Tag Archives: Interpretive Panels

New Painting Post

Glacier Bay National Park aquatic painting

Images should enlarge if you click on it.

Here is the second painting for Glacier Bay National Park. Two weeks ago I posted the first one showing an above the bay – below the bay painting of the same ecosystem. Both paintings will be made into outdoor panels and installed on the dock at Bartlett Cover in the Park.

Both of these have been fun and interesting for me, because there are great similarities as well as great differences between Glacier Bay’s aquatic landscape and ours right here in Port Townsend a thousand miles to the south. Some of the critters on these pilings are much bigger, some are smaller, and some are different colors and shapes. It takes some close study to figure it out, learning about one species at a time.

And here’s the preliminary sketch. I get a lot of mail about seeing the evolution of these paintings from concept to sketch to final painting. This one started out with a dock and gull, railing and all sorts of stuff hanging underneath. They even found the blueprints for the dock so I could see what it looks like underneath, but in the end all that was nixed for a cleaner design. What a difference, don’t you think?

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. She now has more sea otter pup images posted.

New Painting Post

Wilderness Art for a Wilderness Park

90% of the people who visit Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park come on a cruise ship, and most never get off their boat. But those few that do come ashore get to experience a fantastic ecosystem so complex as to boggle a nature-painter’s mind. This painting and exhibit will get front-row seating in Bartlett Cove, the main staging area for people who have the mind and spirit to personally experience this pristine place – and it gives me a permanent little art gallery on the dock! How cool is that?

I just finished this painting two days ago – so it’s still out for approval. This is the first of two images I’ve been working on for Glacier Bay. They both show the critters living between one of the biggest tidal ranges on the planet. Tides here can swing as much as 25 FEET in one cycle, and all that rushing water makes for a pretty rich table, or, as the caption says: “When the tide is out, the table is set”.

I’ve always loved working with the National Park Service. Unlike many, these folks are not in it for the money – but for the good of nature and society, and I just don’t see much of that anymore. As an example of the lengths they go to so I get the best information for a painting, they sent me a little video link a couple of weeks ago. Photographed in a BLIZZARD and with the staff on skis, it showed where this installation will go! Don’t tell me these folks don’t have their hearts in the right place.

Thanks for reading this week. The second painting will be ready soon.
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. Sea Otters, oh my.

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

Ancient Bristlecone Pines mural

(There’s a lot to see here, so these images should enlarge if you click them)
The third and center painting for the Schulman Bristlecone Pine Grove east of Bishop, California was finished this week. Put together, this wall is going to be about 17 running feet of pure high-country paintings. This final one is 5 x 8 feet on stretched canvas and I was really pushing it to fit into my little studio. Several times I almost gave up and went downtown to a larger space, but I wondered how I’d get it in the car. In the end we muddled through and now it’s great to see all three together. Since there was really no room for me to line them up to check (inside, at least), this is the first time I’ve seen them all together. I think it’s going to work.

Bristlecone forests are a beautiful but stark and colorless landscape because the trees are all bleached out by thousands of years of sun, the rocks are white dolomite – and flowers are few here at 10,000 feet. And since some of these trees are almost 5,000 years old, the oldest on the planet, they really look gnarled and sculptural, so that’s what I ended up concentrating on. Paintings of sculpture!

For those who want to know more about this project, I’ve blogged about it before here:
Here is the post for the pinyon painting on the left.
Here is the post for the alpine painting on the right.
And here are the original sketches. You’re notice some serious changes between the concepts and final paintings. That’s the fun of it – not to mention I just love this place.

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.

Murals, New Painting Post, Waysides

A National Treasure- Sol Duc Valley in Olympic National Park

National_Treasure

I ran across this post I had originally written last year, but somehow it was never published. I probably had a bunch of posts and this one didn’t make the cut, but it’s never too late for good art, right?

As one drives up the Sol Duc Valley, on the northwest side of Olympic National Park west of Seattle, there are lots of pull-outs with overlooks to the river or trails leading to some of the best forests I know. This isn’t quite temperate rain forest, but it’s close. It truly is a National Treasure, and it’s a big thanks to the folks at Olympic N.P. who continue to allow me to paint my “backyard”.

Readers seem interested in the artistic processes that go into these more complex paintings. It’s one thing to paint a fine-art image of an old-growth forest. I can just be, well, “artistic” and I paint what I see or what I like, but these complex collages with lots of species are a different beast. Not only do I have to paint the bear, but it has to at least appear to be very accurate. It has to be sized properly with reference to dozens of other critters, and it has to be animated and not stiff. I can’t place, say, a bobcat right next to a rabbit, or a shady plant out in the open. Sometimes it’s a real challenge.

Here’s the fourth draft of the initial sketch.

Wayside UniGuide Grid v. 2.0 (September 2006)
Wayside UniGuide Grid v. 2.0 (September 2006)

As you can see, the finished painting ended up being wildly different than this sketch. Critters appeared, then disappeared, then arrived in other locations. (Sort of like the squirrels that continually try to break into our barn. I chased one out today that was attempting to hide in the Fiberglas insulation over my workbench.) I also had to figure out what to paint behind the text, so this painting could also be used for other things such as park publications and exhibits maybe without the text – or maybe even a future jigsaw puzzle.

And you thought being an artist was easy! Well, maybe not easy, but after 40 years it’s still a lot of fun. It’s often said that being a painter is an old-man’s game. I’m starting to believe 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.

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New Painting Post

Mount St. Helens – Meta Lake at the eruption

If you’re reading this blog for the first time, it’s because I shamelessly added your name after a personal contact with you. I’ve published these art posts about once a week for years, showing new work, paintings, park projects and such. You can unsubscribe at any time by telling me in a reply.

Here is another bit of art for wayside panels recently completed for Mount St. Helens. If you click on it, the image should enlarge in your browser.

This shows Meta Lake, northeast side of the volcano near Portland, Oregon in May 1980 just as the blast cloud is approaching (you can see it over the treetops). In a few seconds, almost all nature here will be obliterated and, as you can see in the upper right panel photo, this old-growth forest will be reduced to ruin. But the mice and toads below the snow (shown in the insets) will survive, and in a few months begin to colonize this area again.

Imagining what this was like at that moment was fun. Would there have been snow in the trees? How much snow would there have been on the lake ice in May? What would the blast cloud have looked like at this point a few miles from the volcano? What do mice look like sleeping in their winter dens? How bent over would the little shrubs be beneath the snow? It seems amazingly easy to paint gallery canvases after doing this stuff. It’s the same paint getting splashed on the same canvas, but if it’s for me and not a park, no one tells me what to paint and I really don’t care if anyone likes it or not. That’s satisfying, sure – but this is challenging because I learn something new with each painting. Thanks for SeaReach for contracting me for this, and Becky at Mt St Helens for her skillful word-crafting. If was a fun project.

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

Fort Townsend Old-growth mural – almost in our backyard

 

 

(Lots going on in this sketch – this should enlarge if you click on it)

((Sorry to say, but my server has been playing some evil tricks with me. Hopefully the blog is back in business.))

I paint this stuff all over the country, from Alaska to the Great Smoky Mountains, but very rarely have I been able to accept a large mural commission within a mile or so of our home. Here’s the sketch almost ready for painting – and it’ll be fun for me.

Fort Townsend is an old army barracks that supposedly protected Port Townsend about 150 years ago. In reality, the town protected the fort, and so as time went on the property fell into the hands of the Washington State Parks – and now it’s one of the rarest lowland old-growth forests in Puget Sound. It’s dry country here 40 miles northwest of Seattle (yes, it’s true) and with only 18″ of rain annually, the trees don’t get very big. Because it’s never been logged and the ground has been undisturbed for about 8,000 years, some pretty rare plants grow here. You can find calypso orchids, candystick, gnome plant, pinedrops and spotted coralroot. These are all interesting plants that live off other plants – so they aren’t green, and this painting is all about showing that. Candystick looks just like its name. It’s a colorful stick like something you’d find at the candy store. To get this sketch going, I simply used my backyard plant and bird list for the pileated woodpecker, brown creeper and all the rest. The deer is from a photo from our front yard. The squirrel, chipmunk and most of the small birds could be drawn from life on our feeder every day.

When it’s finished, we’ll develop an exhibit in the park centered around the painting and its story, and each time we go there for a hike (and it’s often) I’ll feel like I’m a small part of this rare place. This project is being funded by a generous grant from the Friends of Fort Townsend (especially Ann and Nancy) and the Washington State Native Plant Society who know the value of art in education. Thanks to them for allowing me to show off  my backyard!

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

A Torrent of Mud on Mount St. Helens

This is another in the series of wayside panels I recently finished for Mount St. Helens National Monument. Now, you’ll have to admit I’m not normally posting paintings of mudflows – and I can’t even remember ever doing one. The top bit of art tells the story of the giant mudflow that filled this valley 31 years ago during the eruption. The finished outdoor panel will be placed at the overlook boardwalk above the creek. Linda Repplinger and Susan Jurasz of Sea Reach Ltd, 146 NE Yamhill St. Sheridan Oregon did the layout and design.  Also involved in these panels were Peter Reedijk from Sea Reach and Charlie Crisafulli and several others from USDA Forest Service, Mount St Helens who added additional thoughts and comments on the accuracy of the images.

As it’s not easy to read here, this is the text for the panel written, I believe, by Rebecca Railey, Interpretive Planner at Mount St Helens National Monument: Lava Canyon’s beauty lay hidden for centuries beneath lush evergreen forests until the May 18, 1980 eruption. A surge of hot gas, ash and pumice boiled out of the crater and scoured nearly 30 feet of ice off St. Helens Shoestring Glacier. Water, ash and rock mixed, forming a thick slurry that raced down the mountain and into the Muddy River drainage. A 15 foot wall of mud and rock swept into Lava Canyon. In an instant, the mudflow’s boulders and abrasive ash battered, scoured and swept away the vibrant forest that cloaked this canyon, exposing its beautiful waterfalls and rock formations.

The photos below the painting show what it looks like today, but, as they say “a painting is worth 1000 words” and with only about space for a hundred of them – that’s why they commissioned me. In the process I learned a bunch about mudflows. This version had the mudflow too fluid, so I worked at making it more champagne-milk-shakey. Haven’t seen that final mock up, but only I and a couple of USFS science-guys would know the difference between milk-shakey and fluid-flowing. And since no one actually saw this happening, it’s only a guess anyway.

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.