I haven’t posted anything for a few weeks because this has been a stretch of sketching and preparing for lots of new paintings – but they’re all in progress. Then we took a week to drive down to San Diego, but now I’m finally back in the thick of it and wanted to pass along some of the sketches I’m doing.

This is a first-round draft of one of the wayside paintings I’m doing for Mount St Helens Volcanic National Monument. It’s going to show something that no photographer could show (or wouldn’t want to have tried 30 years ago). Meta Lake is a few miles north of the volcano, and this shows the eruption blast cloud just coming over the hill on the left – wind hundreds of miles an hour cutting down this old-growth forest like it was dried grass. The lake was still frozen then as it was May, and critters were still asleep in their burrows below the snow. It was this cover that helped nature return very quickly here, and that’s what this piece of art will hopefully show. We came here for field research back in October, and the scene is now very forested like the photo at the lower right. It’s a lovely place that is difficult to imagine as a wrecked volcanic blast zone.

I love doing these projects, because we get to learn all this new stuff – and that’s what life is all about – it’s it?

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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