Tag Archives: Kenai Fjords

New Painting Post

Feather Dusters – A Worm’s Tale

This is my monthly page in 48 North magazine for February, 2013. You can browse the entire magazine online at the link.

So, we were at the Seattle Aquarium recently and Nancy was photographing the young sea otter, Sequi (she’s shot an entire sequence of the baby for over a year now). I was down in the tide pool room, poking around at the shrubbery in the open tanks – a real crowd of critters. I was reminded of some paintings I did for Glacier Bay National Park in Alaska last year. A ranger at the park, Chad Soiseth (hope I remembered how to spell your last name, Chad), sent me some reference shots of tube worms to paint from, and they were amazingly larger than the 4-6″ locals here in the Salish Sea. At the aquarium,  most people were looking at the star fish and anemones, but there I was, of course, sticking my finger in the tube worms. It just seemed to be a painting waiting to happen, and so it did. The sequence was: kids poking starfish, then poking anemones, but no one cares about these cool worms. So, maybe I should paint THOSE guys for my monthly page – and so it went.

I truly believe, and thanks to my family,  have always believed, that the job of an artist or writer is to not only to create good, competent and skillful work, but to push the viewer to a sense of wonder about something bigger, something larger than just the thing you made. Viewers should be taken to someplace that expands their world, not just ends at the viewing process. It’s not enough to just express myself on paper or canvas, but I try to figure out a way to make people say “wow, I never realized THAT, and maybe I should begin to care and wonder more than I do.”

And the subject doesn’t have to be physically ‘big’. Even a 6″ tube worm will do if the viewer has either never seen it before or seen it in quiet this way – or for that matter, even realized they didn’t care to even look. I sometimes reach too far in my complexity and forget most Americans are pretty clueless about nature, and so I have to reel myself in and go back to some basics. It would have been easy to paint and write about starfish, which everyone knows something about. But a feather duster tube worm?

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 – A New Puzzle

WOOO-WOO: Our new 500-piece jigsaw puzzle is now ready to ship. We’re more than happy to announce this one – the rich habitat below the toe of Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park near Seward, Alaska. I’ve blogged about the progress of this project, from our field trip and concept sketches last fall to the finished mural a few months ago. Now the printed products are arriving, and I think this would be a great puzzle to put together.

 

And here’s the puzzle box back with all the fun stuff about the painting. As you can see, it was funded by Alaska Geographic, a very involved and prolific non-profit that works to support many of Alaska’s parks. I’ve bought their books for years, and now I’m proud to say we’re ‘one of them’ in a small way.

You can either buy the puzzle on the website here, or just email us with your shipping info and we can mail and bill. Buying two puzzles saves you freight as it’s only $2 extra for the second one.

Email us for details.

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 has a new blog about the Washington State Capitol Campus that’s pretty fun.

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

Exit Glacier mural sketch

This will enlarge if you click on it so you can see the details.

I recently posted the on-location concept sketch for this project, and now here’s the proper drawing I’ve presented to the Chief of Interpretation at Kenai Fjords National Park in Alaska. Exit Glacier is in the background, outwash plain coming down into the forest near the Nature Center, young cottonwoods, alders and spruce emerging from a landscape the melting glacier recently left behind. Moose, bear, coyote and short-tailed weasel among the group. I think I’ve got it.

I get questions about how I construct these larger images, so if you click on the concept sketch link above it’ll open in another window so you can compare. That was what I went from back here in the studio, plus a bunch of photos. The parks usually give me a species list and the number of elements they want to see. There are one or two still missing here, but I’ll get them in – like a marmot and mosquitoes, but I think I got all the rest in.

When the art is installed in the Exit Glacier Nature Center, a nearby panel will have some buttons that, when pushed, will produce digital sounds as if you might be standing there in the forest listening to nature ‘talk’ to you. A moose vocalization, insects buzzing, raindrops plopping, the glacier booming, rustling of birds – the beautiful clear and ethereal voices of the varied and hermit thrushes, those soft forest whistles you can never forget. Soundscapes are a new way to interpretive these murals and I think it’s a great idea as long as the device doesn’t break down. Now if they could just pipe in the smells of moose pellets on forest duff!

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

Tern Lake – Kenai Peninsula

While on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula recently I did some preliminary stuff for a few paintings when I returned home to the studio. Here’s the second one, inspired when the late afternoon light was streaming through a mountain notch and lighting up this marshy lake. The golden atmosphere made the air really glow. These mountains were so high and steep I just couldn’t get their tops in the painting, but the blue atmosphere up there gives you a hint of what’s high above. We saw mountain goats in the upper meadows up there, tundra swans and green-winged teals on the lake. It was a soft environment just holding its breath for winter to begin.

What always strikes me about Alaska every time  I’m here is the pure enormity of it all. I live next to Olympic National Park, and it’s a big park – but if you took the time to walk across it, you’d eventually come out and find towns, streets and stores on the other side. It’s like an island of wilderness in the midst of civilization. But Alaska isn’t like that at all. If you walked into THAT wilderness, you simply wouldn’t ever come out the other side. Civilization is a small island within nature. One trail we were on there had a wildlife sightings list at the trail head. It said:eight bears, one moose and calf. So, as we started down the trail Nancy noted that we were 9th on the food chain. It made for a much more heightened and self-aware hike.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $140 unframed. Now click on the framed image and it should enlarge. Notice this version doesn’t have the trees on the left. I added those today, so the painting below no longer exists exactly like this. Notice the difference? No, you don’t get it without the trees!

This mahogany frame with a custom linen liner makes it a total of $165 (and we have other frames) and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details. SOLD, SORRY

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

Red-legged Kittiwakes

I’ve never painted this bird species, and in Seward Alaska recently there were lots of them at the SeaLife Center, so, I just had to take a stab at a painting. We heard someone trying to describe the white on kittiwakes as “the whitest white.” I’d go farther. To me it is so white as to be a void, as if touching one would put your hand into a cosmic hole so deep and profound is that lack of color. They’re a very localized species, nesting on offshore islands of Alaska and spending winters in the Bering Sea, and their populations are down by about a third in recent decades as are most pelagic birds and sea animals around there. Black-legged kittiwakes were there as well, and we saw them on rocks just like this out out in Resurrection Sound with the Stellers sealions near the caving glaciers.

It’s always thrilling for me to see a creature as soft and vulnerable as this making a home in such a forbidding and harsh place. I tried to show that in the colors. Glacier-sculptured rock, windblown and water-blasted cliffs are this creature’s life, never mind the winters of driving snow, ice and hurricane-force winds. And we complain about so many unimportant  and casual things. What do they complain about?

 This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $160 unframed.
A mahogany frame with linen liner makes it a total of $180 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print, but prints will be available soon.
Email us for details.

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

Field trip to Alaska’s Kenai Fjords

We spent this past week in and around Seward, Alaska, and let me tell you about glorious! I’m to paint a mural of the ecosystem for Exit Glacier Nature Center at Kenai Fjords National Park, and time was running out – our window fast-closing for a snow-free field trip. We made it! And in all our travels around Alaska, we’ve never seen it more stunning. Fall was passing with each day, and the colors, well, the colors were pastels of every shade from pale emerald to cottonwood golden, alder ochre to raindeer lichen gray. We couldn’t get enough. You know those rare moments with nature when everything seems too perfect to be real? This was a week of it.

The sketch here was drawn on location beside a raging river at flood stage, but the painting will actually be about the emerging forest ‘downstream’ of the glacier and how it’s evolving out of the glacier’s rubble. For us, the real story here was how far the glacier has receded since our last visit in the late 1990’s. Climate change is seen everywhere here and so obvious and evident that anyone who doesn’t believe this is happening at a very great rate is dumber than the dirt the glacier grinds out of the mountainside. When we got there, a huge hurricane-sized storm had rivers ragging and roads covered (another sign of climate change is abnormally large storms) and with the park road closed we had a rare tour of tourist-central without any tourists.

Everyone complains that we never publish photos of ourselves together, but we’re always photographing nature and not us. Well, here’s one I took in the Seward SeaLife Center. The camera was on the head of a sealion sculpture and the monitor right below my camera. Good enough? Thanks for a very wonderful field trip goes to Kristy and Christina, Doug and everyone else who helped for making us feel very much at home. The painting will come in a few months and I’ll post it then. For now, we’re still enjoying memories of golden mountains and gilded glaciers. And yes, we saw enough Steller sealions, bears, moose, sheep, goats and whales to keep anyone happy.

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.