Tag Archives: Mountains

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.

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

Acres of Glacial Lilies – It’s Finally Summer

On August 6th, the park finally opened the road out to Olympic National Park’s Obstruction Pass. From the acres of cars and people at tourist-center Hurricane Ridge, as soon as we hit the dirt road we transended into acres of glacial lilies and almost no cars or people. It’s amazing how park visitors all clump together in herds.

With the drifts still melting on one of the largest snowpacks on record, neither of us have ever seen such an amazing display of alpine flowers. It’s not just summer August flowers, but spring glacier and fawn lilies to mid-summer tiger lilies. The place is awash in perfume, and as we sat on the edge of this field of color I watched a big bumblebee slowly weaving around like it was drunk, going from one bisort bloom to the next, completely ignoring all the other species. So, was this bisort Sunday, followed by lily Monday and paintbrush Tuesday?

Click to enlarge both images.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $120 unframed.
The nice wooden frame makes it a total of $145 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

Cedar Falls Trail – A Picnic Table Painting

A traditional watercolor painting for today. We spent last week hiking on the east side of the North Cascades and each evening I painted on the picnic table in Site 38, Pearrygin Lake State Park. Like everyone else in the West, they’ve experienced record snowpack and with temperatures in the 80’s, the snow is wasting no time getting out of there. And with spring pushed into summer, the flowers were just amazing. All the alpine lakes are still iced up, but these lower trails along the rivers were stunning, with lupine, paintbrush, calypso orchids, chocolate lilies, mountain ash, balsamroot – all of it in bloom at once. So, back in camp I got out the paints to relive the same experience twice.

While on this trail, I did a short little soundscape recording. I’m trying to figure out a way to easily add sound clips to paintings of these blog trail paintings, so here goes.

If you’re reading this from an email, try this: Cedar-falls-soundscape

If you’re reading this on the internet blog, click this:  Cedar-Falls.amr

Pearrygin Lake is downslope of the North Cascades Highway and south of the Pasayton Wilderness, some of the wildest and most pristine country I know. With over a half million acres, the Pasayton is the northern terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s one of the few places in the Lower 48 where trailhead signs have notices for BOTH grizzlies and wolves. This one was on the South Fork of the Twisp River coming down from North Cascades National Park and caught our eyes. It states hunters need to make sure the dog-species they’re killing is a coyote instead of a wolf. So, why would anyone climb up these steep trails to pull the trigger on a coyote when they’re in most everyone’s backyards – but then hunting anything at all has always baffled me. Doesn’t it seem like we as the now-dominant and planet caretaker species should be beyond that sort of mayhem?

Thanks for reading this week. This painting isn’t for sale just yet. The memories are too good to let it go.
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

Barnes Creek Trail – an Ageless Moment

Another sweet old-growth trail painting today. How many of these trails have I been on? I think it’s some genetic throwback to a distant past that compels me to hike just one more of these trails, and then paint the darned thing later (it’s two for one – first the trail experience and then reliving that pleasure in a painting). This one starts on Lake Crescent in Olympic National Park, goes gently upslope following the creek past Merrymere Falls (pretty cool in itself) and onto the flanks of Mount Storm King. About two miles out, the trail goes over a little hump past some pretty impressive trees – which is where the inspiration for this painting occurred. Don’t go up there looking for it – these things are never even close to what they actually look like. There I was, waiting for Nancy to photograph some spring flowers – knees in the dirt, head in the ferns as usual. And while I stood there soaking in the forest, I just fell in love with the place – the gentle flow of the trail, the glow of light on a few leaves, the agelessness of it all.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $320 unframed.
A custom wood frame is about $25 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

The Marmots of Hurricane Hill

A local project this week. Olympic National Park is just to the southwest of us, we see the snow shining on the peaks just a few miles away. The Olympic Peninsula is a biological island, with water on three sides and lowland on the fourth, so Olympic’s alpine is really isolated from the rest of the continent. Because of this, there are at least twenty-three plants and animals that are only found here – although a couple are on Vancouver Island peaks too. Take a walk in the alpine and you’ll see nature you can’t see anywhere else. One of these is the Olympic marmot, a big meadow-living woodchuck that spends its summers eating sedges and grasses as it prepares for the next 8 months of underground sleeping. We often see these guys hanging out on their den “front porches”, watching for preditors. But recently, their meadows have been changing – and not for the better. One might say the neighborhood has been going to the dogs (coyotes).

So this bit of art will alert visitors as they climb the Hurricane Hill trail to watch for a rare critter that is in trouble. Climate Change? Well, the Park might not say this, but I see thousands of brand new little confers invading the upper meadows, where trees haven’t been before. It’s like winters aren’t as harsh, the growing season just a bit longer. More trees equal better cover for lowland coyotes to sneak through as they go after the marmots. And the coyotes are here since the wolves have been exterminated!

For me, it’s another chance to learn more about nature – and figure out how to illustrate it so you can 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

Meadows

 

Late winter and all this is under gobs of snow right now, but one of the nice things about being a painter is that I can create a moment in time, even if it’s a fantasy. Each day I receive a bunch of blogs from artist friends around the country, and lately they have been full of wistful wishes of warm beaches, rocky summer coastlines, even one from a desert island. So I created my idea of a bit of summer heaven too.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $120 unframed.
We can also frame this if you’d like. Ask us about details. 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.