Tag Archives: Easel Paintings

New Painting Post

Bagley Creek Meadows


Bagley Creek is what you’d call the perfect “river runs through it” stream. It meanders out of a high alpine lake and into this narrow glaciated valley past basaltic cliffs and meadows. Our trail was along the west bank – the morning sun casting long shadows on the far cliffs. Nanc and I could have sat in these meadows for hours, listening to the bumblebees making slow passes on September pearly everlastings and watching a northern harrier canvas the grass for mice. On the slopes above these meadows, blueberries were everywhere, and with the warming sun each one turned into a little berry tart.

There’s a favorite essay of mine by Virginia Eifert (yah, mom) who wrote “I stand by the river and I know that it has been here yesterday and will be here tomorrow and that therefore, since I am part of its pattern today, I also belong to all its yesterdays and will be part of all its tomorrows. This is a kind of earthly immortality, a kinship with rivers and hills and rocks, with all things and all creatures that have ever lived or ever will live or have their being on the earth. It is my assurance of an orderly continuity in the great design of the universe.”

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed. If you’d like to add the gold frame, that makes it a total of $180 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame.
Sonja (who bought one of these small paintings) says I need to say this: This is an original painting, 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.

SOLD

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.

New Painting Post

Black-tailed Deer – Port Townsend Trail

Eifert_Deer_Larry_Scott

Just west of our marina and downtown Port Townsend, an old railroad grade goes along the bay before turning inland. This is now a public trail, part of the great Northwest Trail that goes from Cape Avala, west of here, all the way to Glacier National Park in Montana – three states and 1200 miles away. And while it’s a hiking trail like the John Muir, Pacific Crest or Appalachian Trails, here you have to climb on our ferry for a few miles to keep going east.

Coming into town, there’s one place under the bluffs where, late in the afternoon, black-tailed deer like to congregate. You eyes focus on the marvelous views ahead and they often miss the fact you’re being watched yourself – but Port Townsend deer are pretty tame, having been raised from birth on the garden roses, apples and all manor of tasty plants carefully bought and planted by the locals.

This is a larger painting today. This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on archival board, 14″ x 10″ and $650 unframed. If you’d just like the painting framed, that makes it a total of $690 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is an ORIGINAL painting, NOT a print. Email us for details.

To check the availability of the other originals I’ve blogged about the past few weeks, check the blog here and go down the listings.
Thanks for reading this week.
Larry EifertClick 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.

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Uncategorized

Admiralty Head Lighthouse


It’s a traditional landscape this week!

The other day, while we were waiting for the Port Townsend – Keystone ferry on Whitbey Island, we walked over to take a few snaps of the nearby old Fort Casey batteries and this great old lighthouse. The lighthouse actually predates the surrounding fort by decades, having initially been built in 1861. It has to be one of most interesting lights on the West Coast with a sort-of Spanish look to it (although it was designed by a German). I really should have painted it looking seaward, because across the channel the Olympics, Point Wilson Light and Port Townsend create a vast and beautiful panorama, but I’ll leave that for another painting. Maybe a bigger canvas!

I’ve also been working on some larger “park” murals recently but have really enjoyed these smaller efforts on canvas. I’ll keep at it for awhile – it seems you all like them too.
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 painting, 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.

New Painting Post

Our Road

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Clicking the image should enlarge it for better viewing. If not, go to the blog here.

This week, it’s sort of a Hudson River School painting. Or it could be the 17th-century painter, Paul Rubens, didn’t paint landscapes as much as he painted people, but the colors and mood here are the same (at least that’s the way I see it). I learned early-on that painting dark colors and textural shadows around the edges helps brings the viewer’s eyes quickly to the center focal point – and away from the painting’s edges (where they just might wander off someplace else). I like all these textural effects, slamming wet and goopy paper towels, dry brushes and even the back of my hand into the canvas. The back of my hand: that part of my body has rarely been completely clean of paint now for decades.

“Our Road” is just that, it’s our street right in front of our studio. There are only three addresses on the entire stretch plus another that’s not legal, and it deadends into a saltwater swamp where there are more salmon then people. Hilton Avenue sounds pretty ritzy, but, hah, it’s just a little dirt lane the county sometimes thinks to grade (or not).

This 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.
Email us for details.
Like last time, this one isn’t going on the main website, but will be only on the blog.

We’ll be gone to the mountains until Friday evening, but I promise to contact everyone who wants this in the order we received them.
Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

New Painting Post

Easy Trail

Easy-Trail-framed

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Level, easy and hopefully endless. Now, that’s my idea of a trail. It meandered through ferns for awhile, then came out into this glade filled with false lily-of-the-valley and scattered trillium. All these flowers had long faded, but no matter, it was just a nice place to be. Filtered sunlight came through the upper canopy, casting strong shadows behind the tree trunks. And, as usual for me, I thought this seemed like a good place for a painting.

So here it is – the Easy Trail. It’s always my hope that paintings, like photography, can bring something fresh to eyes that will never see it. It’s my joy to say that, indeed, I saw, and now you have too.

This original painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed. This is an original, not a print.
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.
Email us for details.

This one, like several others this month, won’t be listed on the main website, but will be only on the blog.

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.

 

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New Painting Post

Log Jam

If you click on the image, it should enlarge for a better view.

Someone called me to ask if these small paintings were actually prints. Nope, these are originals. We might make a few prints later, but these on the blog are the real-deal. I’ve always enjoyed doing these smaller studies and have painted thousands of them through the years.

This huge pile of cedar and hemlock trees, a log jam, was across the Nooksack River from a campground we stayed in. Placid water was there at the time, but I’ll bet the river that created this wood pile was something else again when the Nooksack built it. Imagine the power it took to pile these huge trees up against the shore. These log jams are now understood to be critical to healthy fish habitat in mountain rivers, and in some restoration projects, log jams are actually artificially created. On their upstream migrations to spawn, adult salmon rest under these branches and trunks, safe from predators. Young salmon and trout safely hang out here while they’re growing up and kingfishers sit atop the branches waiting for a smallish morsel to swim by.

As a painter, my eye was attracted to the color values and shadows. I liked the way the sun lit up the riverbed gravel with warm yellows and browns – and the way the cool blue foreground shadows colored the same gravel completely differently. Finally, I added the background log jam and standing conifers as the focal point shining brightly in full sun. So even if they’re a bunch of dead trees, this makes for a pleasing and complex composition, don’t you think?

This 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.
Email us for details.

This one, like several others this month, won’t be listed on the main website, but will be only on the blog.

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.

New Painting Post

On the Trail to Lake Ann

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Last week we took our little ferry (locally named Bob, because that’s what it does best) over to Whidbey Island, then drove inland a couple of hours to the North Cascades and Mount Baker. This trail is so high it was still spring, with lupine, columbine and paintbrush everywhere. At one point, there was enough fireweed in bloom to make a scree slope completely magenta. We crossed a side creek by hopping rocks, and I stopped to take a reference snapshot of this scene looking upstream into the glacial bowl. The contrast between blue-sky reflection in the foreground, and the yellow sun-bounced light off distant trees makes for a very interesting scene, doesn’t it?

These little digital cameras have really improved how I can do these paintings. Before, I’d have to stop, pull apart my pack to get at my 35mm, go back and figure the shot out – and then wouldn’t know until I processed the film if the stuff was any good. Now, I pull the camera from my pocket and simply take a bunch of shots – and review them as I go (just like you do too). What’s interesting is that my painting process is still the same. The painting, the end result of all this, always looks very different from the beginning reference shot. I guess I’m not really trying to improve on nature, just rearrange it.

We liked this area so much, we’re going back this weekend for some more trail-miles. Might even result in another painting!

This 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.
Email us for details.
This one isn’t going on the main website, but will be only on the blog.

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.

New Painting Post

Salmon Cascades – Olympic National Park

We were doing some research up the Sol Duc River, about 70 miles west of our home in Port Townsend. I was painting some images for Olympic National Park, and we stopped at the Salmon Cascades to see if any fish were there. They were – a group of coho circling below the falls waiting their moment when a big perfect jump would take them to the top and on to the rest of their journey to the spawning beds upstream. It was a thrill to see these big fish, and the scene with the sun shining through the water’s mist wasn’t bad either.

We have eight-color Giclee prints either unframed or framed, between $39.95 and $239.95 available of this painting and the original painting is available for $700 unframed. Email us.

Link here to the Salmon Cascades print on our website

Or, you can go to our Giclee Print Index here

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

New Painting Post

Lillian Ridge – Olympic National Park

Lillian Ridge Trail
To the west of Port Townsend, Olympic National Park fills our skyline. This trail begins at road’s end, over 6000′, at what we hear is the highest road in the state of Washington. It meanders along the ridgetop with amazing views on all sides for miles. To the east, the narrow chasm of Grand Valley shows hints of lakes and waterfalls. To the west, the Mt Olympus complex fills the view. This is Mt McCartney in the distance as one hikes south along the ridgetop spine, often through acres of endemic wildflowers.

This mountaintop has never been glaciated, so walking here means walking in the same footsteps as prehistoric man. I keep looking for mastodons, or at least their tracks.

We have eight-color Giclee prints either unframed or framed, between $39.95 and $239.95 available of this painting and the original painting is available for $700 unframed. Email us.

Link here to the Lilian Ridge print on our website

Or, you can go to our Giclee Print Index here

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

Uncategorized

The Yellow Rowboat

The Yellow Rowboat
This boat, tied at the dock at the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle’s Lake Union, is one of my favorites. What’s not to like. It’s all varnished, top to bottom, skeg to oars. The only paint is on the tips of the two oars that have been painted blue just where they’d touch water on each stroke. Very classy!

We have eight-color Giclee prints either unframed or framed, between $39.95 and $239.95 available of this painting and the original painting is available for $700 unframed. Email us.

Link here to the Yellow Rowboat print on our website

Or, you can go to our Giclee Print Index here

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