Tag Archives: Murals

New Painting Post

Old-growth Forest Poster Is Now Available

We’ve now printed my Mount Rainier National Park mural as a 18″x 24″ poster. I spent some time on a different type of design for this, with a really great interpretive key on the back. We’ve already had orders from several big parks, so I’m feeling this is going to work.

Awhile ago, I got to thinking about how posters are used. Hang them up, you can’t see the back, all that backside space lost to the viewers. So, I reworked this to make it so anyone can slam it on a copy machine and get four full sheets of the back that create a nice teaching guide and interpretive key. I’m hoping classes use this, but also people who just want to use the painting as a field guide reference.

The poster back is sectioned off so teachers can photocopy each of four panels and create a lesson plan.

And here’s the original painting installed in Mount Rainier National Park. It’s in the main room filled with oiled wood trim and cedar walls, and seems to fit almost like it’s in an art gallery, but guess what, it’s CLOSED because of the SEQUESTER. It’s the nicest visitor center (I think) at that world-class park, and so why would this great country just shut this off, board it up and not allow people to use it at the very busiest season? Let’s see, by doing this, it might staff cuts (people out of work and on unemployment), the non-profit there can’t sell books (meaning private publishers loose money and therefore pay fewer taxes) and artists (us) loose income to pay our printer and and therefore pay fewer taxes.

But while you may not be able to buy this poster at the Ohanapecosh Visitor Center, you CAN get them from us. Here’s a direct link to our shopping cart. 18″ x 24″ poster for $8.95 each. Help us pay the bill that Mount Rainier’s Ohanapecosh would have helped with!

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog.  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 photographs

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

New Painting Post

Sitka National Historical Park gets some Eifert paintings

There are LOTS of historic totem poles at the Sitka National Historical Park and Southeast Alaska Indian Cultural Center in Sitka, Alaska, and soon there will also be some Eiferts. This past week we had the distinct privilege to spend it in one of the most interesting, beautiful and historically-significant towns in America, and one of the most remote as well. No roads go to Sitka, and in fact it’s the only town that faces the Gulf of Alaska head-on. There are about 9,000 people there who own 7500 cars – but there’s only 21.5 miles of roads to drive them on – and I’d guess there are more fishing boats than people. The National Park Service has the oldest national park unit in Alaska, and there’s a beautiful visitor center and historic park along the Indian River, as well as the Russian Bishop’s House, a meticulously restored and remarkable two-story massive structure built in 1842 that is mind-boggling in it’s history, furnishings and especially the building itself. In an effort to keep this short, let’s just say we had a very good time – and boy, are these people friendly.

My task is now to create some paintings of the salmon runs in the Indian River. So after five other concept sketches, this was my best try, and I think it will work. I won’t explain it now, but you’ll soon see the painting, a forest scene with brown bears, ravens, eagles and lots of salmon returning to spawn.

And here’s the location along the river. An amazingly beautiful place, and you’d never know it but it’s right smack in the middle of town. As we walked in these woods, we constantly overheard bald eagles and ravens ‘talking’ among themselves high in the canopy. While we were there one day, a string trio played in a meadow within 200 feet of this photo location and I’ve never heard a cello, viola and violin played along with eagles and ravens chinning in from the balcony – and as loud as the wooden instruments. Remarkable.

And here’s the initial species list I created on location. It was written in the order of discussion and while we didn’t see all these critters here, we saw almost all of them somewhere on our stay – even the grizzlies.

 

 

Stay tuned. It’ll be a fun painting – and there are five other smaller paintings coming as well. I’m excited.

 

 

 

Finally: I don’t usually do this, but I’d like to recommend the channel-side small inn and restaurant we stayed at in Sitka. It’s the Fly-In-Fish-Inn and it couldn’t have been a better experience. Ken and Carla made us feel like we were family.

 

 

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to.

Or click here to follow me on Facebook. I post lots of other stuff there, like trip photos of this expedition.

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.

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

New Painting Post

Theodore Roosevelt NP finally gets an Eifert

Now I ask you: how many artists can say they have public art on display in North Dakota?

 

 

I keep painting away at this – and sooner or later I hope to have some bit of my work in most every Western national park. Theodore Roosevelt National Park is in North Dakota, a fairly remote landscape of over 100 square miles in size and it’s just the sort of beautiful and relatively pristine place I love to paint. But because it IS remote, it’s not so well funded and commissioning an Eifert mural isn’t easy. So, it was nice to get a request from them to use some existing work, a large visitor center mural I did for Badlands National Park in South Dakota. The image seems to fit nicely for what they had in mind, and really could be North Dakota, and so this exhibit panel will be installed in the park this summer.

I’m always asked how the heck I got into the somewhat rarefied line of art, and so here it is in as few words as I can make it. 50 years ago I asked my mom the same thing. Who does someone publish 20 books and write a magazine for over 300 issues? When I was young, it simply all seemed overwhelming. Since my family made it abundantly clear that I was to be an artist, and an artist of nature, I had to figure out what to paint and how to sell it. I gravitated to national parks and wilderness areas simply because I thought, and still do, that these are by far the best places in America – the best of what’s left. I backpacked, climbed, sailed (to Alaska and Mexico), and through it all I painted what I saw. Then someone asked me why I painted and left? Why not keep the paintings where they were created and belonged, in the parks they were painted in? So, I did. And, so, decades later there are Eiferts in a whole BUNCH of parks, from Alaska to Florida, the Mojave Desert to Wisconsin, Mount Rainier to Yosemite. I get it now. It’s not an issue of creating a huge body of work, but creating them one at a time. One at a time. As Henri said: “It takes 1000 paintings to become a painter. So get to work.”

And I’m not going to stop until I drop dead!

 

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.

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

New Painting Post

Closing In – Point Reyes National Seashore

I’m about 80% finished with my current painting for Point Reyes National Seashore. I blogged about the start two weeks ago, and now I’m closing in on completion. There are still many details that need tightening up, filling in, straightening out, smoothing over, brightened or softened, fixed, repainted, moved – but I still call that ‘closing in.’ You can see it’s not finished by the black holes, unpainted treetops, critters just blocked out.

The original painting is going in the Bear Valley Visitor Center at the park, northwest of San Francisco, but it’s also going to be used on their new park map. One entire side of it is the park map, I get the other side. I needed to see how it’s all going to fit that critical space, so Jane at Harper’s Ferry Center in West Virginia (the National Park Service’s interpretive center) popped my painting into the design. The red lines are fold lines.

And here’s that first post so you can see how it’s been developing. The painting is 48″ x 63″. I sort of hit it all over the place to develop a ‘feeling’, which is much different than getting it just ‘painted’. When I look at this progress photo today, I think it’s a bit of history – something no one will ever see again (because it’s painted over). We were at Point Reyes last October for the field research, and it was really flat, dried-up and burnt out colors of nature was getting ready for winter. But Point Reyes has a singular lush greenness that I find very rare and beautiful, and that I’ve brought into the distance. I can’t use the word “unique” because that would mean that no other place on the planet is like it, but let’s just say it’s a ‘singular’ place. It’s a very beautiful landscape to paint.

Thanks for reading this week. I have one more of Virginia’s books up, and a third is almost there. I’ll tell you about them next week unless another painting gets in the way.
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

Point Reyes National Seashore mural progress

I spent the week working away on this large painting for Point Reyes National Seashore near San Francisco. Back in October, I posted the field trip and concept here, and the final sketch here, and now I’m working on the final painting. This isn’t a huge one this time, 48″ x 63″, but it’s big enough that I had to move it to my downtown Port Townsend studio above Union Bank.

So you don’t have to go back into the old posts (unless you want the real details), here’s the concept sketch again.

You can see the basic idea is there but it’s sure refined into another thing completely.

This is a very fun painting for me, not only because Point Reyes is a singularly beautiful and rare place, but because I have work installed in many other parks in that San Francisco North Bay area – and this is just about my last non-Eifert-art location. Muir Woods (9), Sam Taylor State Park (36), Angel Island, Muir Beach, Muir Headlands, Golden Gate National Recreation Area and some others all have Eifertst for interpretive exhibits and installations, and it’s fun for me to imagine all those little art galleries in the woods and ocean overlooks. Sam Taylor State Park has two trails that have a dozen or so panels each, so a walk in the woods is like hiking through a little art exhibit.

It’s also a real honor to be commissioned, yet again, by my favorite bunch of people, the National Park Service. Best to work with, highest standards of excellence, working for a noble cause and I just plain love going to these amazing places over and over for decades. I hope it never ends.

Thanks for reading this week. I’ve now had this weekly blog going for over 250 posts – that’s a lot of art in over 5 years.
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

24′-wide Digital Scan of My Portland Mural

 I wrote about this painting when it was about 80% completed on November 18th, 2012. Here’s the finished version, and now, thanks to Carl Beebe at ColorOne in Seattle (a very cool guy who’s been in his business as long as I’ve been in mine), the final scan is now finished and now ready to be printed and installed on the wall of the new Powell Butte Visitor Center in Portland, Oregon.

Short explanation: that sheared-off section on top is where the ceiling goes – and the brown box on the bottom is a 30″ tall cabinet. Chick on the picture and it should enlarge so you can see some details, such as downtown (a really challenging mess of buildings) and how the heck you go about painting suburbia from 16,000 feet, or 3 miles up. If you live in Portland, tell me if I got your street in the right place and your house color is correct.

And here it is in the building design plan. It covers one entire end of the place.

This is a fairly new way of creating wall murals. For decades I would go on location and work for weeks at painting it right on the wall. A lot of work, a lot of expense in travel time, room and board. Now, with the advent of really good color scanners and high-end digital printing, this has all changed. It allows me to paint these things in smaller sizes, like 50% of the final size so that it gets it down to a painting I don’t have to live on a ladder to create. I have a die-sublimation sample next to me here on a piece of polyester cloth that is a sample of one of these, and they tell me it can actually be tossed in the washing machine and slapped back on the wall. Amazing technology – and so many light-years from the old way of creating art that I sometimes wonder if I’ve lived too long. On the other hand, because I have these old-time painting skills, a little drawing ability and a high degree of computer skills, I seem to continue to get these amazing jobs.

Thanks for reading this week. And thanks everyone for keeping us going on a long and most-interesting path – and this one was sure that! Now it’s up to the amazing designers, Linda and Peter at SeaReach in Sheridan Oregon to finish it off.

Check out what Carl does at: coloroneinc.com. Linda and Peter are at seareach.com.

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. I now have some more giclee prints in the web store.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography.

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.

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 Portland Challange

I left this image fairly large on the web server, so if you click it you can see some details.

For the past few weeks I’ve been plodding along with this painting on the same studio wall right next to the Florida mural. That’s my home these days, second floor of Union Bank in Port Townsend. Now, with the Florida-thing more or less finished, I’m on to this like our Harry Cat is on bonito flakes – and I’m closing in.

This painting is far enough along that I thought I could put a photo of it in the plan specs to see how it might look. The building is 24′ wide, 12′ high. The blue lines below represent where a glass cabinet will go, which might show you how big this thing will be when it’s installed.

The scene is Portland Oregon looking east from about 3 miles up. That’s downtown right in the middle, the Columbia Gorge on the left, Willamette River snaking across from the right. When finished, this will be printed on high-pressure laminate panels and installed in a new visitor center at Powell Butte (right in the middle of the painting) where a big water-works project is taking shape. I’m working with Sea Reach from Sheridan on this, the same good folks I did the Mt Saint Helens paintings for two years ago. The idea is to show the Bull Run watershed near Mt Hood where Portland gets its water – with a delightful airplane view of the entire area. It’s been a challenge to figure out – to say the least. What DOES this place look like from 3 miles up? I’ve flown over it enough on commercial jets to sort of know how it might ‘feel’, but it’s still been tough to figure out. And this IS a painting, afterall, and not a photograph, so I’ve had to understand how reality translates into little dabs and dashes of paint. Am I getting it? Stay tuned for the final edition and I’ll let you know what they say.

Here’s my preliminary sketch. Sure looks different from how it’s looking now, don’t you think?

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

Point Reyes National Seashore mural sketch

I left this at a pretty large size on the web, so if you click on it, you’ll see the enlarged version and all the details.

A few weeks ago I blogged about our field trip to Point Reyes National Seashore and the painting I’m doing for them. Now, here’s my sketch, and Jane at Harpers Ferry Center already mocked it up into the design for the park map so I can see where I need to move things around to fit the text. Vultures below the text, some branches trimmed off a little. The painting itself will hang in the Bear Valley Visitor Center, but funding for it is coming from this park brochure project. I think it’s going to be a pretty lush and vibrant painting. With luck we’ll have some support stuff like posters and puzzles to offer of the painting by next summer.

Some of have askd how I come up with these designs. Do I just copy the real place and add some critters? Well, above is the main reference photo I went by, so you can judge for yourself. It was pretty foggy so some of it was just guesswork, but if you compare this with the sketch, and then the concept drawing below I did on location, you can see how far these things change from my field hiking to field sketchbooking, to the beginnings of paint. That headland in the upper left distance is actually turned around the other way and much more distant in reality – the big bay, Drake’s Estero, is also farther away. All that actually moved back in the final sketch, and the cypress got bigger. Artistic license – or call it surgery to make a better painting. Push and pull, elements get moved until they finally settle in a place they should have been in the first place. I just didn’t know it when I began.

Thanks for reading this week. My big painting for the Polks Nature Center in Florida is so close to being finished I can taste the celebratory wine on my tongue. I’ll show it to you next week.

Oh, and we were forced to build a competely new web shopping cart over the past few weeks, so please bear with us if all the products aren’t up yet. Don’t worry, the puzzles are there at least, and a few posters, but if you want something that’s not there, just email us. Playing webmaster is not one of my favorite jobs.

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

Florida Mural Progress Report

This week it’s just a post about my progress on the central Florida mural. We’re getting there! I posted the initial beginnings a few weeks ago here (September 29) and here (September 9), then we were off on a field trip to Point Reyes so things ground to a halt. Now I’m back in the downtown studio going at it.

 

 

Someone emailed and asked what I used for a palette. Here it is! It’s pretty simple, only about a dozen colors and I use Nova Color exclusively, a special small-company hand-mixed mural acrylic that’s like a milkshake (tube paint is much more paste-like). After I discovered Nova about 20 years ago, I’ve used nothing else and it’s a pleasure to paint with on everything from the biggest cinder block walls to tiny paintings on paper.  You can’t buy this stuff in stores – only online, but I’ve had them ship to me in the field and they’re wonderfully helpful.

 

Here’s the rest of my ‘kit’. A tablet for reference photos (and a few printed out paper references too), dirty paint jar of water, a squirt bottle to keep the paint fluid, and, of course an iced latee from Mean Bean down the street (or Better Living Through Coffee, or Starbucks, or… this town doesn’t lack for Washington’s state drink). And that’s a full-sized paper copy of the sketch in the background so I can figure out what to paint.

Thanks for reading this week. Stay tuned for more.
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.