Tag Archives: Mt St Helens

Murals, New Painting Post, Washington State Parks, Wildlife

More New Mount St. Helens Paintings

These are some of the other new paintings for the Mount St Helens Visitor Center at Silver Lake, Washington. Commissioned by Washington State Parks, they are part of the interior exhibit plan and it’s complicated enough that I’ll just let the art speak for itself. There’s more than this, and the last post I published, but you’ll get the idea.

I wanted to explain the newspaper at the top. When I started painting these a few months ago, I opened one of my file cabinets to find maybe a map of the park, and this thing jumped out at me. It’s been sitting here now for 43 years, as I bought it for $2 right after the eruption – and I imagined it saying “me, me, I’m finally here to help”. And it did, as several of these paintings are direct results of the photos in this yellowing magazine. Serendipity, I think the word is.

This painting deserves a bit of explanation. Left side, immediately after the blast, right side might be today, 43 years after the blast. The elk returned immediately, and in their footsteps in the ash, water gathered and supported many critters as they expanded back into the ash zone.

And below is the mountain today (or, two summers ago when we hiked there). It’s recovering nicely and it’s always fun to see how nature finds a way to cover every inch of ground, even after it’s been blown to smithereens.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

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New Painting Post

Another Painting for Powell Butte, Portland Oregon

Big paintings: that seems to be my life these days. No complaints!

 

I posted another painting from this project a few weeks ago – a giant 24-foot wall mural of Portland from three miles up for a new visitor center in Portland, Oregon. This one is this week’s effort and is a 9-foot wide painting for an interpretive panel in the same visitor center atop Powell Butte (shown perched atop the butte on the right side of the painting). This is actually the bottom 2/3 of the panel, which I edited to show better in this post. It goes up another few feet. Great design by Linda Repplinger of SeaReach in Sheridan, Oregon, don’t you think? (click the images and they should enlarge)

This was a sort of history painting and it was fun to figure out. Notice that over the top of the dairy farm in the middle rises Mount St. Helens before it blew in 1981. Mt. Rainier is farther away and behind it to the right. Thanks, Linda, for pointing out that it would be the ‘old’ mountain and not the sheared off one of today.

 

Left side: Native Americans lived in the Portland area for thousands of years, burning the forests and creating lush open grassland forests that sustained their culture. It was a garden – but it also demanded a bunch of work to keep it that way.

 

Middle: white guys arrived and realized this really was a garden, kicked out the very people that made it that way and put in dairy farms, roads and railways. Mount St. Helens was many decades from blowing it’s top.

 

Right side: today, the old railroad is now a bike/hike path, the old volcanic butte is now hollowed out (I’m not kidding) and holds a soon-to-be-finished 100 million gallon underground water cisterns the size of TWO football stadiums and covered over with dirt with a new visitor center perched on top – and a couple of Eifert paintings installed in it as well.

Amazing!

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

I’m currently in the middle of another project, that of digitizing all 20+ books from my mom’s out-of-print catalog. Virginia Eifert will soon rise again on Amazon.com, so stay tuned. It’s getting wild around here.

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New Painting Post

Mount St. Helens – Meta Lake at the eruption

If you’re reading this blog for the first time, it’s because I shamelessly added your name after a personal contact with you. I’ve published these art posts about once a week for years, showing new work, paintings, park projects and such. You can unsubscribe at any time by telling me in a reply.

Here is another bit of art for wayside panels recently completed for Mount St. Helens. If you click on it, the image should enlarge in your browser.

This shows Meta Lake, northeast side of the volcano near Portland, Oregon in May 1980 just as the blast cloud is approaching (you can see it over the treetops). In a few seconds, almost all nature here will be obliterated and, as you can see in the upper right panel photo, this old-growth forest will be reduced to ruin. But the mice and toads below the snow (shown in the insets) will survive, and in a few months begin to colonize this area again.

Imagining what this was like at that moment was fun. Would there have been snow in the trees? How much snow would there have been on the lake ice in May? What would the blast cloud have looked like at this point a few miles from the volcano? What do mice look like sleeping in their winter dens? How bent over would the little shrubs be beneath the snow? It seems amazingly easy to paint gallery canvases after doing this stuff. It’s the same paint getting splashed on the same canvas, but if it’s for me and not a park, no one tells me what to paint and I really don’t care if anyone likes it or not. That’s satisfying, sure – but this is challenging because I learn something new with each painting. Thanks for SeaReach for contracting me for this, and Becky at Mt St Helens for her skillful word-crafting. If was a fun project.

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.

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New Painting Post

A Torrent of Mud on Mount St. Helens

This is another in the series of wayside panels I recently finished for Mount St. Helens National Monument. Now, you’ll have to admit I’m not normally posting paintings of mudflows – and I can’t even remember ever doing one. The top bit of art tells the story of the giant mudflow that filled this valley 31 years ago during the eruption. The finished outdoor panel will be placed at the overlook boardwalk above the creek. Linda Repplinger and Susan Jurasz of Sea Reach Ltd, 146 NE Yamhill St. Sheridan Oregon did the layout and design.  Also involved in these panels were Peter Reedijk from Sea Reach and Charlie Crisafulli and several others from USDA Forest Service, Mount St Helens who added additional thoughts and comments on the accuracy of the images.

As it’s not easy to read here, this is the text for the panel written, I believe, by Rebecca Railey, Interpretive Planner at Mount St Helens National Monument: Lava Canyon’s beauty lay hidden for centuries beneath lush evergreen forests until the May 18, 1980 eruption. A surge of hot gas, ash and pumice boiled out of the crater and scoured nearly 30 feet of ice off St. Helens Shoestring Glacier. Water, ash and rock mixed, forming a thick slurry that raced down the mountain and into the Muddy River drainage. A 15 foot wall of mud and rock swept into Lava Canyon. In an instant, the mudflow’s boulders and abrasive ash battered, scoured and swept away the vibrant forest that cloaked this canyon, exposing its beautiful waterfalls and rock formations.

The photos below the painting show what it looks like today, but, as they say “a painting is worth 1000 words” and with only about space for a hundred of them – that’s why they commissioned me. In the process I learned a bunch about mudflows. This version had the mudflow too fluid, so I worked at making it more champagne-milk-shakey. Haven’t seen that final mock up, but only I and a couple of USFS science-guys would know the difference between milk-shakey and fluid-flowing. And since no one actually saw this happening, it’s only a guess anyway.

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

Mount St. Helens Wayside Panels

Besides all the other stuff I’ve posted here over the past few months, I’ve been working on paintings for some outside panels at Mount St. Helens National Monument. Here’s the first one. Mount St. Helens is about half a day’s drive south of us, and last fall we were up there to have a look. The eruption happened 31 years ago, and the changes since the initial devastation are pretty amazing. Nature is back in a big way, and my paintings will help explain that. When we were here at this overlook at Meta Lake, there was a toad hatch-out, and what appeared to be squirming mud soon defined itself as a bunch of little amphibians. This species, and lots of others, survived the May 1980 blast because they were either in their dens under the snow, under the lake ice, or buried in mud.

I’ll show you the other panels in weeks to come. Learning about and then illustrating the giant eruption and its aftermath has been a fun project. I feel like we know that mountain in a much better way. It’s one of the reasons I continue to do this stuff. And if you’re on the north side Spirit Lake road, look for a little Eifert art gallery as you go – and you’ll learn about it too. Maybe I should put out a map and guide to all these waysides around the country where you can see my work on outdoor panels. I haven’t kept good track, but I’d guess we’re up to at least 400 by now.

These panels are being designed and created by Sea Reach Ltd. of Sheridan, Oregon – a bunch of very nice people. In an interesting twist, I also bid on this project, which Sea Reach won. Not to be left out, I contacted them and pleaded to be involved – and so here I am. No one ever said I was shy and retiring – but you already know that.

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

Three Blind Mice

I’ve been working on three projects at once, some of them fairly large, so keeping it all straight has been interesting. Oh yeah, then there’s this blog-thing.

Here’s the setup: Imagine you’re a little mouse family living on the north side of Mount St Helens 30 years ago. Meta Lake is just downhill, still snow covered even though it’s May. Life is good, you’ve been asleep all winter, waking occasionally but certainly not leaving your cozy little mouse den. Your little clan found this neat little hole a mole had dug, and in a little side room you set up shop for the winter. It’s May, still a month from being able to leave for a brief summer of munching and gaining back the weight you lost over winter, when you awake to hear what sounds like a 1000 jet planes landing right on top of you. Well, whatever it was, it passes by.

Well, whatever it was – turned out to be the eruption of Mount St. Helens, and because this little family was underground, it survived the almost supersonic blast. After the snow melts, rich ash and a destroyed forest will make for a rich succession of plants with lots of seeds and grasses. And, unlike the elk and deer in the blast zone, the mouse family will survive.

Such is the job of a naturalist-artist. This little painting will be an inset to a much larger painting showing the snow-covered forest and that big ugly blast cloud just arriving. Fun stuff to figure out.

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.

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