Tag Archives: Easel Paintings

New Painting Post

Wish I Was On This Trail!

With rotten weather and the short dark days of Winter Solstice upon us, I just felt an urge to have a summer walk in the woods – so I painted one. It’s no place in particular, but it’s also every place I’ve ever hiked on the West Coast – redwoods, Doug-fir, silver fir, maybe Sitka spruce trails. It could be the Trinity Alps, Olympic’s Hoh, Mt Rainier’s Carbon River or possibly the Dosewallips right near us. It’s all those late afternoons I’ve spent lingering on a trail in the warm sunshine not wanting to head home. It’s smelling ancient forest duff, filled with centuries of life that are slowly decomposing into the next generation of trees. And, for a painter, it’s the way the light bounces from tree to tree, warming the colors of some, cooling others, hinting at more detail than I could ever paint.


Email us for details.

To check availability of the other small originals I’ve blogged about the past few weeks, check the webpage here.

Boy, I sure got a lot of mail last time with the hummingbird-thing. I heard from people all over the country who have hummers attempting to stay the winter – really cold places too, like high mountain communities and along the Canadian border. Come to think of it, WE’RE along the Canadian border. We can see it from the beach. If you wonder if Climate Change is upon us, these hummers are great local examples. I’ve also heard from a fair amount of doubters, saying the BECAUSE of the feeders, these birds are here, but we didn’t feed them until AFTER we spotted them, months past when they should have migrated to Mexico. One writer said she had a hummer outside trying to get something out of a frozen feeder. Maybe we’ll never know for sure, but it’s plain obvious to me.

Thanks for reading this week.
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. We’re working on a new website for her work that should be very interesting. Stay tuned.

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

Early Paintings, Nature Art, New Published Story, Posts about other stuff

Anna’s Hummingbirds and the December Deep Freeze

This is an older painting of mine, and the rhododendrons certainly in bloom, but I felt compelled to write about this week’s freeze and the little birds in our meadow.

From coast to coast, I know we’ve all had amazing weather this past week. The southern storms drove a giant blast of Canadian air down and west over the Cascades, and here we’ve had record lows for a week. Temps haven’t gotten out of the twenties, with nights down into the lower teens, weather we just don’t ever get in Puget Sound. None of us have clothes for this stuff. And while we’ve all been suffering, that can’t be anything compared to what our two wintering-over Anna’s hummingbirds must be experiencing. For all my decades around the Northwest, I’ve never seen hummers here in winter, but last year we had one stay all season, and we’ve heard we’re not alone with this. We put out a feeder when we spotted him, but it wasn’t because of the sugar water that he was here, because we put it out AFTER we spotted him. This year we have an adult and a juvie, and we were ready with a feeder (and a 150w flood lamp on it 24 hours a day after the freeze hit). So far it’s working.

I wrote about hummers a few years ago, and learned that they have ways to cope with this cold stuff. They have normal body temps of about 105-108F, with a sitting heart rate of about 250 beats per minute. However, at night they sleep normally, or, they can go into a turbid state where they actually drop their body temp to between 30 and 65 degrees (depending on need), and drop their metabolic rate to one-fifteenth of normal. In this way, they can maybe make it through a very long night of 15 degrees.

Before nightfall, they make one extra smart move. They find and remember where breakfast is going to be. Then, in the morning it takes upwards of an hour to fully wake up before flying. This requires a huge energy drain on this thumb-sized bird, and if that feeder is frozen when it gets to it, the bird is in big trouble (like a car on empty that gets to the gas station and the pumps are locked).

Temperatures are warming up now, but we’ve felt a great privilege to keep tabs on these two intrepid birds this week. Snow and hummingbirds just don’t go together, but if this is a sign of Climate Change, I’m happy with it.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff. We’re still shipping Christmas puzzles.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing with her photography.

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

Comments are good. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

New Painting Post

Red-breasted Nuthatch

If you click the image, it should enlarge. If it doesn’t click here for the web blog.
SOLD. Sorry to say, I sold this before I could get it up here. Thought I’d send it out anyway. I think it’s a nice little painting.

These little birds are constant neighbors here. I’ll bet we have at least five families around our meadow. We watch them from our dining room windows working the feeder, daintily picking at the suet cake and carrying away one sunflower seed at a time up to the safety of the nearest branch. Their voices are so thin and sweet as to sometimes sound like fluttering leaves. These guys normally feed by circling down tree trunks as in the painting, gleaning insects from bark crevices. They then fly over to another tree and start again. We have another bird here, the brown creeper, that fills just the opposite niche. It circles up the trunk, catching bugs the nuthatches miss.

 Did I ever say I take commissions? Lots of them. If you liked this one, I won’t do it again, but it’s always a treat for me to try a subject in a different way. This painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and we offered it for $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.

Thanks for reading this week. Nuthatches: It feels like I’ve just painted a family member 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. She has some interesting new work from the Seattle Day of the Dead Festival on her blog.

I recently put up a web page of many of my murals. I think there’s about 50 of them here. Check it out.

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

New Painting Post

Riverside Red Alders

I’m still whacking away on the bristlecone painting for Crater Lake Institute, but here’s something I did yesterday just for the pleasure of it. If you click the image, it should enlarge. If not, just go to the blog. I have more of these, but my web server has been ‘migrating’, so the blog has been shut down this week. Just what ‘migrating’ means, I’m not sure, but I wish I was doing some of that myself. Avalanche warnings are up in the mountains already.

For those reading from other parts of the planet besides the Northwest, red alder is a common lowland tree found in moist Northwest stream-side forests. They often appear after logging to revitalize trashed-out land and conveniently add nitrogen to the soil by ‘fixing’ it from the air. Our woods are full of them, so I know the tree well. In fact, there’s currently a red-alder log in the fire as I write this. It’s a very beautiful tree to paint because of the gray and brown, speckled patchwork trunk patterns. There are other alders, but this one has a sure identifier. The edges of each leaf curl under slightly right along the edges – a little fact that most field guides don’t tell you.

This original acrylic painting is varnished 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.

Thanks for reading this week.
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 on her blog and website. Pretty interesting stuff on the blog.

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

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

New Painting Post

First Serious Snow – Olympics

Click the image to see a larger version.

Boy, we’ve had some weather lately. Going into town yesterday, the eastern Olympics showed their best with fresh snow. Strong westerly winds were blowing it off Mount Townsend in great banners, and the clouds were alive. Mile-high Hurricane Ridge was supposed to have gotten 18″, and you can see this for yourselves here at the park web cam mounted on the visitor center roof. The camera lens is currently 90% plastered with snow and you could barely see anything. At night, even on a cloudy evening, you can still see the unearthly glow of the snow, but seeing it on a normal clear day (without the snow on the lens), the view of Mt. Olympus is stunning. The little thumbnail next to the web cam is what you’d see in the summer. This is only about 45 air miles from here and we go there often. And with the web cam, now so can you. Check back to see it ‘unclogged’.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $420 unframed.
The gold frame makes it a total of $445 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. Sorry, this painting is sold.

To check availability of the other small originals I’ve blogged about the past few weeks, check the blog here.

Thanks for reading this time.
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.

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

New Painting Post

Snow Creek Estuary

Happiest Halloween, Everyone. Tonight we helped hand out 40lbs of candy in downtown Port Townsend at Gallery Nine. 40lbs from our gallery times about 40 stores is a LOT of sugar! It was a wonderful home-time event for a bunch of very cool kids from towns as far as an hour away. My favorite was the H1N1 pig costume.

This week I was supposed to have the bristlecone mural all finished up and ready to show you – but other life got in the way, including new keel bolts for the boat and a maybe never-ending exhibit project now almost in its fourteenth month. But who’s complaining. Both those diversions were artistic in their own ways. The keel bolts kept that 70-yr old boat from sinking in the slip, so you could call it art-rehab.

I did, however, find some time to do this little acrylic of Snow Creek Estuary. (click on it to enlarge. If not, click here.) This place is very close to our studio, right here on the ‘back’ side of our local Quimper Peninsula. Snow Creek comes down from the eastern Olympics and drains into Discovery Bay, the site of George Vancouver’s first anchorage here-abouts in 1792. Few live here, and it still has a pretty healthy run of chum salmon. It was from here that ‘our’ Chimacum Creek got a hatch box full of these genetically-similar salmon eggs about a decade ago. Nature worked her wonders, and now there are over 1000 chum salmon that come home to Chimicum to spawn each fall, right below out house.

Just at dusk a few weeks ago, we stopped here for Nancy to do some photography, and while out in the meadows, we discovered a giant population of garden spiders, all sitting patiently in their webs for some insect action. These are some serious spiders, so we backtracked gingerly the way we had come. We felt we had intruded into their world – which we had.

And now, back to the studio and the bristlecones of the Great Basin.

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 check availability of the other small originals I’ve blogged about the past few weeks, check the blog here.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

This week I also remodeled the Interpretive Section of larryeifert.com and added some new projects.

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.

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

New Painting Post

Late Afternoon – Lillian Ridge Trail

Lillian-Ridge

SOLD
Obstruction Point area, Olympic National Park.
Acrylic on linen canvas – a small easel painting this time.

This trail is a favorite – I can’t paint it enough. It’s about 35 miles, as the eagle flies, west of our studio in the eastern Olympic Mountains – a serious set of rocks. I painted another version this last spring and posted it here in March. It’s not the amazing scenery or that it’s an almost level trail (well, that might be part of it), but it’s also the fact that, at over 6000′, it’s above any glaciation that’s ever occurred there. To walk here is to trod on the exact same stones and sit on the very same overlook that the mammoth hunters did during the last Ice Age. The shattered shale that crunches under my boots is unchanged, and I could very probably be the very NEXT person since that Pliocene hunter to sit on that rock and look for Olympic marmots, those alpine animals that are only found here. The only difference might be that it would have been the hunter’s dinner and not mine.

For an artist that wishes nature were a bit less mild these days, that wishes he were born a few years earlier so he could have seen more of our now-vanished legacy, this is heady stuff.

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

Still working on the bristlecone painting, but painting in the boatyard (our boat) has gotten in the way.

Thanks for reading this week. For new readers, I try to alternate between park interpretive stuff and easel paintings, but they’re all about nature. It’s what I’ve done for over 40 years.

Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive art and other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing with her photography.

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

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

***previous*** — ***next***

Murals, New Painting Post

Stream Stones and Bristlecones


Progress on the Bristlecone Pine mural
I sent out the pencil sketch for this painting on September 8. and now, after several review comments and changes only a dendrologist (tree scientist) would recognise, I’m moving along pretty well on the final. Many large-scale painters do a complete smaller image first, then recreate it in the larger final version. I’ve never been comfortable with that process because it seems like I’d just be painting something twice. It’d be like remarrying the same person you’ve already divorced – all those little issues you hated the first time ’round are still lurking there. Nancy and I have done several 90′ paintings without a finished ‘baby’ painting and it was truly exciting – for both us and the clients that were scared numb. Nancy once stated: “we are in SERIOUS trouble here” but we still pulled it off nicely. Next week I hope this’ll be close to finished and I’ll send another update.

But that’s not all:

Stream Stones

This is another painting from our recent alpine excursions. If you know your Pacific Northwest geology, you’d pick up that these stones are from the North Cascades and not the Olympics. Cascade stones are very much more diverse in color and texture – brownish iron oxides and lots of gray speckled granites. If you see these stones around the Olympic Mountain edges, they undoubtedly came there from scraped streambeds in the Cascades by way of the mile-high Cordilleran Ice Sheet 80 centuries ago, and they match pebbles you’d find in any Cascade river today.

You might think 80 centuries is awhile ago, but consider this: there are bristlecone pines in the White Mountains and Nevada that approach 50 centuries. And that’s the way I tie the top part of this entry with the bottom part of.

New Painting Post

Dipper Dipping

For local readers – This weekend we’ll be exhibiting at the Fort Worden Wildlife and Nature Exposition in Port Townsend. Hope you see you there.

This little dipper (or water ousel, as my naturalist-mom called it a generation ago) sat here for quite awhile. Dippers dip – up and down, up and down, almost constantly as if doing a little stationary dance, and this one did just that. It’s mate was close by, and as the dipping went on, the little bird made pleasant and soft chattering calls. Then it left my view by simply launching itself over the log and into the water – sinking out of sight. I thought this was a very ‘dipper like’ scene, so here’s my effort to hold on to that memory. The way the water curls over the partially submerged log made for interesting lighting changes.

Dippers are pretty crazy birds. They live year-round, thought the worst winter storms, around clean and cold high mountain streams, nesting behind waterfalls and always sticking closely to their local stream. Summer or winter, these robin-sized birds make their living by jumping into these chilly, sometimes icy, fast-moving crystal-clear waters to walk along the bottom, kicking over stream stones to find aquatic insects. I’ve heard they even hold their wings outstretched to pin them down in the current – which means they are even more exposed to frigid waters. This river (in September) was probably 50 degrees F, having just been released from a glacier up the hill, and it would be the warmest it would ever experience – so you get my drift about ‘crazy’ birds. But then they have feathers, and we don’t, so comparisons are probably idiotic.

This is an ORIGINAL painting in acrylic on stretched linen canvas. It’s 9″ x 12″ and offered for sale for $140, or $180 framed as you see it. Priority mail shipping will add a bit more, as well as sales tax if you’re in the state of Washington. Email us if you’re interested.
Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff at larryeifert.com.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing. She’s currently got a show in Port Townsend at Gallery Nine.

Or, you can always email us to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

New Painting Post

Elwha River at the old Humes Ranch

I’ve painted two large murals of the Elwha River for Olympic National Park, and so in the interest of science, art and fun, of course we had to hike up the river to check it out. We’ve backpacked up this valley several times in the last two seasons. The Humes Ranch area is only a few miles from the trailhead, but its scenic beauty would be worth miles more. As someone said, this is a big messy river, with snags and piles of old-growth trees strewn along its shores. We’ve camped here several times, right on the grassy knoll above the rocks here, taking in the vastness of this place as the sun sets behind the peaks. This is what Western National Parks are all about, experiencing wildness that used to be taken for granted, but isn’t any more.

Oh, and Humes Ranch used to be here prior to the park’s creation. In fact, the oldest building in the park, the old ranch house, was just restored just up the slope. The only livestock left today are the bears, deer and elk.

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 check availability of the other small originals I’ve blogged about the past few weeks, check the blog here.

Thanks for reading this week.
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.