Tag Archives: Mountains

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.

New Painting Post

Going to Lewis Lake

This is another painting from late summer – and possibly my favorite from the past few months. Just haven’t had time to post it.

“Going to Lewis Lake” not, “Taking the trail to Lewis Lake” – because there isn’t one (the trail, that is). In fact, we didn’t make it to Lewis Lake because the snowy boulder hopping was a bit much and we didn’t have our ice gear. Not that I minded – the view right here was as far as we got and was sure worth the climb, Lewis Lake or not. If there’s anything I love dearly to paint, it’s an alpine landscape with all sorts of craggy angles and snow in both sun and shade. The North Cascades are my idea of  painterly paradise.

I’ve thought a lot about why this is a beautiful image to me, and I’m pretty sure it’s partly the idea that these landscapes are delicately fragile and gigantically solid – soft and deadly, both at the same time. It’s not a place you can relax. Contrast the little soft-stemmed alpine lupine and paintbrush to places still snow-covered – to the ominous sounds of distant rockfall as thawing ice loosens yet another boulder. It’s a place of wildly grand contrasts painters love, at least I do, even if it was difficult to find a place to sit and compose a future painting without squashing an entire little alpine garden.

I’ve decided to hang on to this one for a bit – just because I like it so much. So, at the moment it’s not for sale. We don’t ever really hang art in our own home, mainly because we have mostly big windows and almost no walls – but this one found its way to one of the few spots, and I enjoy reliving this grand hiking experience every time I see 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.

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.

New Painting Post

A Show at Gallery Nine in Port Townsend


For the month of November, Gallery Nine, 1012 Water Street in Port  Townsend features the paintings of Larry Eifert and Chuck (CW) Stern’s wood turning in a show about the Craftsmanship of Art.
Both Nancy and I are represented by this peninsula gallery, and I so rarely do any shows I thought I’d post the event here. For this, I’m partnering with Chuck Stern, a wood turner and carver whose work I consider to be of the highest quality. It’s a nice mix because I tend to paint wood in the form of forests and trees – Chuck uses wood to create his art.

(Here is a part of the press release) Chuck Stern turns both functional bowls and vases as well as carving unique burl wood into beautiful, sometimes whimsical sculptures. His love and close knowledge of wood comes from a lifetime on the Olympic Peninsula working in many facets of the wood industry, and it’s clear that Stern knows wood in a way that is not simple or superficial. “It’s taken decades to understand that once-living wood has a history buried within it. Each year, each growth ring, each winter storm or injury creates an internal change I need to recognize, understand and try to incorporate into my finished piece. It’s not just slamming it on the lathe and turning out a bowl, but more a conversation with an ancient once-living soul.” 

 Join the artists for conversations about their work during November’s Gallery Walk, 5:30 to 8 pm, Saturday, November 5.

For my part of the show I’ve worked up 20 new paintings (these, besides the three big murals I’m currently involved with that aren’t finished yet means I’ve been busy). If you’re interested in the painting shown here, as of this posting it’s still available. “Heather Meadows ” is 11″ x 14″ on canvas. It’s available for $140 without a frame. A nice custom wood frame makes it $165 and shipping adds a bit more depending on your zone. If you’re interested, email me and I’ll put a hold on it.

Thanks for reading this week, and if you’re here on Saturday, please stop by Gallery Nine. Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to. And here’s the link to Gallery Nine’s website.

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

Cutthroat Creek Meadows

This painting and about 20 others are destined for a November show I’m having at Gallery Nine in Port Townsend. If sold here on the blog, I hope I can still hang it there for a week or so. While only about 5% of my mailing list is from Port Townsend, I’ll be hanging the show on Monday if you’d like a pre-show preview before Saturday Gallery Walk.

Cutthroat Lake is on the east side of the North Cascades, but just barely. Where the snowmelt runs out of the lake, it braids itself through some very pretty mosquito-filled meadows, then comes together to plunge down into Early Winters Creek towards the Methow Valley in eastern Washington. We were there a few months ago and I was interested in the way the light was streaming through the trees and onto the creek. It made for a very interesting and complex set of light patterns around the jumble of islands, downed trees and moving water. From this location, we turned around and walked a few hundred feet, and this was the spectacular scene that awaited us. (Clicking on both these images will enlarge them.)

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $140 unframed.
The custom wood frame makes it a total of $165 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 here for details or just hit reply.

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

Schulman Grove Pinyon Pine Forest

(If you click it, this will enlarge in your browser)

This is the second of the three Schulman Grove bristlecone paintings for the new visitor center east of Bishop, California. A few weeks ago I painted the first one of the alpine area that will go on the far right side. Now this one goes on the left side and shows pinyon – juniper forest. Overall size of these three is about 17′ x 5′. If you look at the upper right of the painting, you can see the bristlecones growing up at 10,000′, where the middle painting is sited. That’s the High Sierra in the distance.

Pinyon pine nuts have provided food for people, birds and animals for as long as they’ve been growing. Because of this, the Forest Service requested a gathering party of Native Americans be added to the mural so they can interpret that on the reader rail below. That seemed awkward to me, because it places it as historic and out of context with the other two. What to do? So, I set an amber value scale to the painting to make it feel like an old sepia-tinted photo. I’m hoping it will still go well with the other two paintings, but there’s a very different feel to it.

A busy time these days as I have a show coming up at local Gallery 9 in Port Townsend. I’m enjoying the back and forth between huge mural canvases and looser easel paintings. There’s a lot of paint being tossed around.

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.