Tag Archives: Olympic

New Painting Post

Royal Basin – The Upper Trail

Royal-Basin-Upper-Trail

Sorry, it’s sold.

Another original painting in this current series of Olympic Mountain images. This has been an amazing summer of backpacking and day-hiking for us, and memories of some of it are reappearing in my studio. It’s been many years since we’ve been in the mountains so much, and we’re enjoying it as long as it lasts into the Fall. These paintings are like a fond memory, which, I think, makes for good art. They tell stories back to me of places I’ve found and love.

 

Past Royal Lake, ‘up the hill’ from where we live, the main trail goes upslope through an open, flower-studded forest before it reaches alpine meadows. It’s about 7 miles and 3500′ uphill from the trailhead, so it sure isn’t a day hike. I love this gentle area and wish I could return every time I think of it. Early morning, long shadows, hints of the jagged Needles on Gray Wolf Ridge in the background. For me, life doesn’t get any better than this. As I recently heard someone say, “There a LOT of God up there”.

Royal-Basin-Upper-Trail-framed

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 framed.
The custom frame has a triple liner and glass, and if you want to swap this frame out of another, we can also do that. Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  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 beautiful photographs

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

New Painting Post

Royal Basin Trail – Into the Light

Royal-Basin---Into-the-Light

We recently hiked this glorious trail, and I always love to relive good times by painting them. Miles of old-growth forest in a mature western hemlock forest, trails going off in various directions to alpine places of glorious solitude, the sounds of the Dungeness River always in ear-shot. It’s a special place we go to often. So here’s a little painting expressing that. If I die tomorrow and walk into the Light, this is how I hope it will be.

Royal-Basin-Into-Light_framed

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 6″ x 8″ and $145 custom framed with a triple mat and glass. The glass size is 11″ x 14″ and outside measurements are 14″ x 17″.
Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  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 beautiful photographs

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

New Painting Post

Little Tarn – Bailey Range

Lillian-Tarn-2

We hiked along this slope, in and out of little groups of snow-stunted hemlock, and after awhile this stunning view appeared. The Bailey Range beyond, little tarn full of quiet reflecting water, alpine edge-of-the-forest where the mountain hemlocks group together to withstand some pretty harsh winters. Two big Cascade frogs sat in the water watching us, as if we might be frog-hunters, which we are certainly not. I posted another little alpine tarn painting on the last blog, and it’s found a home a very long way from Olympic National Park – and its new owner wishes differently. That painting touched something, so this one might do the same. Hands off, Yaming, let’s let someone else have a chance.

What I’m endlessly enjoying with these subalpine painting studies are the positions of the graphic elements, the snow-slimmed trees, the freeze-shattered boulders, little bits of water that are always arranged in flawless designs. I think I’m drawn here for another reason too, that of seeing a landscape unaltered in any way by us – an increasingly rare thing these days. These rock gardens look like a master gardener has been here, but the caretaker is Mother Nature, the only real master gardener.

Little-Tarn-framed-2

And here’s what you get – if you’re interested:

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 framed and ready to hang. A triple custom mat, framers glass, a nice cherry custom frame. Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  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 beautiful photographs

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

New Painting Post

The Little Tarn on Lillian Ridge

Lilian-Ridge-Tarn

“Little Tarn on Lillian Ridge” acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ framed: $145.

Actually, the little tarn doesn’t look anything like this, but it was a starting point. It’s a favorite place of ours, maybe yours too for a few or you that hike the Obstruction Point area of Olympic National Park. For me, this area is about as close to ‘goin’ to church’ as I can find. It’s one of the highest roads in the Northwest, and once out of the darned car bumping along that ridgetop, there are miles upon miles of alpine landscapes to wonder.

We hiked down here a couple of weeks ago, below the ridge and away from other hikers. The loudest sounds we heard were big bumblebees working the lupine and bluebells, and a couple of gray jays giving their soft greetings. So I painted it, and then get to live it all over again in the studio – like a memory of a good dream.

Little-Tarn-framed

This ORIGINAL FRAMED painting is acrylic on paper board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 custom FRAMED and a tad bit more for Priority Mail. Glass is 11″ x 14″, outside frame measurement is 14″ x 17″. This is the original painting, NOT a print. Remember, I’m offering this with the frame and a triple custom mat. Email us for details.

SOLD, THIS PAINTING IS GOING TO TEXAS TO SOMEONE WHO WANTS TO BE IN THE OLYMPICS.

Thanks for reading this week. Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  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 beautiful photographs

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

New Painting Post

Squirrels Everywhere

Squirrel-Tiger-Lilies

Certainly a fruitful spring here. Three fawns in the meadow, more Douglas squirrels than we can count, and the female junco whose nest is hidden in the hose coil is going on her third, yes third, brood. Yesterday I checked the car’s air filter, and sure enough there was a squirrel’s nest in there again. I’m telling you, it’s not too easy to live with Nature, but we probably wouldn’t be nearly as happy without it – especially without the “Big Boys”, those two bucks that hang here every day.

At any rate, here’s my homage to it all – a Douglas squirrel with our tiger lilies in bloom (although the horse radish has sort of taken over that area of the place and the lilies are somewhat overwhelmed). The painting looks calm, but I’m telling you – it’s not.

This painting is an acrylic on hardboard, 15″ x 15″ and available unframed for $375. Email me if you’re interested. I can also get a nice custom frame, but for that we need to talk.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  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 beautiful photographs

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

New Painting Post

The Eighth Dipper

Dipper-8

Click the image and it should enlarge in your browser window.

I recently painted another small dipper painting for a very nice client in California. What, another dipper? Yes, and then looking at my dipper reference photos I turned right around and painted this one.

I seem to be evolving into a real dipper-connoisseur.  What’s not to like? This little bird lives only by the cleanest and wildest of mountain streams, walks and flies underwater and builds its nest behind waterfalls. Dippers are equipped with an extra eyelid that allows them to see underwater, and sports scales that close nostrils tight when submerged. Dippers also produce more oil than most birds, which may help keep them warmer when they’re walking around underwater. If they migrate, it’s usually just downslope to open water so they can dive into icy creeks, and given a choice of flying the long way around or over a narrow bend, dippers will always take the long way to stay directly over their beloved stream. I was reminded that another name for them is the water ouzel. My mom called them that, and was known to drive 1200 miles west of Illinois to see one.

And here’s the reference photo I worked from. You guys always say you like to see how a painting evolves, so here’s the beginning – a photo taken with my little point-and-shoot last year about 3 miles up the Tunnel Creek Trail just near the shelter. This little guy was sitting on ‘his’ rock enjoying some sun, and stayed long enough for both Nancy and I to get some very tasty shots. Did I get the values close enough?

Dipper-8-reference

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $140 unframed.
A custom wood frame makes it a total of $170 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

Here’s the blog on the web.  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 beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books. She now has her own web domain name at virginiaeifert.com. What would she have thought about THAT?

New Painting Post

Rialto Beach

Rialto-Beach-Sun-and-Fog

Close, but not quiet finished, I still thought I’d post this today. I’m in our library right now, looking up at this grapefruit juice carton we found on the beach at Rialto awhile ago. Tucked away on a bookshelf, it’s all bleached out but clearly says “grapefruit” with all the rest in Japanese. We’re fairly sure it’s tsunami debris. When we opened it, a giant whiff of grapefruit odor poured forth. So, that’s the spark for the painting – a memory of picking that container up last year and wondering who held it last – and are they still alive. In the painting, I replaced the juice container with a red float covered with Japanese characters, which we also found. The location is right at Ellen Creek, where most of the hikers turn around because of the wet ford.

 

grapefruit

 

 

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on board, 48″ x 24″ and is headed for Gallery Nine downtown in Port Townsend. This is the original painting, NOT a print. If you’re interested, email me for price and details. No gallery commission – yet!
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  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 beautiful photographs

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

New Painting Post

Dipper on the North Fork Returns

North-Fork-Dipper
  • This is not a new painting, but this week we sold a large custom print of it. The painting itself is in our private collection, just because I liked it, and now I think I like it even more.  There’s a quality about the river’s transparency, of water-carved rocks glowing from within – and that reflected glow on the dipper. OR, maybe I like it because of the memory of the moment. That’s important now as spring slowly arrives here and I wish for warmer hiking days. We have 6″ high nettles up in our woods, daffs higher than that, the willows are out – and it surely is an early spring, but not earlier enough for us.
  • That moment: North Fork of the Sol Duc River in Olympic National Park. Hike up and over a little ridge, ford the river up to your crotch in blindingly-cold ice melt – and you’re on a truly glorious and empty trail for miles. In places there are huge water-carved boulders (where we saw this dipper dipping), and in August it’s a grand place for skinny dipping for sure. Thanks, Kevin, for buying the print so these memories could return.
  • I think this is why I’m just a painter of life’s memories. I can paint pretty good non-objective images and commissioned fictitious murals of some detail, but when I look back at all the paintings through the years, I get the best emotional charge from painting experiences from the times (good or bad) in my life. I think of the moment, the experience surrounding that moment, who I was with, what it smelled like, felt like, sounded like.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  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 beautiful photographs

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

New Painting Post

The Gulls at Ruby Beach

Gulls-at-Ruby-Beach

“The Gulls at Ruby Beach” is a new acrylic painting on canvas, 20″ x 40″ and offered here for $1750 framed. Email us for details if you’re interested. Click it and you’ll see enlarged versions of both these images.

  Ruby Beach is usually a vibrant and wild Olympic National Park beach, but on occasion in late summer the ocean can be more like a calm lake – little surf and almost no wind. We were there to see a sunset and it felt like this. It felt like warm coffee. The headlands beyond the beach aren’t quiet as close as what I painted, but it just seemed like I needed to stack up the levels of receding shorelines and show some abstract textures to that area. And maybe some of you will notice the big missing sea stack on the left side. No, not on purpose, but if you stand just here on the trail down to the beach, that big rock is more to the left and out of view. I think it works.

Gulls-at-Ruby-Beach-framed

 

Here’s a photo of the painting and frame that’s included. If you don’t want the custom frame, we can do that too. This is the original painting, NOT a print.

And, if you’re interested, you might go over to my Facebook Fan page and like it. I post lots of trail albums and other art there. See the link below.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  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 beautiful photographs

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

New Painting Post

American Dipper 4

Dipper-4

This ORIGINAL painting is  acrylic on linen canvas, 16″ x 20″ and $190 unframed.
This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

    Long ago, I saw some paintings of a South American rain forest. I have no idea who the artist was, but they were moody, dark, ethereal – and had this ‘feeling’ about them that a painter can only get if they’d actually been to a place like that. And it’s not just going there, but they would have to really get to know a place, not just how it looks, but WHY it looks the way it does.

    I think that way about this painting. If just feels like it really was. We’ve spent a spring and summer doing a lot of hiking, more than normal, and much of it has been beside these pure, ethereal and pristine Northwest rivers that are unlike any others I know. The water is often blue-gray because of ice melt far upstream, streamside moss and salmonberries are sculptured gardens of lush green and fresh life – never dusty and tired-looking. And that little dipper. It just keeps reappearing in these paintings, over and over, the symbol of wilderness and these Northwest waters.

    Last week Nancy and I backpacked into Royal Basin in the Olympics – the epitome of these types of landscapes. For over six miles we hiked beside the Dungeness River, then Royal Creek, never out of earshot of its roaring and rumbling as it dropped through the canyon. We broke the climb up into two sections and camped so near the creek that all night I thought I heard voices – well, I guess I did if you consider rushing water to have a voice. The river-talkers were almost too loud at times.

River-camp

Towards the top, Royal Lake appeared, encircled by some of the highest peaks in the Olympics – and we were the only ones camping here. Somehow, this dipper painting needed to be posted afterwards. So I did!

Royal-Lake-and-Mt-Fricaba

Thanks for reading this week. There’s an album of these trip hikes on my Facebook fan page.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  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 beautiful photographs

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