Tag Archives: Everett Washington

Commissioned paintings, Everett Washington, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

City of Everett WA Madison Morgan Park

June 14, 2022 Brush Man

I’ve been painting some outdoor wayside panels for the City of Everett, Washington. This is my 3rd and 4th for Everett, which is north of Seattle and is becoming a real city with some real money to spend on this stuff. But it’s also becoming a ‘real city’, with its nature gone. They have a small nature park in the middle of it and so I’m working on some installations that tell about its nature. Lots of shrub plantings are going on here, putting the place back to some assembly of a native forest.

This is the original concept sketch and you can see how the design really stayed the same as the painting progressed. The boundaries for me were not hemmed in at all, they were just pleased I was doing it.

This panel is sort of a nature guide, birds on the top and animals on the bottom. It was a fun image for me to figure out, as these are all the same critters as we have here in our own little forest just 40 miles to the west on the Olympic Peninsula. And I’ll say this, we have better by far, right here in our own meadow. That makes these paintings show how fortunate Nancy and I are to have these acres of trees and critters that feel safe here. We even have old snags that serve as homes for many.

This is the original finished painting before it went into the design. It takes a variety of skills to make these, design, writing, making art and a deep background of the nature. Somehow it all has to come together to make a dramatic and beautiful piece of art that, hopefully, lots of people will stop and learn something. A bit of art in the forest.

And this is the corner of Madison-Morgan Naturescape Park where these two panels are going. The second wayside is being painted now and is coming soon, so stay tuned. Then between 15 and 20 more are going around Silver Lake in Everett, another urban nature park being spruced up by my stuff. In total, I should have about 24 paintings on panels here that will all last beyond my life – it’s a good legacy.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

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Commissioned paintings, Murals, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

Smith Island Estuary painting

July 3, 2020 Brush Man

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Making Art – Part of Salmon Restoration

While the words are only in placeholder form, I wanted to show off this new painting. It’s going to be installed as a public wayside exhibit at the Smith Island Restoration Project on the Snohomish River Estuary, north of Seattle. This project has been going of for years, heavy equipment removing old dikes, building others and generally restoring a vast area of junk yards and farmlands to wetlands so that it becomes salmon habitat. It cost over a billion dollars and I’m proud to have been involved in a tiny way with my painting.

Here’s how it started on this painting. I had photo references that showed me how it looks at low tide. They gave me much latitude on my design and how it looks and feels, so I made it more of a dramatic sunset image. Below is how a corner of the place actually looks, a brackish slough, perfect for young salmon. I made some basic sketches and just started painting. I imagined a mid-tide level so I could show the fish.

You’ll notice the great-blue heron on the left suddenly got bigger as it gained a more important place in the story.

Closeup scans of the left and right sides show the level of detail.

Below, I’m closing in on the final painting before I added the insets and text blocks.

The final installation will be 48″ x 24″. I pleased that people will be looking at this for decades as the place grows into itself again. A few years ago it was a landscape that’s unrecognizable now. I remember part of it was a junkyard and tire dump that caught fire awhile ago, burning for weeks. I could see the smoke miles away. The absolutely lowest level of what we can do to wreck a natural place – it’s no wonder salmon are in trouble. Now, there are salmon and herons, kingfishers and Nootka roses in bloom (or soon will be).

Thanks for this commission go to Snohomish County, WA and Gretchen Glaub who worked with me to make it happen.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com, down the right side of the home page.