Tag Archives: National Park Service

Commissioned paintings, National Park Service, New Painting Post, People Paintings

Wrapping Up My American Camp mural

This photo was sent by Margy Emerson of her sister next to the installation.

Getting close to the final brushstroke on this 35-foot wall for the San Juan National Historical Park visitor center mural. How does a painter know when it’s the final brush stroke? When he can’t stand to make another one! (or so the old saying goes.) This wall was probably more brush strokes that I would have liked, but the entire process was interesting, challenging and really fun. I can’t help but feel grateful for the opportunity.

Here are some section shots that should enlarge in your browser so you can see it better. I think there are around 105 Indians, 18 gulls, 3 eagles and 2 wool dogs. Those wool dogs are an extinct species of dogs tribal weavers would use for wool, and I have one of them spinning with a drop spindle.

The scene is at South Beach, San Juan Island, Washington, a place that is now a national historic park. Historically, It’s a park because of the Pig War in 1859 between the U.S. and Britain. In reality, the “history” is more about the giant salmon runs in late summer, when millions of fish coming down the Strait of Juan de Fuca would crowd the shoreline. For thousands of years, many different tribes would show up here to catch and dry a few of these fish, and also dig camas bulbs, and catch up on the news. Both the salmon and camas flour were important winter foods.

The painting is supposed to show pre-European contact, so no iron, steel, or woven cotton fabric. It was fun to research all this, but it’s also why I enjoy making art so much for the National Park Service. We both feel art is a good way to show our legacy, our history and future (see the current generation and future generation down in the right corner). The NPS seriously pushes me to paint beyond what I’ve ever thought I’d paint. This project made me realize how grateful I am for taking physics and algebra in high school!

Here’s a photo of my studio with part of this being painted. See those reference photos down along the bottom? Nancy was my model for almost every one of the people.

Below is the visitor center wall this is going on. It’ll be installed by early summer if we’re all lucky, along with another 11 paintings from me, and all the other exhibits. Capitol Museum Services from Manassas Virginia is doing the installation.

The outside of the new visitor center with Nancy in front and a truly amazing Douglas-fir that they basically built the building around. Most commercial projects would have just bulldozed the tree, cleared the land and then planted little Mall-Ready trees, but not the NPS!

And the last two photos are the location of the painting a quarter mile from the visitor center. It’s actually a couple of square miles of landscape all pushed together into one painting, add people, voila!

When I was growing up, the kid of two people who worked for the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, Illinois, I would go down to the museum after school. My babysitters were the curators who were building giant habitat exhibits much like this new wall mural. Most of the exhibits were about nature, but a couple were of Indian life. Robert Larson, a famed painter in charge of this (and a big man who didn’t need a ladder to paint the sky) would talk to me as he worked about what he was doing. I was always a little kid with his mouth open in awe. That was 60 years ago! I know Bob would have enjoyed this, wanted to be a part of it. His kindness and friendship, along with all the rest of those wonderful people in the museum’s back end, are still a factor in my life.

Here’s a photo of Larson doing a plaque of my mom after her death. It’s in the Virginia Eifert Book Store in the museum. And below, one of his big Indian paintings at the museum.

Robert Larson paints the Archaic diorama in the ÒPeoples of the PastÓ exhibit. Photo courtesy Illinois State Museum

More soon. Stay tuned. Feel free to pass this around. People seem to enjoy seeing my process.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings.

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Commissioned paintings, Murals, National Park Service, New Painting Post

Creating a World – Salish Sea Centuries Ago

Click images to enlarge. A 35-foot long wall doesn’t shrink well to a little screen.

I finished a fun project this past week. I got to create a little world of it’s own on what will be a 35′ wall. I grew up in a museum, you see, where both my parents worked with a staff of curators and writers, artists and generally amazing people. The museum staff that made huge wall dioramas were my babysitters. And here I am, decades later still deeply passionate about this stuff.

So, I was tasked with coming up with the conceptual design for a new park visitor center, but can’t tell you where it is because this drawing hasn’t even been presented to them yet. Cart before the horse, I know, but it’s the way things work at this level. I still wanted to pass this around because who knows what will happen with potential changes – but I like it just as it is now. And this is just the concept or design phase. There’ll be another contractor doing the production phase where I hope to be the painter. It IS my drawing, after all.

The story I was tasked to create was of a summer fishing camp on the Salish Sea some time, or ANY time within the past 8,000 years before pre-white contact – meaning before 1775.

This means no iron or steel tools, no European clothing. Tribes would have come from miles around to fish here in summer as huge salmon runs hug the shore, so there would be fishermen using reef net style techniques, drying racks on shore and baskets full of fish. Summer is also the time when camas bulbs would have been harvested, dug and then baked for later consumption. Both dried salmon and baked camas were the prime staples of life here. I’ve actually been to this exact place in the 1980’s and watched modern seiners catch tons of salmon so close to shore the wives and girlfriends would yell out the egg their men on. I have a connection here.

So, with all that in mind, I just started drawing, left to right so as not to smudge the paper:

And then all this next.

On this left side, racks of drying fish, visiting people chatting it up, wool dogs hanging out. These dogs, a breed now extinct, provided wool for weaving, and tule or cattails provided clothing and tarps for temporary summer shelters.

The rectangles are for interpretive text panels, the long horizontal thing is a reader rail with real examples of tools – matching the tools I used in the mural. I added a wool dog watching a baby strapped up in a papoose bag down low so real kids can see them at eye level. These white woolly dogs were family pets that were sung to and treated as family members. It was fun to find a few photos actually showing them.

I gained valuable references online from Curtis photos, public in the Library of Congress image collections. Here’s one that shows the summer house style and canoe, clothing and baskets all in one image. I used all these parts across the wall.

In reading references for all this, I learned that black-bellied plovers begin their winter migrations from Alaska in summer and stop here to eat the drying seeds of prairie plants, so I added this below the reader rail for kids to see.

On the far right, behind the real paddles, I drew a plank showing the various wood-working tools and someone actually shaving a paddle.

And here’s the reference below for the camas processing, shown in the mural both on the center prairie and in camp showing the underground baking process.

And here’s the entire wall again, 35′ wide. Oh, those moons are the 13 Moons in much of tribal spoken history, representing each moon of the year – and providing (I hope) for a thoughtful reference to the thousands of years this scene took place, again and again during the 8,000 years of tribal life here in the Northwest.

Thanks for reading this week. It was a fun project, probably more fun than actually painting the darned thing.

Larry Eifert

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 stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Commissioned paintings, Murals, National Park Service, New Painting Post, Wildlife

Wind Cave National Park

I submitted this painting a few days ago – I think it’s close to finished and thought I’d show it off here. Wind Cave National Park is in the Black Hills of South Dakota, a fantastic place with patches of prairie, rolling tree-covered hills and an amazing cave network. Somehow it all had to be jammed into one painting, along with the bison, prairie dogs and all the rest of the amazing wildlife most see there when they visit. This bit of art is going on the back of the new park map, meaning an Eifert painting gets to go home with most of the 650,000 people who come each year.

This is the map publication with art in place. I like the way the critters overflow the black NPS band on the left. And below is the original first draft concept sketch I did on location, one of seven. Quite a difference from the final art.

So, how does this all happen? While there on the site visit, I tend to take photos while drawing, LOTS of photos. I don’t really know how the painting is going to evolve, so I take ground shots, close-up details like the two below. That little dung beetle was working hard and eventually made it into the final art. These little guys roll up the bison poo and then just continue on to who-knows-where, rolling their little ball along. The ponderosa was the one I used for the main feature on the entire right side of the painting, as well as the foreground reference to the forest duff.

There may be more small changes as the park takes a look, but I think I’m about there on this effort. I have art is many nearby parks near here, Badlands and Devils Tower, but this one beautiful place has eluded me until now. Yahhh.

If you would like to sign up for my periodic blogs as emails, you can do it here.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.