I get the best emotional charge from painting experiences from the times (good or bad) in my life. I think of the moment, the experience surrounding that moment, who I was with, what it smelled like, felt like, sounded like.

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

American Dipper 5

Dipper-5-8x10

    American Dipper 5 is a new original painting, acrylic on board, 8″ x 10″ and $140 unframed. This is another in my on-going search for the perfect dipper waterfall.

A custom 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.
Email us for details. I can send a photo of the frames we have available.

       And then there’s this: We spent the last couple of weeks working around the eastern Cascades near Leavenworth, Washington and day-hiking below the Enchantments. Amazing giant mountains, warm days and fall colors at their peak. Nancy gained some very tasty images for an up-coming show – and I found new material for more dipper paintings.

Nancy-up-Snow-Lake-trail

 

     Here’s Nancy hiking almost straight up on Snow Lakes Trail above Icicle Creek – ALL the trails are straight up! Hiking into the light reminded me that, for us, this is as close to realizing the divine as we know. For Nancy and me, pristine wilderness, land unaffected by humans is religious, a medicine and tonic for the soul. It’s important to us in many ways, but mostly it serves as the realization that this will be here long after we’re gone. In a way, it’s a sense of immortality.

    We trailer camped in an almost-closed up KOA right in town, and Harry the Cat had a rather amazing experience one day. He had not the foggiest idea what these American turkeys were, but actually seemed like he wanted to become friends with them – even came out and rolled around on the ground in front of them. Any one of them could have laid him low, but I guess I’m happy to report that we’ve raised a ‘soft’ cat with some sense of morality – if not mortality. 

Harry-and-Turkeys

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

Chickadee In The Soloman-seal

Chickadee-and-Soloman-11x14

We have new chickadees on the feeder these days, spring chicks that are now flocking as one big family. Chestnut-backed and black-capped, two species that all seem to live together easily. Seemed they needed documentation. Then I saw a false soloman-seal on a trail the other day that had berries, beaten up fall leaves – and I put the two into one painting. The soloman-seal has had its day and is almost ready for winter, foliage waning, berries awaiting some critter’s help in dispersal – the chickadees are young and full of it, dispersing themselves with great gusto.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on birch board, 11″ x 14″ and $145 unframed. Click the image to see an enlarged version.
A custom 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.
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.

New Painting Post

The Gulls at Ruby Beach

Gulls-at-Ruby-Beach

“The Gulls at Ruby Beach” is a new acrylic painting on canvas, 20″ x 40″ and offered here for $1750 framed. Email us for details if you’re interested. Click it and you’ll see enlarged versions of both these images.

  Ruby Beach is usually a vibrant and wild Olympic National Park beach, but on occasion in late summer the ocean can be more like a calm lake – little surf and almost no wind. We were there to see a sunset and it felt like this. It felt like warm coffee. The headlands beyond the beach aren’t quiet as close as what I painted, but it just seemed like I needed to stack up the levels of receding shorelines and show some abstract textures to that area. And maybe some of you will notice the big missing sea stack on the left side. No, not on purpose, but if you stand just here on the trail down to the beach, that big rock is more to the left and out of view. I think it works.

Gulls-at-Ruby-Beach-framed

 

Here’s a photo of the painting and frame that’s included. If you don’t want the custom frame, we can do that too. This is the original painting, NOT a print.

And, if you’re interested, you might go over to my Facebook Fan page and like it. I post lots of trail albums and other art there. See the link below.

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

American Dipper 4

Dipper-4

This ORIGINAL painting is  acrylic on linen canvas, 16″ x 20″ and $190 unframed.
This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

    Long ago, I saw some paintings of a South American rain forest. I have no idea who the artist was, but they were moody, dark, ethereal – and had this ‘feeling’ about them that a painter can only get if they’d actually been to a place like that. And it’s not just going there, but they would have to really get to know a place, not just how it looks, but WHY it looks the way it does.

    I think that way about this painting. If just feels like it really was. We’ve spent a spring and summer doing a lot of hiking, more than normal, and much of it has been beside these pure, ethereal and pristine Northwest rivers that are unlike any others I know. The water is often blue-gray because of ice melt far upstream, streamside moss and salmonberries are sculptured gardens of lush green and fresh life – never dusty and tired-looking. And that little dipper. It just keeps reappearing in these paintings, over and over, the symbol of wilderness and these Northwest waters.

    Last week Nancy and I backpacked into Royal Basin in the Olympics – the epitome of these types of landscapes. For over six miles we hiked beside the Dungeness River, then Royal Creek, never out of earshot of its roaring and rumbling as it dropped through the canyon. We broke the climb up into two sections and camped so near the creek that all night I thought I heard voices – well, I guess I did if you consider rushing water to have a voice. The river-talkers were almost too loud at times.

River-camp

Towards the top, Royal Lake appeared, encircled by some of the highest peaks in the Olympics – and we were the only ones camping here. Somehow, this dipper painting needed to be posted afterwards. So I did!

Royal-Lake-and-Mt-Fricaba

Thanks for reading this week. There’s an album of these trip hikes on my Facebook fan page.
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

Gallery Nine Show in Port Townsend

Eifert_Union_Wharf_Gulls

“Gulls at Union Wharf” is an acrylic painting, 14″ x 20″ on board and offered custom framed for $795. This is part of my show opening September 7th in Port Townsend at Gallery Nine. Email me if you’re interested.

Gallery Nine in Port Townsend is where both Nancy and I show. It was just voted best art gallery in our county (and that includes Mount Olympus and the Blue Glacier).  It’s not the first time. In fact, by my count, Gallery Nine has won that award four out of the last five years, and I think for good reason. It’s a happy, fun and fairly prosperous place considering it’s remote location, and the wine and goodies at the monthly gallery walk aren’t bad either.

 

This original painting has been in our collection for awhile now, but it’s time to let it go. This was our boat for over a decade, and I did some major restoration on her. It’s a somewhat historic boat with a nice pedigree, and I still miss it. The painting was actually to commemorate the new sails we just bought. Notice the new sail ties, the pure whiteness of the main (soon to change after some use and stress). They match the color of Nancy’s hair that is just barely visible through the open hatch (that got that way by use and stress).

 

I’ll be in the Wooden Boat Festival this coming weekend with our new boat, a Lightning named Thriller, and the gallery show opens on Saturday evening from 5:30 to 8pm with wood-turner Chuck (CW) Stern. Come down for both and say hi and help me sell out the show on its opening night. I’ll be on the boat most of the weekend.

 

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

Dipper Bobbing – Dungeness River

American Dippers cannot seem to just stand there, but have to constantly bob up and down. This one was at the bottom of the bob.

I just have this thing for American Dippers and clear, rushing little waterfalls. So here’s another painting of my favorite little bird, mainly because we’ve seen many of them on our recent summer hikes. Dippers were also John Muir’s favorite bird. He said it was because they only live along the cleanest mountain streams and represented what’s best about American wilderness. They never stray from rushing water. Given a river bend, dippers will fly the long route around instead of short-cutting across the neck. They build nests of moss and twigs behind waterfalls, so the chicks are wet from birth. Now here’s the best part: dippers feed by jumping into the water, sometimes barely above freezing, and with wings open for balance, they just walk around underwater kicking over stones looking for aquatic insects to eat. It’s as if they’re oblivious to the fact it’s water at all. They can jump into a huge current, and then appear someplace completely different, at home just ‘ambling around’ underwater. Pop, they’ll just jump out of a pool and sit for a moment on a log, just like this painting shows, seemingly without a drop of water on them. In fact, come to think of it, I’ve never seen a dipper actually shake off water.

 Here’s where I saw this little guy, the Dungeness River up in the Buckhorn Wilderness, featured today on the Wild Olympics website and just 20 miles from home. It’s the second steepest river in America, falling 7700 feet in just 28 miles.

 

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $145 unframed.
This custom frame (sorry, color seems a bit off in the photo) with a 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. I have other frames of various styles too.
Email us for details.

Sorry, but it’s sold.

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.