This could be Malheur National Wildlife Refuge – possibly 1000 years ago when the Waditiki Indians lived here, fishing and hunting the marshes during high water periods. It’s from the perspective of the Trumpeter Swans, Canada geese and ducks the Indians hunted. Looking down through the birds you see the tule and cattail houses and boats, and people going about their daily lives. I like the feeling of a gigantic landscape with a very few humans touching the land lightly. How things have changed!
I finished this painting a few days ago for Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon. This is one more of that series I’ve been working on seemingly forever, but this one I truly enjoyed, because there was so little guidance from anyone involved. This is another fairly big wayside, 60″ wide, that will be part of 3 at the Buena Vista Overlook south of Burns, Oregon. Here it is in the final form.
And here’s the original sketch of the main painting. Getting the feel of a made-up place, because who knows what it really looked like then, what the Indians looked like, what they did or how many there were. I think I got it.
I’ve been working on art for Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon, a continuing effort that’s finally coming together. This wayside panel I just finished is going there, telling the story of springtime water vs. fall desert. It’s been interesting to compare the two scenes – which is a completely fabricated scene. No such place exists, yet it’s at Malheur in many places.
This view is of the spring snowmelt season there, when water from the local mountains fill up this grand valley with ponds and marshes. These lakes are only a couple of feet deep at most, many are less, but the place is crammed with birds either nesting or on their way north. It’s possibly the single most important wildlife refuge in the West.
And this scene shows the same place a few months later. The lakes have dried to an almost desert landscape and the lush foliage of spring has yellowed. It was interesting to figure this out – just the cattails were challenging to understand their life-cycle.
And here is where this and two other waysides are going – Buena Vista Overlook. My new paintings will replace these old and tired ones atop a stunning view of the valley below. These are big panels, each five feet wide. They needed to be big to compete with the scene.
Call this my small effort at using art to fight our current culture of White Terrorists in America. This is the place the Bundy Gang of Thugs took over a few years ago in a Right-wing attack on our heritage. Remember? Yes, this place is OUR heritage – and then the Trump administration pardoned them when they were sentenced for their crimes. Not enough said – but if you want to save what’s left of these places, VOTE for nature!
Yellowstone National Park, Grand Prismatic Hot Springs
I’ve been getting many requests for one-off prints of my larger paintings. Call us disorganized, I guess, but we emptied the lock box of about 100 transparencies and digital scans, and now I have a new section on the website for giclee prints of paintings. Many of these can be printed wall-sized, I mean 7 to 10 feet wide, but most requests I get are more in the 3 to 4 feet size. So, if you want to see what I have up here so far, check out the ever-expanding list. Hopefully I’ll have around 100 or more when I’m finished. Some haven’t been seen in decades (I haven’t even seen them in decades either, and some are really pretty good).
Here’s another that was painted for The Nature Conservancy at Great Salt Lake. The original art is in their visitor center there, but few have seen it. It would make a pretty good canvas print, don’t you think.
I just polished these three outdoor wayside panels for Washington State Parks. Soon they’ll be installed at Rosario Beach, Deception Pass State Park near Anacortes, right on the beach at one of the most heavily-explored tide pool areas in Washington. The three paintings tell the stories of how the tide works to create this amazingly rich ecosystem, how people messed it all up with boots and flip-flops – and finally how to walk here without screwing it up again.
I want to show you the third panel, the one about their rope path. These tide pools were decimated by thousands of feet, but the park stretched a yellow rope out to the best pools and signs (like this one) tell people to ‘Follow the Ropes”. It worked, amazingly enough, and the tide pool life returned – crabs and anemones, kelp and sculpins. It was such an easy idea, and now the place is returning to normal. Seeing this is one of the many reasons I still get a charge out of painting art for public places.
These panels are 36″ x 24″ and will be made of high-pressure laminate and probably last longer than I will.
I received some installation photos for my Lime Kiln Point Lighthouse paintings. Everyone seems to like them, so I thought I’d share it all here for the record. I painted these last winter for Washington State Parks with EDX Exhibits in Seattle. Installation and these photos were by Marius at Doty Signs in Seattle.
This lighthouse is THE place to watch orca whales up close in the wild. There’s possibly no place on Earth you can get closer to wild whales without getting on a boat, and in summer, people line the shoreline here to watch the killer whale families feeding on salmon right in front of them. This is a big deal since the southern population of orcas is endangered and it’s not looking good for a recovery. It’s a thrilling experience to see them, and I’m proud to say my stuff now explains what people are looking at. Plus, there are one or two really nice looking pieces of art!
This is sort of a big deal for me, too, as new rules don’t allow boats to approach these endangered animals, leaving Lime Kiln as the best viewing in the Northwest. It’s also a place I know well, since I had “October”, my 40-foot sloop tied in nearby Friday Harbor in the ’80s – my ‘painting platform’ as I sailed from San Diego to Alaska and most places in between. I have history here. Nancy and I, decades later aboard our 45′ floating home ‘Rumpy’ came by here one afternoon and watched in amazement as an entire orca family slowly swam directly beneath our boat (engine off). One of the big males was bigger than our boat, but they minded their manners and didn’t touch us.
We were out in the rainy Hoh Rainforest, commissioned to take installation photos by the project designer in Washington D.C. Nancy took some very tasty images and I thought I’d share them here. This project ended last summer, but no good photos existed of it, and project artists, designers and builders need these for examples to show for future adventures. This old guy just happened by for one of the shots. That’s a see-through painting of Mount Olympus on the right, a complex collection of forest floor paintings on the tabletop – and beyond is the real thing.
Look out the windows past the art and this is the view. Big Sitka spruce is what this beautiful place is all about. I feel fortunate to have my art here, an installation that will be enjoyed long after I’m gone from walking these trails.
I’ve been painting imaginary scrapes of landscapes for a long time. I find it very rewarding to take a moment in time and build a little painting around it, a memory for me of ‘being there’. This one is actually a streamside rock pile up the Big Quilcene River on the Olympic Peninsula, Olympic National Forest. I remember, it was raining, had glistening rocks, lots of varieties of color and texture, a few bits of wood as well. It was near the old log bridge at Bark Shanty. These are cold waters, so I primed the board with Mars Red to give it all a warm cast.
The spotted sandpiper is the same, a nice memory for me of bumping into this little guy on a hike. They’re around most Western mountain streams throughout the summer, but head south to Argentina when the snow flies. You might normally think of sandpipers as birds that flock for safety, but this one is always singular. They poke around stream and lake shores, banks and beaches for lunch and have a curious habit of teetering up and down as if it’s lost its balance.
The first time I ever saw a spotted sandpiper was in the High Sierra. I was walking along a meadow bank beside the river above Tuolumne Meadows a few miles south of the campground. What a place! And here was a sandpiper, just meandering along and minding its own business as if I didn’t exist. It spent time, and so did I. Those memories make for good paintings, no matter if it’s decades later.
This painting is now for sale. It’s framed and the outside measurements are about 24″ x 20″ matted and under glass for $1295 total. Shipping is a bit more. Let me know if you’re interested at larry@larryeifert.com.
American dipper working the Upper Dungeness – but it could be any clean mountain stream hereabouts. A little space between projects, so I painted my favorite bird – John Muir’s favorite bird too. No secret why, this little bird lives where Muir felt most at home, and I do too – next to a clear rushing and wild bit of water in the high country. Dippers are so connected to this singular habitat that they’ll fly around a stream bend instead short-cutting across a meadow. ‘Dine in’ for a dipper means diving into a waterfall and walking around underwater, kicking stones around and eating insects.
Painting moving water is always a joy for me, but also has some mental anguish. It’s not easy to define what it looks like – something that is more a feeling than a fact. There is lots of bounced light, reflecting off the sky, nearby trees, sunny patches of moss that is getting direct sunlight. It’s not what I see, but more what I think I feel that is important. Did I get it on this one? I’m never sure.
I realized at the beginning that this would be a gray and green painting, cool colors. So, I started it by priming the board with Mars Red, a very brilliant purplish-red that you can see hints of all over the painting. Look carefully, you’ll see what I mean. It warmed the entire painting up a lot.
This painting is still for sale as of January 31, 2019. It’s framed as you see it here, outside measurements are about 20″ x 24″ and is $295 total, with shipping a bit extra. Email me at larry@larryeifert.com if you’re interested.
Sorry, this painting sold a few hours after posting.
El Malpais National Monument mural painting completed
I finished my El Malpais National Monument mural a few days ago. Of course they don’t know about it yet because the park staff is shutdown, but I thought I’d post it here to let everyone else know that artists don’t get sent home – we ARE home. Park staff isn’t getting paid, and neither am I.
Enough of that! The progressive steps of this painting are shown below, from the concept sketch created on location in Grants New Mexico, to the refined sketch and finally the painted version on top. Scroll to the bottom to see the chronological progression in reverse.
This painting shows the rather amazing and pristine high desert plateau landscape right on the Continental Divide in central New Mexico. This giant park has over 400 lava caves, ancient pueblo ruins, sandstone cliffs, vast lava flows, cinder cones and some of the oldest Douglas-fir trees on the planet. The painting shows most of these components, and also several cave entrances, bats emerging for the evening, a ringtail watching them pass. There are two tinajas, or waterpockets with frogs and others coming to drink after a hot day in the desert. This part is on sandstone, like the background cliffs. There are ancient junipers that were probably here 1000 years ago when the pueblo was occupied, and lots of pot shards are littering the ground. We saw all this, and much more I couldn’t get in while on our site visit last spring.
The design for the park’s map brochure.
This painting will be going to the main visitor center in Grants, but a larger copy with also be produced for an exhibit there. The real reason for this, however, is that it’s going on the back of the new park map brochure, so each year over 100,000 people get to take it home with them – along with this painting of mine. This part of the project is being produced by the excellent staff at the National Park Service’s Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia. They always do great things with my paintings. I know the production will be top-notch.
Super-refined sketch prior to painting. This one was drawn in the studio here in Port Townsend and was the final draft before painting.Refined sketch number seven, also drawn on location.ELMA sketch #7
Above is the initial sketch photographed for big screen presentation at the park. I did this on the pavement at the hotel in Grants New Mexico, then loaded into my laptop and piped it onto the big screen for the park to see and comment on while I listened and wrote comments. This is sketch #7, the final one attempted and it was heartily approved. Even the superintendent was there, which is a rarity for me.
This was drawn on location, along with half a dozen others, but wasn’t a specific place. It has all the ‘elements of El Malpais, but doesn’t hold faithful to any ‘stand here and see this’ location. I think I nailed it pretty well.
“Light in the Forest” is an original acrylic painting on canvas, 24″ x 48″. This started with the reference sketch that I made at Sol Duc Valley in Olympic National Park. A droopy trillium flower, a few non-flowering False Lily-of-the-Valley plants, some sword ferns – but I liked the idea of a big shaft of bright sun illuminating a lush springtime old-growth forest. I think I need to work on this just a bit more, but I’m close to getting there. It may be a tad over the top with details, but I couldn’t help but to add a calypso orchid, just because it’s my favorite forest flower – and a Pacific wren, one of my favorite forest birds. These little guys are only about 3 inches long, yet sing an astoundingly-loud sizzling song that seems to go on forever. The poor little bird had its name changed a few years ago when some new genetic testing reveled the birds here on the West Coast are different than the eastern birds. No respect!
This is the original painting, NOT a print. If you’re interested in purchasing this, email me.
We’re offering “Light in the Forest” for $1700 with our custom-built hemlock frame. Shipping will add a bit more, but since it’s on canvas, it’s light. Other frames are also available.
