Tag Archives: Interpretive Panels

New Painting Post

Point Reyes National Seashore mural progress

I spent the week working away on this large painting for Point Reyes National Seashore near San Francisco. Back in October, I posted the field trip and concept here, and the final sketch here, and now I’m working on the final painting. This isn’t a huge one this time, 48″ x 63″, but it’s big enough that I had to move it to my downtown Port Townsend studio above Union Bank.

So you don’t have to go back into the old posts (unless you want the real details), here’s the concept sketch again.

You can see the basic idea is there but it’s sure refined into another thing completely.

This is a very fun painting for me, not only because Point Reyes is a singularly beautiful and rare place, but because I have work installed in many other parks in that San Francisco North Bay area – and this is just about my last non-Eifert-art location. Muir Woods (9), Sam Taylor State Park (36), Angel Island, Muir Beach, Muir Headlands, Golden Gate National Recreation Area and some others all have Eifertst for interpretive exhibits and installations, and it’s fun for me to imagine all those little art galleries in the woods and ocean overlooks. Sam Taylor State Park has two trails that have a dozen or so panels each, so a walk in the woods is like hiking through a little art exhibit.

It’s also a real honor to be commissioned, yet again, by my favorite bunch of people, the National Park Service. Best to work with, highest standards of excellence, working for a noble cause and I just plain love going to these amazing places over and over for decades. I hope it never ends.

Thanks for reading this week. I’ve now had this weekly blog going for over 250 posts – that’s a lot of art in over 5 years.
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

Another Painting for Powell Butte, Portland Oregon

Big paintings: that seems to be my life these days. No complaints!

 

I posted another painting from this project a few weeks ago – a giant 24-foot wall mural of Portland from three miles up for a new visitor center in Portland, Oregon. This one is this week’s effort and is a 9-foot wide painting for an interpretive panel in the same visitor center atop Powell Butte (shown perched atop the butte on the right side of the painting). This is actually the bottom 2/3 of the panel, which I edited to show better in this post. It goes up another few feet. Great design by Linda Repplinger of SeaReach in Sheridan, Oregon, don’t you think? (click the images and they should enlarge)

This was a sort of history painting and it was fun to figure out. Notice that over the top of the dairy farm in the middle rises Mount St. Helens before it blew in 1981. Mt. Rainier is farther away and behind it to the right. Thanks, Linda, for pointing out that it would be the ‘old’ mountain and not the sheared off one of today.

 

Left side: Native Americans lived in the Portland area for thousands of years, burning the forests and creating lush open grassland forests that sustained their culture. It was a garden – but it also demanded a bunch of work to keep it that way.

 

Middle: white guys arrived and realized this really was a garden, kicked out the very people that made it that way and put in dairy farms, roads and railways. Mount St. Helens was many decades from blowing it’s top.

 

Right side: today, the old railroad is now a bike/hike path, the old volcanic butte is now hollowed out (I’m not kidding) and holds a soon-to-be-finished 100 million gallon underground water cisterns the size of TWO football stadiums and covered over with dirt with a new visitor center perched on top – and a couple of Eifert paintings installed in it as well.

Amazing!

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

I’m currently in the middle of another project, that of digitizing all 20+ books from my mom’s out-of-print catalog. Virginia Eifert will soon rise again on Amazon.com, so stay tuned. It’s getting wild around here.

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

Historic Photo Exhibit for Port Angeles WA

Historic, maybe because it took over a year to get this installed on the Port Angeles, Washington waterfront! I’m not complaining at all – because for me it was fun and meaningful. I learned a lot.

So, with a bit of funding from Olympic National Park and guidance and direction from the Feiro Marine Life Center – text by Deborah Moriarty and Betsy Wharton, photos from a bunch of dead photographers plus two that are still alive, and this all came together nicely.

While the only thing I PAINTED was those two little black bands on the wall, I spent some considerable time in the Port Angeles Historical Society with my flatbed scanner. Most of the photos were very old and only 8″x10″ or less. Technology went to work when I clicked the button, and what seemed like hours later I had some pretty amazingly scans. While that was going on, I had the rest of the collection to myself – oh boy! One of the scans was 8 feet long, and most were more than 36″ on the long side, so, that’s when the work began for me. Back in my studio, I spent many hours (I should underline MANY) going back and forth across these old scratched up images removing hairs, cuts, thumbprints (whose we’ll never know), tears, frayed edges, bug squashes – and in the end I think the results looked like they were taken last week with the highest quality camera.

(Here’s a tourist immediately enthralled by the quality and detail of these old images.) After fretting over the text, Deb and Betsy refined it to a very high degree of quality – and that’s from me who does this stuff daily. This is good – and they should be proud!

Oh, but I didn’t tell you the photo’s story. The Elwha Dams have now been torn down on the biggest river on the Olympic Peninsula. These dams have been here almost a century and provided electricity that made Port Angeles a real city, lighting houses, stores and powering mills. But with the dams the salmon runs ended, and so now with the dams gone, the salmon are IMMEDIATELY coming back. Only a few months after the lower dam’s removal, King Salmon are already back above the old dam site. This wheel I’m holding is the same wheel that first turned the power ON almost a century ago, and just a few months ago turned it OFF.

As an artist and naturalist my entire life, I feel so honored to have been apart of this event, the largest dam removal in American history. I consider it part of my legacy. For the dams, park and salmon, I’m nothing but a guy with some skills, but for me – I was there!

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

Glacier Bay National Park Forest Trail

 

 Seems like this took forever, but when I’m painting it in Port Townsend, sending the files to West Virginia, getting approvals from Alaska – well, it just takes some time.

So, this was a bit of a challange. Without seeing the darned place, my task was to paint a place in Glacier Bay National Park. I thought that would have been easy. But then there were three of them, and the first (left side) was to show it as it was when the glacier was receding (at the fastest recorded pace) just a century ago. This thing shrank 65 miles back up the valley in less than a century! You can see it in the distance. Then the middle panel shows the plants – mosses, wildflowers and willows colonizing the barren gravel, ground is greening up, even the islands in Bartlett Cove are covered with young trees. Finally, the right painting shows what it looks like today – a young forest with deep moss and mature trees. I had some photos taken last winter in deep snow as the only reference, plus a couple of Google Earth images, buy my real references were an entire lifetime of boulder-hopping glacier rubble. This is Melanie, Chief of Interpretation last spring showing me the eratic-specimen. She’s now guiding tours in the Antarctic – lucky woman. If you look, you’ll see two glacial erratic boulders in each of the three paintings to show that it’s one place in three time periods.

 

 I know some of you will ask if I also did the map. I’ve done my share of these, but the real heavily lifting with design and map fell to Chad Beale at Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia. So that makes this somewhat of a collaboration with Harpers Ferry Center (2300 miles from me) and Glacier Bay National Park (2800 miles from him).

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

One Tree Moment for Ballard Nature Center

I still have the color to add on the five little insets, but I think this project of interpretive art is looking so good right now I wanted to share it.

It’s a very small world! I was asked by Genesis Graphics in Escanaba, Michigan if I’d be interested in doing some watercolor and ink paintings for the Ballard Nature Center in Effingham, Illinois. (So, if we did a conference call, that would be a 4000-mile round trip triangle for the words to be heard by everyone involved.) I’ve had a long and fine relationship with the folks at Genesis, and they always let me just do my thing without a bunch of hoops to jump through. My reply on this idea was, “Oh, I know where Effingham, Illinois is. My formative years were spent  just a few miles to the west in Springfield. I learned my stuff in the Illinois State Museum where I was spoon-fed nature and art by the staff and my parents.” This was relayed to the Ballard folks and it turns out two of my mom’s books are in their visitor center library. What a small world, and very soon they’ll have two generations of Eifert work there.

I know everyone likes to see the ‘behind the scenes’ stuff, so to show you how far this design was refined, here’s the concept sketch.

 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

Reprinting the Arcata Marsh Mural

This was only the third big habitat mural I ever painted, and I’m  hard-pressed to figure out the date it was finished. I’d say 1989, give or take, but it could be earlier. A printed copy of this painting lives in Arcata, California at the Arcata Marsh Interpretive Center. Its home is a sunny wall, and for that the reason we installed a copy of the painting and not the original. Now because of sun damage it’s about to have version #3 printed to replace #2.

So, this week I went into the giant lock box at the bank and fished through the hundreds of 8″ x 10″ transparencies (film they don’t even make any more) and brought this home for scanning. A decade ago was the last time we replaced this, and then we used that transparency and simply made a photo blowup. This time it’s all digital and will be printed on half-inch thick high-pressure laminate material similar to Formica. Thinking about this I was truly struck by the technical changes of this stuff in the past decade, and how artists really need to understand and keep up with it – or risk being left behind like so many other ‘industries’ – and I’ll be damned if they’re going to outsource ME to India!

When I painted this, the Arcata Marsh was a very new place, and it was difficult to imagine what it would become. Sitting on an old log processing pond at the upper end of Humboldt Bay, the idea was for the nearby sewer plant to run its almost clean water through a series of channels and let aquatic plants clean up the last of it. Birds would flock, animals would find homes, people would come to walk and view – and over the years it all came true. I’m happy to have been a part of the initial interpretation, and happy they continue to kept my painting as part of it.

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

My New Portfolio Is Ready To Erupt

For some years now I have had a cd Powerpoint portfolio I send to clients, parks and contractors who give me these great commissions painting nature. Keeping the thing current has always been a challenge, but nothing like I used to deal with back in the dark days when things weren’t digital. It’s a great way to present what I might do for future projects or references of what I have painted, printed and produced. I also had a second disk for some of my easel paintings that was wildly out of control, so recently I’ve been working on a new version of all of it. This new one is a composite of both portfolios, and at 147 pages, it’s almost a book. I’ve also put it all together into one big presentation and divide it into clickable sections with a Table of Contents for easy viewing. So, there are murals, wayside exhibits, big walls, dainty ink drawings, watercolors, acrylic paintings on canvas, publications and other stuff like jigsaw puzzles and posters, nature guides and tours – the works, and all on one little disk.

 

It’s now ready to fly, so if you’re a park interpreter, design firm for nature interpretation and installations, past client or just interested in a copy (free) to have ‘just in case’, I can now mail one out to you. Just hit the reply key and give me the scoop, but please, no requests from my easel painting collectors. Sorry, but how much time do I have for this when I’d rather be painting?

 

And, a brand new 500-piece jigsaw puzzle is coming out this week, so stay tuned, oh my many faithful puzzle people. This one is of the mural I painted for Kenai Fjords National Park in Seward, Alaska. It shows the ecosystem emerging from the melting toe of Exit Glacier, and the only other place you’re going to be able to buy it is at the new Visitor Center there or through Alaska Geographic. So, it’s either a luxury cruise, a long flight and a rented car, OR, you’ll be able to get it from us! Come to think of it, options one and two don’t sound all that bad.

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

Glacier Bay Old-growth

Keeping it going, this week was spent working on five smaller paintings for Glacier Bay National Park. Nancy says I tend to loose track of obligations, appointments and schedules, well, try keeping five paintings with lots of details all on track. Ah, priorities! It’s like juggling. This one is a purely fictitious place but based on reality. The landscape around the Visitor Center and Lodge at Glacier Bay National Park is fresh from the ice and its forests are still pretty young. It will likely be changed before it’s finished, but my task here was to paint what WILL be there eventually if the forest there continues to evolve as it should. If things go according to one option in nature’s normal plan, this will become a western hemlock-dominated forest, a few huge trees, logs almost completely covered with moss, skunk cabbage and devils club. Everything would be green filtered light as if you’re inside an emerald. Did I get it?

Here’s the first-draft concept sketch.

And below is the second draft before I started painting. It’s still very different from the final painting, but the elements are taking shape. In the end, the huckleberries left, devils club and skunk cabbage came in after the Park straightened me out. Those two species require more moisture than I had realized was there, so we shifted things around.

I get a fair amount of mail saying that comparing these sketches are the best part of my weekly posts. It’s the ‘inside scoop’ that few see, and I think it’s easy to recognize the fact that the pencil is the painter’s most valuable tool. The second most valuable tool might be that I’m working with two guys from the National Park Service that really care. It’s such a treat for me to have interactions with people who know what their doing, both on the ground with Melenie and Tom at Glacier Bay in Alaska and Chad at Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia. I just never tire of learning about this stuff, especially from smart people. And that we did a conference call this week featuring a land-line and cel phone joining Alaska to Port Townsend together with a desk’s top in West Virginia is even better.

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

Bristlecone Pine Sketchbook Journal

I posted some other pages from this project a few weeks ago here. There are 11 pages of sketches that will string along the bottom of the three mural paintings I also painted, and all these will soon be installed in the new visitor center at the Schulman Grove of ancient bristlecone pines in California. When it opens in a few months, this is going to be really fun to see, at least I hope so. Standing in front of the three huge paintings, these sketchbook panels will show how the paintings were developed, like a field sketchbook.

I’ve always loved field sketching. It gets to the heart of things, of using your eyes to see. You get to watch the results flowing out of your hand like magic. To me, it’s the very basic process of creating art, and something I’ve done all my life. Someone recently asked me if I ever took mind-enhancing drugs. No, I said, instead I draw nature outdoors and in the field, and to do it well requires great attention to details, color, texture and how nature has evolved in a single place. I mean, how much more clearly could a person see this amazing and vibrant world than with a pencil in your hand?

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

The Old-growth of Fort Townsend State Park

 

This should enlarge with a click. Please do so as there are lots of details.

Just a mile or so from our studio is one of the rarest of all Northwest places – a lowland old-growth forest. It’s quite a park, and for Nancy and me, just walking the road into this place is often almost spiritual. Here in Port Townsend, we’re on the dry side of the Olympics so these trees aren’t huge like rainforest giants, but there’s an open and ancient feel here that always gets my heart going. Giant glacial boulders dot the forest. Signs of old wildfires are evident. We watch pileated woodpeckers hammer out old snags. Cougar warning signs abound. For about 8,000 years or since the last ice melted, this place has been left to itself. Even when there was a small military garrison here, the only trees cut were a few for firewood.

So, while thousands of miles of forests, our heritage, have been whacked away and the land irreputably ruined, this place has what few lowland forests have these days – some very, very rare plants. All those weird and odd plants that line the painting’s foreground are saprotrophic fungi, plants that don’t produce their own food but instead borrow it from the trees. You won’t see them in cut-over forests – if the forest goes, so goes most of the other stuff like gnome plant, sugar stick and pinedrops. Even calypso orchids won’t reappear. I won’t go into it more here, but I consider this forest to be something of a sacred place, a place much like a world-class museum that holds our most meaningful treasures – our  heritage. These great forests won’t return ever again while humans are here, and so along with the few other scattered lowland patches of old-growth, this is IT!

Somehow the very active local friends group for the park, The Washington State Plant Society, came up with some funding for me to paint a mural for an exhibit at the park. Seriously, I can’t imagine anything more fun for me to do than paint this exceptional forest. I mean this is like a gift, a chance to actually paint my own backyard. It just doesn’t get any better than this. Here’s a picture by Nancy of the ol’ guy at the easel, half way through this effort. Was he dragging his feet? Well, maybe! 

Thanks Ann and Nancy of the friends group, this was just plain fun.

And as usual, 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.