Tag Archives: Easel Paintings

New Painting Post

Low Water – High Contrast

I get a charge out of finding little back corners in nature, dark places that look as if they’ve been created from a painting, sort of reverse art. This was one of those places. North Fork of the Nooksack River, a wild and crazy place during a storm, but as the sun set here in late summer a few months ago, it was as soft and ‘painterly’ as they come. And in a few minutes the sun was gone, color was gone, light was gone and it was as if this scene never happened.

 

When I was growing up and probably like some of you, my parents read all those classic adventure novels to me each night. I fell asleep listening to tales about the Last of the Mohicans,  the black spot in Treasure Island, Tom Sawyer and Huck – all illustrated by my hero NC Wyeth. I remember I would always sit on the left side of the book so I could study the cover art when it tilted a bit. That was 60 years go and I still try to paint like that guy. Father of Andrew Wyeth, American painter of even bigger renown, he was a large man that left a huge legacy. Wyeth’s style featured deep shadows, moody warm ocher light that, at least to me, always looked like the canvas was glowing from within – like there was a light bulb behind it. And those shadows – well, let’s just say there were wild critters lurking in every one, even if you couldn’t see them. The colors in this painting come straight from NC’s pallet, and of the 8 or so colors I use (that’s about it, total – just call me cheap), all were his too. If you don’t know about NC, Google him and see where I came from – or at least where my pallet came from.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $160 unframed.
We have custom wood frames that would make it a total of $185 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.

New Painting Post

Light in the Meadows

I painted this a few months ago, but larger stuff kept getting on the weekly blog. I painted this because I was struck by the misty air here that almost made the ground and creek glow. On the far edge of the flood plain the alders were really lighting up, like a spotlight had been trained on them, but in a few seconds this all changed when a cloud moved over us and changed the light from warm to cool. Gone, but I still remember the moment. It’s what paintings are all about, chasing those glorious moments of memory. Too many giant paintings have been coming out of this studio in the past few months and I’m sure ready for some of these “moments” here.

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

On a more ‘retail’ note, the website is finally coming back together and by the rate of people buying Christmas stuff, it seems to be working Okay. I’m adding the prints and puzzles, journals and stuff every day, so stay tuned for more as the experience gets richer. http://larryeifert.com/shop is the portal, but you can also get to it from the website simply at http://larryeifert.com

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

Harlequines Are This Month’s Sketch Page

 Just click on the page and it’ll enlarge.

 

What to paint for my December 48-North magazine page? Well, I was hiking on the beach trail in Port Townsend and two beautiful harlequin ducks were just sitting there on a rock, eyeing me carefully and getting nervous. I stopped – they looked. I immediately wondered if these were the exact same ducks I saw in summer up on the Dosewallips River? Could be, but not likely. After that day on the river, I painted this 24″x48″ acrylic of that spot where the river was roaring in full spring run-off and the alder leaves still in bud.

 

If you read the magazine page at the top, you’ll see that harlequins spend their summers up in the mountain rivers diving in the near-freezing glacial melt waters for insects. Winter comes and here they are in our backyard (well, almost) doing the same in the Salish Sea  -where waters are considerably warmer. I’d like to think I saw the same two birds, but the best thing about birding is that I’ll never know.

 

I’m still rebuilding the web store for jigsaw puzzles, posters and prints and it’s coming along. If you try to purchase something and it doesn’t work, just email us.

 

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

48 North Magazine Cover for November

 I write a monthly feature page for this magazine, 48-North, and occasionally they put one of my paintings on the cover. This month they have my sketchbook story about moon snails and the cover painting is of our 1940 classic wooden Monk sloop, Sea Witch. Wow! While we sold the boat to a Canadian couple two years ago, I still have vast and fond memories of this craft, and of the four big boats we’ve owned, for me Sea Witch was the best – a perfect boat. This painting is called “Otters on the Dock” and when I painted it, I offered it up as a totem to the two river otters that would occasionally pay us a visit and poop all over the cockpit and bright work with stuff that is too awful to even think about. I thought that maybe if I payed homage to these two, they’d cut it out. No such luck.

As I go down memory lane right now, 30′ Sea Witch is a pretty famous boat in the Northwest, having been used as a floating adventure for not just Nancy and I, but also Jo Bailey, who for decades used the boat to write countless cruising stories and several books. Also in the painting are my summer dockside geraniums. There’s a sweet wooden sloop without an engine that my neighbors would sail in and out of the slip with only an oar to stop them. Sparkle in the back that was by far the fastest wooden sailboat boat in town, and the Portside Deli (a fine place for lunch or afternoon coffee). But marinas evolve, and today the only subjects of my painting left in place are the engineless sloop and the otters. And I’m not sure about the otters.

Here’s a photo of Sea Witch at her launch in 1940 in Seattle, sent by Pete VanAtta, son of the gal christianing the boat. She was the daughter of the builder standing in the back.  These old boats seem to create extended families.

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

Sunlight on the River Bend

An easel painting is for this week’s blog. Lots of big projects winding up here, details, details. Lots to keep track of. Then we were in Portland for two days doing some research on a new set of commissions and it just seemed to smell like fall with a hint of coolness in the air in the mornings. So, this bright little painting seemed appropriate.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $140 unframed.
The gold frame makes it a total of $165 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.

New Painting Post

My New Portfolio Is Ready To Erupt

For some years now I have had a cd Powerpoint portfolio I send to clients, parks and contractors who give me these great commissions painting nature. Keeping the thing current has always been a challenge, but nothing like I used to deal with back in the dark days when things weren’t digital. It’s a great way to present what I might do for future projects or references of what I have painted, printed and produced. I also had a second disk for some of my easel paintings that was wildly out of control, so recently I’ve been working on a new version of all of it. This new one is a composite of both portfolios, and at 147 pages, it’s almost a book. I’ve also put it all together into one big presentation and divide it into clickable sections with a Table of Contents for easy viewing. So, there are murals, wayside exhibits, big walls, dainty ink drawings, watercolors, acrylic paintings on canvas, publications and other stuff like jigsaw puzzles and posters, nature guides and tours – the works, and all on one little disk.

 

It’s now ready to fly, so if you’re a park interpreter, design firm for nature interpretation and installations, past client or just interested in a copy (free) to have ‘just in case’, I can now mail one out to you. Just hit the reply key and give me the scoop, but please, no requests from my easel painting collectors. Sorry, but how much time do I have for this when I’d rather be painting?

 

And, a brand new 500-piece jigsaw puzzle is coming out this week, so stay tuned, oh my many faithful puzzle people. This one is of the mural I painted for Kenai Fjords National Park in Seward, Alaska. It shows the ecosystem emerging from the melting toe of Exit Glacier, and the only other place you’re going to be able to buy it is at the new Visitor Center there or through Alaska Geographic. So, it’s either a luxury cruise, a long flight and a rented car, OR, you’ll be able to get it from us! Come to think of it, options one and two don’t sound all that bad.

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

Rialto Beach Float

 

 Quite a pile of wood, don’t you think? This new painting was inspired by the few days we spent kicking around the Olympic Beaches of Rialto, Ruby and Third Beach a few weeks ago. Each time we hike this stretch of beach north out to some of the best tide pools anywhere, I’m struck by the designs of all these dead Sitka Spruce trees that line the high-tide mark. It’s quite a jumble, and I finally came to grips with how to paint it. I don’t think it’s quite finished, but I heard some comments on my NOT posting last week – “and I hope you’re Okay?” So in the spirit of almost 200 posts in 200 weeks, finished or not – here it is.

On the same beach we saw many (like 8 in one view) drift floats with Japanese characters on them, along with other tsunami trash like the grapefruit juice container I blogged about a few weeks ago – and so I thought I should add that to the painting too. Look in the lower left-center. The actual float was much bigger, but if you look carefully on the photo below you can see the Japanese maker’s marks just above the seam. This one was just coming into the surf, and I had to do a fancy dance to get it ashore. Radioactive? I hoped not.

This ORIGINAL painting “Rialto Beach Float” is varnished acrylic on hardboard, 24″ x 48″ and $1200 unframed.
Because we have a wholesale account with the frame suppliers, we can also supply a custom frame to match it at much less than your local framer. 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. She just opened a new show at Gallery Nine in Port Townsend this month.

New Painting Post

Heather Pass

I painted this back in October, 2011 when we were in Washington’s North Cascades. It made it past the scan, into a frame, into the blog – but I never hit the “Post” button. For the last eight months the canvas has just sat there in my studio and also on the blog software – and the title stares at me each time I start the program. “ME, ME, Post ME” it screams, but each week I’ve sent out something else I thought was more interesting. But, now that the High-Country around the West is melting out and trails are beginning to open up, maybe it’s time to show this one.

Here’s what I wrote all those months ago, thinking I would post it then:

Heather Pass is a good 3-mile climb in the North Cascades, and while we’ve been here twice, neither were in late afternoon when the sun was doing this yellow-orange-thing. The last time we were here, there was a lone hiker camped just below this heather-filled bench, and I envyed him for his upcoming sunset and evening solitary view. Beside his single tent was a back-packer’s expresso maker, and this little spring runoff stream in the painting would be his coffee water the next morning. If there’s a reason why spending the night in a place wouldn’t be anything but glorious, I can’t think of it.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $140 unframed.
A custom wood 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 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.

New Painting Post

The Dosewallips – Spring Runoff

Click on the painting and it should enlarge in your browser.

No presketch on this one, so I can’t show you the process – it seemed pretty clear so I just started painting. After Nancy posted our exploits along the Northeast Olympic’s Dosewallips River a few days ago, and thereby beat me to a post about its stunning beauty, I put aside a couple of more serious projects to finish this painting up. I was moved by the late afternoon sun was streaming through the canyon and really lighting up the streamside alders. It just seemed like a painting, which it now is. With a big snow pack upslope quickly turning to water, the river was loud, frantic, seemingly in a very great hurry to hit the ocean just a few miles downstream to the east. What a place! What a place to live – and paint!

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished board, 24″ x 48″ and is offered here for $1200 framed. 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. Can you hear the river’s roar?
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

Yellow Rowboat

Click on the painting and it should enlarge in your browser.

A classic double-seat rowboat with a wineglass stern of the Whitehall design, this is one of many similar boats at Lake Union’s Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle. I just love the two blue paint swipes on the oars – the only paint anywhere on the boat, and masked off to hit the water at just the right angle when someone is rowing with them.

For me, it’s a painterly study of reflections and bounced light, the subtle way varnished wood both brightens wood color, and reflects the glow of sky light. If you know me, you understand I think of these historic craft as sculpture, the perfect union of form and function. There’s nothing frilly on this boat at all, and every piece of wood is there for a purpose that’s been worked out through trial-and-error. Yet there isn’t a single thing that was put on to make it more beautiful for the sake of beauty. It doesn’t need it. Even the cotton (not synthetic) string holding the asymmetrical oarlocks to the boat has a graceful arch. Some say art should be thought-provoking and culturally relevant of today’s society. I’d say this is just that, showing how far we’ve fallen from the desire to create functional beauty – but don’t get me started about today’s constant mantra of cheaper-is-better.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on board, 14″ x 20″. The custom gold frame with linen liner has a second inside gold edging that measures at 18″ x 24″ on the outside.
Including the gold frame as you see it here, Yellow Rowboats is offered for $690. 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

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. Her sea otters are hot. She had a feature color front page story and inside as well this week in the Olympic Peninsula’s Peninsula Daily News.