Tag Archives: Mountains

New Painting Post

The Little Tarn on Lillian Ridge

Lilian-Ridge-Tarn

“Little Tarn on Lillian Ridge” acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ framed: $145.

Actually, the little tarn doesn’t look anything like this, but it was a starting point. It’s a favorite place of ours, maybe yours too for a few or you that hike the Obstruction Point area of Olympic National Park. For me, this area is about as close to ‘goin’ to church’ as I can find. It’s one of the highest roads in the Northwest, and once out of the darned car bumping along that ridgetop, there are miles upon miles of alpine landscapes to wonder.

We hiked down here a couple of weeks ago, below the ridge and away from other hikers. The loudest sounds we heard were big bumblebees working the lupine and bluebells, and a couple of gray jays giving their soft greetings. So I painted it, and then get to live it all over again in the studio – like a memory of a good dream.

Little-Tarn-framed

This ORIGINAL FRAMED painting is acrylic on paper board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 custom FRAMED and a tad bit more for Priority Mail. Glass is 11″ x 14″, outside frame measurement is 14″ x 17″. This is the original painting, NOT a print. Remember, I’m offering this with the frame and a triple custom mat. Email us for details.

SOLD, THIS PAINTING IS GOING TO TEXAS TO SOMEONE WHO WANTS TO BE IN THE OLYMPICS.

Thanks for reading this week. Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Sugar Pine Point – Lake Tahoe and Climate Change

General-Creek-2014

Some years ago I was commissioned for two paintings of Sugar Pine Point State Park, a park that has two miles of Lake Tahoe’s forested coastline and one of the most pristine creeks to enter that lake. Fun project, I got to go there and poke around. The images were eventually made into outdoor wayside panels, and the originals are in the visitor center – pretty typical. We made lots of book store products from the images, and now the poster of General Creek has been redesigned and will soon be available.

For me, the real story is on the poster’s backside, and it’s possibly more important than first version the first time around. I rewrote the essay, and I was struck how the theme, the story, the very reason for this poster and painting has changed in just one short decade. I finished it up, sat back and breathed a ‘WOW’ to myself. Here’s the thing. The original essay spoke of each of the critters, plants and everything else that lives here as being no more important than any of the others. That’s nature’s way, after all. And it went on to say humans were no better nor worse too.

And the updated text? It now speaks of human-caused Climate Change, proving I was wrong about that last sentence. Nature will survive here, of course, but in what form we can’t yet say. Will this ecosystem still be in harmony with itself? I suspect not. Will General Creek, the main focus of this painting, still be flowing in summer when the critters need it most? Doubtful. We just don’t know, but we can guess. In my final statement, I say this: Climate Change is now effecting this landscape, which will alter what we see here in many ways – and add to the stress on a fragile place. In the future, this painting of General Creek may become a historic record of what once was.

Eifert_General_Creek
The original wayside panel beside General Creek.

All of a sudden I realized that all these large-scale murals I’ve been creating for the past several decades might become something more than their original intent. I thought they were painted to educate people about what’s here. As human-caused climate change evolves, now I see these images might be about what once was. A scary thought, for sure, but maybe one that’s more valuable and long lasting.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

It’s a wrap – Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone

Prismatic-Hot-Springs

  • This week I finished up this new mural about Yellowstone Climate Change. I’m happy with it – or at least as happy as I ever get at this stage of working on something for a month and never truly knowing how it’s going to end. This painting and the last Yellowstone mural about whitebark pines (finished last month and seen here), were both funded by the Crater Lake Foundation. I know it seems odd to have someone at Crater Lake fund two Yellowstone paintings, but there’s more to this. First is that this painting is the 12th big painting I’ve done for them, and it’s part of a broad scheme for the funders to create an art collection reflecting various ecosystems and habitats centered around western pines. Whitebarks, bristlecones and now the lodgepoles in this one, are all threatened by Climate Change, and using art to educate is what I’m all about – so I’m thrilled to be able to contribute to this.
  • And, once again, here is the original sketch so you can see how it evolved for the concept. And, once again here’s the story. Lodgepole pines are built to handle wildfire. Their cones won’t even open unless their heated. But today’s hotter summers, warmer winters and less snow mean many more pine bark beetles are surviving cold winters and killing millions of these trees.
  • This painting is meant to show the Yellowstone ecosystem, its wildlife and how the forests are being battered into something almost unfit for wildlife to live in. It’s a trick to paint destruction and yet show it as beauty, and yet as musician Jack Johnson says in this Climate Change YouTube video (please take a minute and watch it), we don’t have to think of this as an end point, just change we need to somehow learn how to handle – and leave this beautiful world in a better place than when we arrived in it.
Hot-Spring-sketch-vs1

Thanks for reading this week. Pass the video on – I thought it was very good.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Wildflower Heaven

 

The past four days: Nancy and I did something we’ve never done. In our hurry to hike every high-country trail, climb to every lookout, paint or photograph every park, we’ve never just walked out there and plopped ourselves in the meadows and spent days just soaking it up like we lived there. It’s always such a hurry with us we never get to just sit and smell the Sitka valerian (very sour). So, that’s what we did – just walked out there and sat down at about the 6000′ feet level – and I’d say it was nothing short of heaven. John Muir said go to the mountains and get their good tidings. We did!

 

There’s this high rocky road, some say the highest in Washington State, that goes off from Hurricane Ridge in the Olympics and in 10 miles or so traverses the most glorious alpine landscape I think I know of. We heard murmurrings that after a seriously big snow winter, this week was the best flower show – but that was a serious understatement. I took three flower books – figured out most but some just weren’t listed. You see, the eastern Olympics are a place unlike any other. Isolated from the rest of the continent like an island in the sky, you can see Olympics-only marmots, chipmunks, violets, hairbells and lots of others, only found here. Red, pink, orange and purple were the meadows. Some, like the photo below looked like snow. Nancy sat herself down next to a marmot family’s communal den system and got some great closeup shots of marmot pups testing their restling skills, and I just went off and found flowers I still have no idea what they’re called.

 Avalanche Lilies

What’s the definition of heaven in this life? I’d say it would be sitting in the middle of this field of avalanche lilies – but I’m just an artist, painter of wild places and still can’t get enough of it. You: go, go now. They’re still 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

Heather Pass

I painted this back in October, 2011 when we were in Washington’s North Cascades. It made it past the scan, into a frame, into the blog – but I never hit the “Post” button. For the last eight months the canvas has just sat there in my studio and also on the blog software – and the title stares at me each time I start the program. “ME, ME, Post ME” it screams, but each week I’ve sent out something else I thought was more interesting. But, now that the High-Country around the West is melting out and trails are beginning to open up, maybe it’s time to show this one.

Here’s what I wrote all those months ago, thinking I would post it then:

Heather Pass is a good 3-mile climb in the North Cascades, and while we’ve been here twice, neither were in late afternoon when the sun was doing this yellow-orange-thing. The last time we were here, there was a lone hiker camped just below this heather-filled bench, and I envyed him for his upcoming sunset and evening solitary view. Beside his single tent was a back-packer’s expresso maker, and this little spring runoff stream in the painting would be his coffee water the next morning. If there’s a reason why spending the night in a place wouldn’t be anything but glorious, I can’t think of it.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $140 unframed.
A custom wood frame 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.
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

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

Meander Up the Dosewallips

Some weeks are just like this.Spend the entire week drawing, drawing, drawing – but in the end there isn’t a single finished painting to show for it. There’s a stack of concept stuff, in between or in progress but not a postable painting in the lot. I think there’s about 20 of them.

Oh, and did I say the weather turned, poof, into summer. So, put the top down on the little car and head for the hills – and a little hike along the Dosewallips River in the Olympic Mountains. Harlequin ducks, bald eagles, a ruffed grouse strutting his manly stuff, hooded mergansers, trilliums and bleeding hearts, violets and salmonberry in bloom. It just couldn’t have been nicer, and I wanted to share. This photo is in about 2 miles, Nancy photographing a little waterfall coming down into the Dosewallips (that’s doe-see-wollips for those out of town)

Thanks for reading this week. I’ve got a dusy of a painting project almost ready to show, and it doesn’t involve canvas or paper, but more sea-going.
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

Ptarmigans Drumming

Can you teach two old dogs some new tricks? Maybe!

Tom Stewart, amazing drum maker who shows with me in Port Townsend’s Gallery Nine approached me recently with a proposal. Would I like to paint one of his elegant drums; a collaborative project. Sounded like fun to me, but what to paint? It took me about 8 seconds to process from drumming to mountains, then to wildlife that drum and finally to the little prairie chicken-like ptarmigans we see and hear booming in western alpine meadows. Actually, there are several species of ptarmigans and they all do more or less the same “drumming” and dancing to call attention to themselves. We’ve almost fell over one once in the alpine heather on Mount Rainier.

So, off I went without any sketches or plans, just an idea of mountains and ptarmigans. They change color with the seasons and are pure white in winter – and they’re the only bird that remains in the alpine throughout winter. But that’s not all: then they turn white and brown in spring and fall (like spring snow patches), and look almost brown in summer. In winter, feet are covered with feathers, as well as some of the beak – so air can be warmed as it’s breathed. Quite a bird!

The drum? Tom plays it far better than I do, and there was a point I could almost think I was in an alpine meadow. It’s 24 inches tall, 12 inch diameter head, goat hide skin. The drum weighs 9.5 pounds and the drum shell is made from five layers of laminated kiln dried Douglas-fir.

The out side surface was wrapped with fiber glass mesh and stuccoed with two coats of wood filler. The filler was sanded smooth making an ideal surface to paint on. The tuning hardware is hand-formed by Tom with mild steel and electro-plated with brass.

We’re going to display this wonder at Gallery Nine in Port  Townsend at Gallery Walk, April 7th. Come in and play it too.

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

Sketchbook of the White Mountains

Click each image to enlarge – there are nice textures here and there.

This week I painted more art for Schulman Grove’s new visitor center in the White Mountains of California. This group is a series of seven sketchbook pages for exhibit panels below my three murals. These three need to be cleaned up a bit, so you’ll see some ragged look and blocky edges here and there from all the Photoshop layers. It’s a work in progress, but this way you can see assembly process.

I hope not, but I may need to move some of the sketches around or change the wording, so I thought it best to create EACH drawing seperately and even the color is seperately layered so it can be changed. Each text passage is put in with Photoshop too, so it can be edited if necessary. I first did the pencil sketch, then put tracing paper over it and painted the color layer. Both were scanned, pieced together and put on a photo image of one of my blank sketchbooks. I think the results look pretty good, like they’re old field sketches drawn on location a century ago. I was shooting for those old botanical illustrations on faded yellow paper, and I think I came close. Once I get approval from the Forest Service, I can clean up the rough edges. The reason I didn’t hand letter the captions is that all this has to be ADA compliant, so the characters have to be an approved font. Ah, the world of public art these days is pretty complex!

Computers can be maddening, but then again they can help produce wonderful results. On the other hand, if I didn’t have a few drawing skills in the first place, none of this would have happened at all, so don’t send me emails about computers replacing artists. They’re just tools, like paint brushes or pencils.

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 some new shots of Sequi, the new sea otter she’s been photographing.

New Painting Post

Another Bristlecone Pine Painting

A few weeks ago I posted my three large murals just completed for the new Schulman Grove Visitor Center near Bishop, CA. Now I’m working on some smaller art for interpretive panels for the rest of the building, and this one features a big ol’ gnarly ancient bristlecone tree in pen and ink and acrylic wash. Below is the preliminary sketch so you can see the progression from pencil to finished painting. It’s pretty close!

There are a lot of other people involved in this project besides me, but I seem to rarely express thanks to these folks for the help I get and joy I experience in doing my work. I’m sure not saying I’m any better than anyone else here, just that it takes a bunch of people to make a visitor center. There’s Rosie, the contractor and designer from Georgia, Frank the writer from Marin County, CA, John L and Sheryl H from the Forest Service, as well as Scott and John from the team Rosie’s assembled to get all this accomplished. We’re a bunch of people that are all doing specific jobs to create a beautiful installation on a remote mountaintop in the Great Basin – and I get to do the art. What a deal!

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.