Tag Archives: Interpretive Panels

New Painting Post

A Rare Forest – Whidbey Island Land Trust

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A new painting for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust project at the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve. In case you missed the last several posts of this, here’s the last painting before this. I think I’m about 75% to completion on this new one. It speaks to the windy extreme weather on the bluff tops of Whidbey Island, Washington, how that weather shapes these 350-year-old trees, how the forest changes farther inland, how, one gnarly branch at a time, it’s slowly grown here over centuries. A rare forest indeed.

Rare-5

Great changes occurred in this design, logs moved, an entire underground section vanished – it was evolution right before my eyes. 

Rare-4

You can see some of the design changes in the lower right of this third photo. Compare this with the newest photo at the top.

Dark shapes help me focus on overall design. I sometimes stand back 25 feet to look at these 4′ paintings.

Rare-2

And here it is initially laid out, sky and ground, warm and cool. A free and fanciful non-objective painting just waiting to be hung in an art gallery somewhere. But these paintings don’t exist anymore. After I photographed it at each stage, it’s as if I’m then throwing away the image – because soon after it’s gone for ever under the progression to the next stage.

Rare-1

And here’s the original sketch showing the underground sections that are now gone from the painting.

Forest-ecology-sketch

By next week, I’ll have this finished up for a show-and-tell. Thanks for the interest in these images of the progression of a complex painting. Fun for me to see too.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

A Rare and Diverse Forest – Whidbey Land Trust

Forest-ecology-sketch

A click will enlarge this in your browser. 

This is the second painting for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust project at the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve just a few miles north of Port Townsend. Missed the first painting? Click here. This time it’s less about the critters and more about showing this rare and diverse forest, a remnant lowland bit of old-growth hugging a bluff-top. This place gets the full unfettered west wind coming right down the Straits, so the trees on the edge are wildly “flagged” from centuries of being blasted by the Westerlies. Eagles and hawks patrol this bluff edge, riding these updrafts that also increase the wind’s velocity. Weeesheeeh, can you hear it?  Then there’s the trail snaking along, a left-over from when this was part of Fort Casey where they watched and waited for an enemy that never showed up. Farther inland, the trees are huge and less flagged, but still very gnarly. In fact, they have some of the gnarliest branches I’ve seen around Puget Sound. They’re trees you’d expect on the western beaches at Kalaloch or La Push instead of here, 100 miles to the east. Trees and wind, trees and wind. It’s a fun painting for me so far.

Rare-1

And here’s my progress so far. An old friend wrote last week to say he thought when my larger paintings reach this stage, it  was about as good as it gets – free and dramatic, non-objective nirvana. I completely agree. It’s not that the finished paintings are less good, just a different good. I could end it here, show it in some gallery for a month and maybe it’d be hung in some rich-guys house. But if I continue to paint it, thousands upon thousands will see it for decades to come – so I paint on.

Rare-2

Here’s some structure appearing – blocking out trees and distant horizon, the Olympic Peninsula in the distance.

Rare-3

And now the trail is defined, some parts are refined a bit so I can judge how it’s going to come together. Background horizon is finished enough that I can understand how much atmosphere there might be to make it appear distant. Painters out there: see how light that is! Just saying. Stay tuned, because given some time, by next week this should be well along – oh, but then there’s the magazine page I have to write, a new puzzle that needs proofing, a web site to build for Crater Lake Institute – and a spring to enjoy.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Progress Report – Whidbey Wildlife

I often get emails about blogging progress reports of these larger paintings. Someday I’ll set my camera up and do a little film of it, start to finish. This painting has some degree of pressure with the calendar, in other words, no time to mess around. So here’s a little progress report in a couple of photos.

 

Wildlife-4

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Top image is how it’s looking this morning. Many things get in the way of painting the hours I need to put in, like new spring printed projects, puzzle redesigns, trying to find resource material for the other four paintings – but it’s moving along well. Last week I blogged about the sketch and an overview of the entire project here.
Wildlife-1

And here’s a couple of days ago. Background’s in place so I can begin defining the foreground’s details, critters, closeups that take the time. There have already been major changes in that area, but only I will know.Forest-animals-sketch

And here’s the original sketch I showed last week. Thanks, Mark and Jessica at the Whidbey Camano Land Trust for making this a very fun project. I don’t often get the chance to paint these complex murals of my backyard forest, but this project comes close.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

A Fantastic Finish for Sitka

Sitka-estuary-painting-vs2

Last week I finished up my painting for Sitka National Historical Park in Alaska.  I think it hits the mark pretty well. I was tasked with showing the relationships between spawning pink salmon and the forest around Indian River, right in the town of Sitka. The park actually surrounds this Estuary. Essentially it’s the story of how the returning fish feed the local critters and even the trees themselves. See the American Marten running deeper into the forest with a fish? The dipper with an egg in its mouth, a brown bear catching the salmon, or eagles and ravens doing the same? I thought it pretty great that this coincided with our local “pink” salmon stream, the Dungeness River that is having a huge spawning run right now too – over 100,000 fish and still counting.

Indian-River-Panel

And here’s the finished installation (or at least a design mockup from Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia). It’s not approved yet, but well on the way. I left the web version large, so click the image so you can see the text and other details. This will eventually be installed along the trail in the exact location as what the painting shows. At 42″ wide, it will be a pretty large panel, almost as big as the original painting.

This installation is a great example of why I just love my job. This will be there for many years, teaching visitors about this special place by using art in an outdoor location – right at the point of contact with nature itself. My mom taught people about nature, but she did it with her books, photography and outdoor classes. I’m just doing the same thing in another way, with paintings – and I hope it never ends.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

A Sea-run Humpy for Sitka

No post last week – just too busy. But this just came off the easel today and will be sent out tomorrow for approval, so let’s get your approval as well.

This is going to Sitka National Historical Park in Alaska. My task here was to paint the ocean form of the humpbacked or pink salmon in a realistic way so it looks like it’s the real deal. I also painted the eggs, alevin and fry in the same manner, but I’ll post those later. This one seemed to have gotten that pretty well. There was some debate about the shine. If it’s out of the water, it would shine, but in the water this fish wouldn’t shine anywhere. In fact, they look pretty dull and camouflaged, and needs to be or it would be a seal’s meal. After I scanned it and looked at the reference photos (about 25 of them), I thought that the fish might need to be more reddish since my scanner is always on the cool side. So Photoshop did that, and now I’m not sure.

So here’s that second version with the red.

Sea-run-pink-salmon

Art is always like that. There’s no THERE there. You never know when it’s finished, or if it’s ‘right’, since there is no ‘right’ – just someone else’s opinion. Years ago, in the Eifert Gallery in California, a woman came in and went right around the main exhibit hall.  I happened to be upstairs on the mezzanine and overheard her comment as she went around the room: “Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong” she declared in a voice that I thought was louder than necessary. It was a teachable moment for me, because I realized my confidence had grown and I was solidly in command of my feelings, and what did she know – nothing more than I did, and probably less.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Progress Pix for my Sitka Alaska Painting

Progress shown here in reverse. This is the most current version as of Friday, August 2, 2013. Trees are more refined, details emerging on the shoreline, devils club and meadow, water reflections beginning, some details with the Marten are beginning – and the dipper appears along with some salmon.  As I paint this, I can almost feel myself remembering our trip there, standing on this same shore and how it felt and smelled.

Defining broad areas with texture takes time.

Last week before I had National Park Service approval to proceed, I spent time blocking out color and background, which is stuff that almost never gets changed. This painting is about four feet wide – not a big one for me, but big enough to get some detail going.

And here’s the second version of the sketch I posted two weeks ago. The entire lower half was enlarged by about 15% with the bear, deer, harlequin ducks and some other stuff moved around to fit better.  The lower part was enlarged to show off the critters that tell the story of how the salmon return home to spawn, die and are subsequently eaten by local birds and animals that, in turn, provide nutrients to the forest. I had to provide (prove) that the foreground critters were sized correctly in relationship to each other, so the Raven = 24″, Dipper = 7.5″, Marten = 19-27″, which in my view is about correct.  Am I getting there?

 

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Sitka National Historical Park Mural Sketch

 Here’s my sketch for the biggest of six paintings for Sitka National Historical Park. I’m now awaiting approval or change requests to begin painting – oh boy. I loaded a big 16″ version of this on the web, so just click the drawing to see it.

There are some areas that still need figuring out. The right side needs defining better, harlequin ducks are too big, the upper left (spruce forest). The overall concept is probably Okay, but I won’t know until the National Park Service releases comments (which they’re very good at).

And here’s one of my reference photos of the location to show how I arrived at the sketch. This is the story I’m trying to tell: pink or humpy salmon come into the Indian River to spawn and then die. Bears, eagles, ravens, martens and more come in to get the fish; some are dragged or flown off into the forest to be eaten – and the remains leach into the soil feeding the trees. It’s some of the only nitrogen these trees get, and a healthy forest is needed to feed and shelter the new eggs after they hatch and young (alevin) as they grow. It’s a story only recently discovered. I had a tough time with the rocks on the left, which were obviously placed there to keep the bank from eroding, but they’re not natural, and in fact are not healthy for young fish. In the end, I added a few.

And here’s the ‘Subject Sitka Spruce’ within 100 feet of the other photo, with devils club on the left, false Soloman-seal on the ground and Nancy (the real subject of interest to me) to add a size-scale. These were taken on our field trip there last month.

This painting will eventually become an interpretive exhibit placed right here, and an entire generation of people to see and learn about the Indian River’s salmon. It will outlast me, I’m sure.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Eifert Paintings In Sitka

There are LOTS of historic totem poles at the Sitka National Historical Park in Sitka, Alaska, and soon there will also be some Eiferts. This past week we had the distinct privilege to spend it in one of the most interesting, beautiful and historically-significant towns in America, and one of the most remote as well. No roads go to Sitka, and in fact it’s the only town that faces the Gulf of Alaska head-on (seven feet of rain annually – but only the tourists care). There are about 9,000 people there who own 7500 vehicles – but they have only 21.5 miles of roads – and I would guess there are more fishing boats than people. The National Park Service has the oldest national park unit in Alaska there, with a beautiful visitor center and historical park along the Indian River, as well as the Russian Bishop’s House, a meticulously restored and remarkable two-story massive structure built in 1842 that is mind-boggling in its history, furnishing and especially the building itself. In an effort to keep this short, let’s just say we had a very good time – and boy, are those people friendly.

 My task is now to create some paintings of the salmon runs in the Indian River. So after five other concept sketches, this was my best try, and I think it will work. I won’t explain it now, but you’ll soon see the painting, a forest scene with bears, ravens, eagles and lots of spawning salmon. I plan to blog more about this stuff as it progresses.

And here’s the painting’s location along the river. An amazingly beautiful place, you’d never know it’s right smack in the middle of town. As we walked in this forest, we constantly heard bald eagles and ravens talking among themselves high overhead in the upper canopy. While we were there one day, a string trio played in a meadow within 200 feet of this photo location and I’ve never heard a cello, viola and violin played along with eagles and ravens singing from the balcony – and as loud as the wooden instruments themselves.

Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Or click here to follow me on Facebook. I POSTED A PHOTO ALBUM OF THIS TRIP ON THERE, SO CHECK IT OUT.

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.

Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Sitka National Historical Park gets some Eifert paintings

There are LOTS of historic totem poles at the Sitka National Historical Park and Southeast Alaska Indian Cultural Center in Sitka, Alaska, and soon there will also be some Eiferts. This past week we had the distinct privilege to spend it in one of the most interesting, beautiful and historically-significant towns in America, and one of the most remote as well. No roads go to Sitka, and in fact it’s the only town that faces the Gulf of Alaska head-on. There are about 9,000 people there who own 7500 cars – but there’s only 21.5 miles of roads to drive them on – and I’d guess there are more fishing boats than people. The National Park Service has the oldest national park unit in Alaska, and there’s a beautiful visitor center and historic park along the Indian River, as well as the Russian Bishop’s House, a meticulously restored and remarkable two-story massive structure built in 1842 that is mind-boggling in it’s history, furnishings and especially the building itself. In an effort to keep this short, let’s just say we had a very good time – and boy, are these people friendly.

My task is now to create some paintings of the salmon runs in the Indian River. So after five other concept sketches, this was my best try, and I think it will work. I won’t explain it now, but you’ll soon see the painting, a forest scene with brown bears, ravens, eagles and lots of salmon returning to spawn.

And here’s the location along the river. An amazingly beautiful place, and you’d never know it but it’s right smack in the middle of town. As we walked in these woods, we constantly overheard bald eagles and ravens ‘talking’ among themselves high in the canopy. While we were there one day, a string trio played in a meadow within 200 feet of this photo location and I’ve never heard a cello, viola and violin played along with eagles and ravens chinning in from the balcony – and as loud as the wooden instruments. Remarkable.

And here’s the initial species list I created on location. It was written in the order of discussion and while we didn’t see all these critters here, we saw almost all of them somewhere on our stay – even the grizzlies.

 

 

Stay tuned. It’ll be a fun painting – and there are five other smaller paintings coming as well. I’m excited.

 

 

 

Finally: I don’t usually do this, but I’d like to recommend the channel-side small inn and restaurant we stayed at in Sitka. It’s the Fly-In-Fish-Inn and it couldn’t have been a better experience. Ken and Carla made us feel like we were family.

 

 

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Or click here to follow me on Facebook. I post lots of other stuff there, like trip photos of this expedition.

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.

Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Theodore Roosevelt NP finally gets an Eifert

Now I ask you: how many artists can say they have public art on display in North Dakota?

 

 

I keep painting away at this – and sooner or later I hope to have some bit of my work in most every Western national park. Theodore Roosevelt National Park is in North Dakota, a fairly remote landscape of over 100 square miles in size and it’s just the sort of beautiful and relatively pristine place I love to paint. But because it IS remote, it’s not so well funded and commissioning an Eifert mural isn’t easy. So, it was nice to get a request from them to use some existing work, a large visitor center mural I did for Badlands National Park in South Dakota. The image seems to fit nicely for what they had in mind, and really could be North Dakota, and so this exhibit panel will be installed in the park this summer.

I’m always asked how the heck I got into the somewhat rarefied line of art, and so here it is in as few words as I can make it. 50 years ago I asked my mom the same thing. Who does someone publish 20 books and write a magazine for over 300 issues? When I was young, it simply all seemed overwhelming. Since my family made it abundantly clear that I was to be an artist, and an artist of nature, I had to figure out what to paint and how to sell it. I gravitated to national parks and wilderness areas simply because I thought, and still do, that these are by far the best places in America – the best of what’s left. I backpacked, climbed, sailed (to Alaska and Mexico), and through it all I painted what I saw. Then someone asked me why I painted and left? Why not keep the paintings where they were created and belonged, in the parks they were painted in? So, I did. And, so, decades later there are Eiferts in a whole BUNCH of parks, from Alaska to Florida, the Mojave Desert to Wisconsin, Mount Rainier to Yosemite. I get it now. It’s not an issue of creating a huge body of work, but creating them one at a time. One at a time. As Henri said: “It takes 1000 paintings to become a painter. So get to work.”

And I’m not going to stop until I drop dead!

 

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.

Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.