Not just the paintings, but I also do all the designs for our stuff, puzzles, posters, books – you name it – the go-fer guy. I figure if I painted the thing, I should be able to transfer some of the same ideas to the rest of it. So, after talking with a bunch of puzzlers, I worked on this new design with a better understanding of what makes an interesting and somewhat difficult jigsaw puzzle. Add to this the box with a species list, key and a bunch of stuff about ancient old-growth forests, and I think this is a winner. Lots of layers of color and texture, lots to look at, and many pieces that could go anywhere. I think it should be an entertaining and educational product – and you may learn a few things about these forests in the process.
Just in time for the approaching holidays, this week we received a giant load and our warehouse is stuffed. The details: 500-pieces, finished size is nearly 18″ x 24″, and the box is 9″ x 12″. You can order it now on our website here.
Finally, our summer load of new puzzles have arrived, and Badlands National Park might prove to be a real winner. By my count (somewhat fuzzy) this is somewhere around the 80th jigsaw puzzle we’ve developed or licensed from my paintings. The original mural is installed at the main Visitor Center in Badlands National Park in South Dakota. What, you say? You even have work in South Dakota? Yes, and this painting was done to commemorate the release back into the wild of the black-footed ferret, a native hunter important to that prairie ecosystem.
This is the box back, chocked full of enough critters to fill a field guide.
And here’s a detail showing you what color carpet we have (just in case you want to know these things). The main thing is to know these are now available, because I received a bunch of emails requesting such things. You can order them here from the website store.
Not just a nice painting, but an entire outdoor art gallery! This wayside panel goes to ‘press’ this week, so here’s the final design. Forest path, old-growth forest on the cliff, windblown ancient trees and a complex ecosystem – all in one painting. Since the text talks of this forest, we put in eight smaller paintings of the local trees and shrubs, so the art becomes a nature guide. Click to enlarge in your browser.
This will be fabricated out of very thick high-pressure laminated ‘plastic’ resin and cardboard with a lifespan certainly longer than mine. An art gallery in the forest – just my idea of where art should be shown.
In the 1990’s I was commissioned to paint this wildlife mural for the City of Arcata, California’s marsh project. A fairly innovative idea at the time, they were using old log sorting ponds to purify their sewer water, using them for settling ponds. Of course, being Arcata which is mostly Humboldt State University, it involved wildlife, and lots of it – and so a visitor center was built and this painting is an exhibit there, but it’s inside the building.
Now, two decades later, they’re using the same image as their entrance sign at the gate, so I did a redesign last week and it’s at the fabricator now. This simply wouldn’t have been possible back when I first painted the image, but nowadays I can digitally create this huge sign, send it off over the cable – and soon this beautiful, 6′ x 6′ and 3/4″ thick, it’s going to be made out of something like Formica – with a life span longer than I’ll be alive.
Of course, this is all possible because I retained the copyrights to this painting, so when Denise at the Marsh wanted to do this project, she needed to come to me. It’s a way we working artists make a living. I only signed away the rights to one large painting – the first one I ever did for the National Park Service at Redwood National Park. It ended badly, with me having to actually buy my own posters from the parks’ bookstores and not even having a digital copy of it to put on my website. A cautionary tale, don’t you think?
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.
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.
This is the second painting for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust project at the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve just a few miles north of Port Townsend. Missed the first painting? Click here. This time it’s less about the critters and more about showing this rare and diverse forest, a remnant lowland bit of old-growth hugging a bluff-top. This place gets the full unfettered west wind coming right down the Straits, so the trees on the edge are wildly “flagged” from centuries of being blasted by the Westerlies. Eagles and hawks patrol this bluff edge, riding these updrafts that also increase the wind’s velocity. Weeesheeeh, can you hear it? Then there’s the trail snaking along, a left-over from when this was part of Fort Casey where they watched and waited for an enemy that never showed up. Farther inland, the trees are huge and less flagged, but still very gnarly. In fact, they have some of the gnarliest branches I’ve seen around Puget Sound. They’re trees you’d expect on the western beaches at Kalaloch or La Push instead of here, 100 miles to the east. Trees and wind, trees and wind. It’s a fun painting for me so far.
And here’s my progress so far. An old friend wrote last week to say he thought when my larger paintings reach this stage, it was about as good as it gets – free and dramatic, non-objective nirvana. I completely agree. It’s not that the finished paintings are less good, just a different good. I could end it here, show it in some gallery for a month and maybe it’d be hung in some rich-guys house. But if I continue to paint it, thousands upon thousands will see it for decades to come – so I paint on.
Here’s some structure appearing – blocking out trees and distant horizon, the Olympic Peninsula in the distance.
And now the trail is defined, some parts are refined a bit so I can judge how it’s going to come together. Background horizon is finished enough that I can understand how much atmosphere there might be to make it appear distant. Painters out there: see how light that is! Just saying. Stay tuned, because given some time, by next week this should be well along – oh, but then there’s the magazine page I have to write, a new puzzle that needs proofing, a web site to build for Crater Lake Institute – and a spring to enjoy.
Click the image and it will enlarge in your browser.
Feeling pretty good about this painting, and that’s saying something for me (who’s usually a real curmudgeon about my own stuff). With several more paintings right behind this one, I didn’t hesitate to finish it up this week. Some details need to be refined, a couple of minor changes I can already see, but we’re close – very close.
This is all about wildlife in the forest, so I designed it to show the actual trail meandering down and around the viewer. It’s as if YOU were back in the woods with all the critters, watching hikers come and go, come and go. The coyote shares the trail with people as I often see them doing (they can cover a lot of ground that way), a Douglas squirrel shucks a Douglas-fir cone, a chickadee lands on an old uprooted snag. I enjoy piecing this together, one critter at a time, and hopefully in the end it all makes sense. The critters should all be sized relative to each other, spaced in such ways that might really be true. I still need to alter the rose color, fix the shine on the squirrel, a couple of other things – and, well, what do you know, just this moment I realized I forgot the deer mouse in the old stump. Back to the easel! Next time you see this painting, look for it.
And here’s the sketch again, finished just 13 days ago. I’m telling you, I’m on fire! Can you see the deer mouse?
I often get emails about blogging progress reports of these larger paintings. Someday I’ll set my camera up and do a little film of it, start to finish. This painting has some degree of pressure with the calendar, in other words, no time to mess around. So here’s a little progress report in a couple of photos.
Click the images to enlarge them in your browser.
Top image is how it’s looking this morning. Many things get in the way of painting the hours I need to put in, like new spring printed projects, puzzle redesigns, trying to find resource material for the other four paintings – but it’s moving along well. Last week I blogged about the sketch and an overview of the entire project here.
And here’s a couple of days ago. Background’s in place so I can begin defining the foreground’s details, critters, closeups that take the time. There have already been major changes in that area, but only I will know.
And here’s the original sketch I showed last week. Thanks, Mark and Jessica at the Whidbey Camano Land Trust for making this a very fun project. I don’t often get the chance to paint these complex murals of my backyard forest, but this project comes close.
Click the image and it will enlarge in your browser.
A new project unfolds! Rarely do I get to do a bunch of paintings of something I truly love and know already. Or do it for a local park and do it for a group as tasty as this. I’m painting some small murals, doing design and handling fabrication for trail exhibits for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust – just to the north of us. It’s actually part of the Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve, and, in fact, I often sail over to Whidbey Island right under the bluff where these installations will soon be installed in the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve. Here’s the location -right on the bluff-top to the left. Port Townsend is to the right just across the channel.
Photo thanks to Mark Sheehan, WCLT
Above is the first sketch, already underway as a painting. Four other paintings come as soon as possible – and that’s the catch. All five plus fabrication and installation have to be finished up and installed in three months – a daunting task for some, but not the manic me. I’m just a slave to my paintbrush! This first painting is about the forest on the ridgetop, a very rare coastal old-growth forest. Being on a bluff at the downwind end of the Straits of Juan de Fuca, this forest sees some pretty violent weather, so the bluff-top trees have grown very gnarly and wind-flagged. But, back in the quieter part, a more normal forest shelters a marvelous bunch of critters, and that’s what this painting is all about. It’s also an island that was under ice until just 8.000 years ago, so there are some wildly odd critters missing, like native rabbits, moles, bobcats and others normally found around here but not on Whidbey. No moles? Humm. This is the part of my job I dearly love, that of learning all this stuff from people who love it, like Mark, Ida and Jessica and Janelle, Whidbey Islanders who are helping me figure it out. And I, in turn, hope I’m helping them create something that will effect people for years to come.
And I just have to share this. An old friend and fellow artist, John Sturgeon, who teaches video at the University of Maryland recently contacted me, or maybe it was the other way around. There were four of us in the same year, same high school art classes that went on to life-long art careers – a rather high percentage, I think. John told me something I’ve suspected, but never heard from anyone who might know: “The general consensus is… that by five years out of art school about 10% are still practicing, and by 10 years out it drops to 5% . . . then more or less stays there. However, those that make a living from it [making art instead of teaching art] . . . less than .05%, which is astounding. You are among that small % my friend. Pretty damn cool. ” Trouble is, I never really went to art school to learn how to do this stuff.
And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books. I currently have five up, with 15 more coming.
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.
Thanks for reading this week. Pass the video on – I thought it was very good. Larry Eifert
