Tag Archives: Exhibits

New Painting Post

A New Life for Lahonton Wetlands

My first Nature Conservancy commission was this mural of the marshes east of Reno, Nevada. The original painting hangs in their offices in Reno, along with about 2.000 posters floating around the West. Now, almost 20 years later, another image will be installed in the new BLM California Trail Interpretive Center, eight miles west of Elko, Nevada. I just sent the final scan and it’ll be 17 feet wide by 10 feet high, proving that art never dies, it just gets reprinted.

Back when this was painted, there weren’t digital scanners like we have today. I remember I had it photographed in Sacramento and found the 8″ x 10″ film postive transparency still there in our lock box on Kodak film that’s not even made today. It was a color-perfect shot and scanned up 2500% just beautifully. How big was that file for a 17′-wide image? The Photoshop layers file was 2.4 gigabits, and I admit my computer took some time to process it. Smokin’.

It was almost 20 years ago when Nancy and I were doing field research for this painting in the dry lakebeds and marshes around Fallon, Nevada. It was the only time either of us have been on an airboat – basically an airplane engine and prop on the back of a big rowboat. What a thrill it was to just glide over these bull rushes and “fly” around miles of marshes. We eventually ended up at a beach just like this one where the US Fish and Wildlife Service guides showed us fresh water clams, reminders of the ancient Paleo landscape when these dwindling lakes were giants from Ice Age runoff.

I have a new show at Gallery Nine in Port Townsend this month. Here’s press on it from the Peninsula Daily News, and here’s the Gallery Nine website with more information. Come on down if you’re here.

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

Exit Glacier – Kenai Fiords National Park

Commissioned by the National Park Service and funded by Alaska Geographic for the new nature center in Kenai Fiords National Park. My task here was to show the ecosystem of this emerging landscape so recently covered by the glacier. You can see the trail winding through a young forest populating the outwash plain of the giant glacier connected to the even bigger Harding Icefield (bigger than the state of Rhode Island). Just a few miles from Seward, Alaska, this is one of the few glaciers you can actually walk up to and touch. It’s a bright summer scene, the way most people see it, but when we were here in September everything was already turning ochre and there was a rain and flood-event going on. I blogged about that on September 14, 2011 when I got the location sketch posted here. A few weeks later I posted the finished sketch here. It’s fun to see the evolution of the painting from concept to finished mural, but I know you guys don’t like to click through, so here’s the concept sketch again, but this time as it was happening (photo by Nancy Cherry Eifert over my right shoulder).

 And here’s the sketch drawn back here in the studio.

Soon there will be a high-pressure laminate panel of this painting for the center. Since it’s closed in winter, no heat, and it IS Alaska, it was decided that the original will hang downtown in the main offices. Next spring we’re hoping for puzzles and other products, so stay tuned.

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

Port Angeles and the Elwha River Wall

 

Not that I’m complaining, but just when IS summer play time? Well, not right now.

I’ve been working on three sizable projects at once. This one is my current midnight-panic-attack. It’s not my usual painterly-project, but interesting as always and I’ll be posting progress in the next few weeks (on the project, not my nighttime worries that it won’t be finished in time).

So… if you’ve read these posts over the past year, you’ll know I’ve created a bunch of art and interpretive panels for the Feiro Marine Life Center in Port Angeles, WA. This is the next phase of that, an outside 39-foot wall collage near the other installation. Opening date is September 17th when all sort of luminaries come to town for the kick-off of the Elwha Dam removal project, the nation’s largest dam removal and river restoration so far. I’ve been involved with this unfolding event in many ways over the past few years, and it’s exciting stuff for both Nancy and I. The very fact that they’re using art to interpret this visionary project is very forward-thinking.

My job this time is to create a dozen panels that tell the story of how the dams changed the region over the past century – and specially the town of Port Angeles on the Olympic Peninsula. Betsy and Deb are providing the fabulous text like they did on the other installations, while I’m doing the signage, computer design and handling the fabrication and installation. Like a giant jigsaw puzzle, this all has to fit together somehow. For once it’s not a mural or original art, but I’m learning lots about the region’s history at at the Clallam County Historical Society. I grew up watching my mom research history this same way, except that now I have a laptop and flatbed scanner. Times have changed.

I’ll post more as this gets closer and the details are filled in, but for now the photo shows where we are – in mockup stage.

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

Necedah Wildlife Refuge installation

 Last week, someone asked:“what happened to that last big mural you did in, where was it? Necedah Wisconsin?” And, as life often gets by me, I had to say “beats me, haven’t even seen a photo of the installation.” So, with an email and a little poking around on Flickr – here it is, or at least a part of it. You can only see about half of the 130 feet as it goes around the bend and off into the sunset. If you remember, these were the two paintings that were scanned and printed at 300% from the original, then hung like wall paper. I’d say it looks pretty good – at least in the photo.

Some people are shocked when they find out that I not only didn’t go to Necedah for research (too much snow – couldn’t have seen what I needed anyway), but that I didn’t go there to install it (someone else’s job). I’m not sure I liked that, but that’s the way these things go sometimes. No going for research was difficult and I certainly could have used a few hours on the ground with my camera. It’s the details I just can’t get from a few on-line photos, like how the ground looks, how plants grow out of it, how much downed branches and logs, how varied the plants are between sunny and shady areas – endless stuff you normally don’t notice. Sure, a species list helps, but how many, where do they live and which ones did I need to use? In the end, I just made it up from years of doing this stuff, and everyone seems to like it.

When I was growing up as a backroom brat in the Illinois State Museum where both my parents worked, Robert Larson was museum staff habitat diarama background painter (now there’s a business card title). He was a pretty famous dude – but to me he was just the tall guy that threw paint around. I’d go down there and watch him do his stuff and he painted amazingly artistic, huge yet realistic backgrounds for exhibits that looked so real you’d swear the wolf moved each time you saw the exhibit (turned out they had an extra wolf mount they switched out occasionally). Watching this guy paint was my only training for painting these big canvases, and here it is a half-century later and I’m still at it – so, he must have had the magic that so influences kids they are determined to spend the next 50 years trying to do the same thing.

The huge, really really huge difference is that Bob Larson could take a year to do the painting you see here – and I did it in 35 days!!

Here’s one of the paintings again in full view.

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

Day 12 – Necedah Refuge murals

Here’s the next installment of the progress on the two murals for Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin. This photo represents about a tenth of the entire project. On the final installation, the image you’re looking at will be about 10 feet tall and 25 feet wide. Click the image and it should enlarge.

 This area is pretty much finished (the color’s a bit off since I photographed it under evening lights – sorry).  As a studio visitor said when I was working away on another section “while you paint, you don’t ever want to glance left or right down that long expanse of canvas, do you?” Right! Way too depressing – like I’m painting the Great Wall of China. Nancy’s been a true painter-partner on this project, doing the thankless duty of painting base textures and background – like millions of blades of grass. It truly steps up the pace – hear that, Michael? These big paintings, at least for me, are all about texture – fuzzy, messy and subtle colors that start from a very dark and stack up to a final highlight on top. Lots of layers! As it goes on, there becomes a mysterious point when it almost becomes a real place when you’re standing right on top of it.

Thanks for reading this week. Stay tuned for more progress.
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

New Mural – Exploring the Nearshore

Nearshore of the Elwha River

For the past few months I’ve been working on some projects centering around the dam removals on the Olympic Peninsula’s Elwha River – located about an hour west of here. This painting has just been finished, so I thought I’d pass it around. You and the clients are both seeing it for the first time! It shows the shoreline, Olympic National Park behind, the Elwha River delta on the right – and of course the critters and plants that call this place home.

This is a collaboration between Olympic National Park and Feiro Marine Life Center in Port Angeles, just to the east of where this scene is. One of the big beneficiaries of freeing the Elwha will be the unrestricted flow of nutrients, sediments and drift material from the river into the ocean and then along this shoreline. The river has been blocked for almost a century and this beach is pretty starved, not only because of the dams but also because the shore is ‘armored’ with boulders (read: very bad for critters). In this scene, I’ve hopefully given you an idea of how dynamic and complex this place should be. The painting is destined for the Feiro Center, along with other panels that will tell the story of this, the largest dam removal project in our history. I’m pleased and proud to be part of this forward-thinking environmental project.

These big paintings are always fun for me. I just never get tired of figuring out how to somehow ‘build’ all these 3-D plants and critters into a somewhat realistic and complex world of only two dimensions. It’s a real puzzle. If I continued working on this painting, it would become a very tight and almost photographic work, but I’ve always thought they should be more an “impression” of a scene, and so I try to paint them that way – in an impressionistic style. While it might look realistic on your screen, it’s actually fairly loose in technique.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to. If you know others that might enjoy my musings, they can sign up on the blog page – or by sending me an email.

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, Uncategorized

An Eifert Look to the Marine Life Center

Feiro Marine Life Center gets a dozen Eifert exhibit panels and new “look”.

 (Click the image and it should enlarge)

The Feiro Marine Life Center in Port Angeles Washington. We’ve been working on this for a seven months now, and it’ll be probably another year before it’s completed, but I thought I’d pass some of it around here today.

The place needed some freshening up, so they asked us to help. Much of this is centered around the ‘big deal’ that’s coming down locally in Olympic National Park – the removal of the Elwha River dams, largest dam removal in the US to date – and it really is a big deal, at least around here and at least for me. I’ve been involved with the dams project for several years now as a provider of art showing what the river will look like post-dams, so it was logical I also help create some exhibits about it at the Feiro. Here’s a link to some of that other Elwha River work.

The image above is only the quickie-watercolor concept sketch, but I thought it interesting enough to pass around. Everyone sees the finished products – complex paintings or big visitor center exhibits – but few see where it starts, the basic skin and bones of ideas. And while it may (read: probably) not end up this way at all, it’s a good view into the creative process. So here goes: This wall is actually three times longer than this. It goes off to the left where there are also windows, so to keep it simple, I just focused on this area for a concept sketch. The sign is all they really requested, which includes a changing banner up top for programs. I’ll do all that here in the studio, but the rest will likely be done on-site. We went to the big Seattle Aquarium for some field research into how kelp and fish look underwater, how fish circle, and how light filters down into the ocean. The two herring balls – thousands of little fish circling for protection, will mimic the oval sign, and the octopus encircling the sign shows a popular critter they have in their tanks. There will be more and larger fish, likely salmon, and more extensive bull kelp, but this shows the basic idea.

Stay tuned, I’ll send more as this goes along.

For local readers: Nancy is opening a show of her photography at Gallery Nine in Port Townsend Saturday night, 5:30 to 8pm. Come on down and see her new work.

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.