Tag Archives: Olympic

New Painting Post

James Pond Waterlilies

 

 James Pond Waterlilies

 24″ x 48″ acrylic painting on  hardboard.
(I put a 16″ image on the web, so click the painting and you’ll see it enlarged.)

This is one of those places that makes me happy to be alive – it gives me a sense of what I love about painting nature – the wonder of it all. From Mora Campground beside the famous Hoh River in Olympic National Park and about a mile from Rialto Beach, there’s a little trail going into the woods – and a small sign saying so – I’d seen in many times. I hiked it at 6:00 in the morning not knowing where it went – just started walking with hopes of maybe seeing some elk. It’s a loop trail, and half way along a spur goes off into the huckleberry thickets, and then right out onto a mossy log into this amazing and ethereal place. Obviously it was an ancient oxbow bend of the Hoh that was long ago cut off and evolved into a lily pond, but it just seemed like a staged set. The morning mist was just clearing, cool shadows still prevailed, but deepening color values (by the minute) foretold a bright day ahead. I sat here a long time, watching early morning dragonflies hawking for mosquitoes – watched a kingfisher dive for breakfast.

This was the view from the log.

And when I brought Nancy back an hour later, all was flat and sunny-day values – nice but nothing like the pastel and thick atmosphere I saw earlier. How far this little pond goes in either direction I don’t know, but I don’t think any other trails hit this quiet backwater.

This painting is offered for sale as of today. Email us for details.

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 for Virginia Eifert’s website and see where all this started for me.

New Painting Post

Historic Photo Exhibit for Port Angeles WA

Historic, maybe because it took over a year to get this installed on the Port Angeles, Washington waterfront! I’m not complaining at all – because for me it was fun and meaningful. I learned a lot.

So, with a bit of funding from Olympic National Park and guidance and direction from the Feiro Marine Life Center – text by Deborah Moriarty and Betsy Wharton, photos from a bunch of dead photographers plus two that are still alive, and this all came together nicely.

While the only thing I PAINTED was those two little black bands on the wall, I spent some considerable time in the Port Angeles Historical Society with my flatbed scanner. Most of the photos were very old and only 8″x10″ or less. Technology went to work when I clicked the button, and what seemed like hours later I had some pretty amazingly scans. While that was going on, I had the rest of the collection to myself – oh boy! One of the scans was 8 feet long, and most were more than 36″ on the long side, so, that’s when the work began for me. Back in my studio, I spent many hours (I should underline MANY) going back and forth across these old scratched up images removing hairs, cuts, thumbprints (whose we’ll never know), tears, frayed edges, bug squashes – and in the end I think the results looked like they were taken last week with the highest quality camera.

(Here’s a tourist immediately enthralled by the quality and detail of these old images.) After fretting over the text, Deb and Betsy refined it to a very high degree of quality – and that’s from me who does this stuff daily. This is good – and they should be proud!

Oh, but I didn’t tell you the photo’s story. The Elwha Dams have now been torn down on the biggest river on the Olympic Peninsula. These dams have been here almost a century and provided electricity that made Port Angeles a real city, lighting houses, stores and powering mills. But with the dams the salmon runs ended, and so now with the dams gone, the salmon are IMMEDIATELY coming back. Only a few months after the lower dam’s removal, King Salmon are already back above the old dam site. This wheel I’m holding is the same wheel that first turned the power ON almost a century ago, and just a few months ago turned it OFF.

As an artist and naturalist my entire life, I feel so honored to have been apart of this event, the largest dam removal in American history. I consider it part of my legacy. For the dams, park and salmon, I’m nothing but a guy with some skills, but for me – I was there!

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

Wildflower Heaven

 

The past four days: Nancy and I did something we’ve never done. In our hurry to hike every high-country trail, climb to every lookout, paint or photograph every park, we’ve never just walked out there and plopped ourselves in the meadows and spent days just soaking it up like we lived there. It’s always such a hurry with us we never get to just sit and smell the Sitka valerian (very sour). So, that’s what we did – just walked out there and sat down at about the 6000′ feet level – and I’d say it was nothing short of heaven. John Muir said go to the mountains and get their good tidings. We did!

 

There’s this high rocky road, some say the highest in Washington State, that goes off from Hurricane Ridge in the Olympics and in 10 miles or so traverses the most glorious alpine landscape I think I know of. We heard murmurrings that after a seriously big snow winter, this week was the best flower show – but that was a serious understatement. I took three flower books – figured out most but some just weren’t listed. You see, the eastern Olympics are a place unlike any other. Isolated from the rest of the continent like an island in the sky, you can see Olympics-only marmots, chipmunks, violets, hairbells and lots of others, only found here. Red, pink, orange and purple were the meadows. Some, like the photo below looked like snow. Nancy sat herself down next to a marmot family’s communal den system and got some great closeup shots of marmot pups testing their restling skills, and I just went off and found flowers I still have no idea what they’re called.

 Avalanche Lilies

What’s the definition of heaven in this life? I’d say it would be sitting in the middle of this field of avalanche lilies – but I’m just an artist, painter of wild places and still can’t get enough of it. You: go, go now. They’re still there.

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

Rialto Beach Float

 

 Quite a pile of wood, don’t you think? This new painting was inspired by the few days we spent kicking around the Olympic Beaches of Rialto, Ruby and Third Beach a few weeks ago. Each time we hike this stretch of beach north out to some of the best tide pools anywhere, I’m struck by the designs of all these dead Sitka Spruce trees that line the high-tide mark. It’s quite a jumble, and I finally came to grips with how to paint it. I don’t think it’s quite finished, but I heard some comments on my NOT posting last week – “and I hope you’re Okay?” So in the spirit of almost 200 posts in 200 weeks, finished or not – here it is.

On the same beach we saw many (like 8 in one view) drift floats with Japanese characters on them, along with other tsunami trash like the grapefruit juice container I blogged about a few weeks ago – and so I thought I should add that to the painting too. Look in the lower left-center. The actual float was much bigger, but if you look carefully on the photo below you can see the Japanese maker’s marks just above the seam. This one was just coming into the surf, and I had to do a fancy dance to get it ashore. Radioactive? I hoped not.

This ORIGINAL painting “Rialto Beach Float” is varnished acrylic on hardboard, 24″ x 48″ and $1200 unframed.
Because we have a wholesale account with the frame suppliers, we can also supply a custom frame to match it at much less than your local framer. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

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. She just opened a new show at Gallery Nine in Port Townsend this month.

New Painting Post

A Small World – Japanese Tsunami Debris

Friday, March 11, 2011 – or about 60 weeks ago, we all heard or shocking news about the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. It sure seemed like a long way from us here in the U.S., didn’t it?

Well, Nancy and I just spent a few days out in the “West End” hiking the beaches of Olympic National Park, and I’m hear to report that all those beaches are now receiving a pretty good dose of flotsam from Japan.

These images should enlarge with a click, but if you look closely here, you can see the maker’s mark on this buoy. There were LOTS of these, and we guessed because they rode high on the waves, the wind brought them here quicker than what’s still coming along out there. All the floats we examined had one anchor hole broken off, as if it had been surgically removed by a huge force – like 1″ solid plastic broken with a snap.

And here’s a grapefruit juice carton with the print-date of February, 2011. The red lid kept it floating, all 5,000 miles and all those winter storms – a tribute to plastic/paper cartons, don’t you think? As a painter of big-walls, I know that blue is the last color left standing after the sun bakes everything else out of it.

As we were walking down those pristine beaches, watching whales and sea otters, pelicans and marbled murrelets all in one view, I just couldn’t get over the fact that the last time these objects were seen or touched by people might have been the last time those folks saw anything at all. It was a sobering feeling to unscrew that grapefruit juice carton and inhale the smell of juice (yes, it still smelled of grapefruit) that someone might have had for breakfast on March 11, 2011.

Thanks for reading this week. It’s not art, but I think worthy of a post.
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

The Dosewallips – Spring Runoff

Click on the painting and it should enlarge in your browser.

No presketch on this one, so I can’t show you the process – it seemed pretty clear so I just started painting. After Nancy posted our exploits along the Northeast Olympic’s Dosewallips River a few days ago, and thereby beat me to a post about its stunning beauty, I put aside a couple of more serious projects to finish this painting up. I was moved by the late afternoon sun was streaming through the canyon and really lighting up the streamside alders. It just seemed like a painting, which it now is. With a big snow pack upslope quickly turning to water, the river was loud, frantic, seemingly in a very great hurry to hit the ocean just a few miles downstream to the east. What a place! What a place to live – and paint!

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished board, 24″ x 48″ and is offered here for $1200 framed. 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. Can you hear the river’s roar?
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

Meander Up the Dosewallips

Some weeks are just like this.Spend the entire week drawing, drawing, drawing – but in the end there isn’t a single finished painting to show for it. There’s a stack of concept stuff, in between or in progress but not a postable painting in the lot. I think there’s about 20 of them.

Oh, and did I say the weather turned, poof, into summer. So, put the top down on the little car and head for the hills – and a little hike along the Dosewallips River in the Olympic Mountains. Harlequin ducks, bald eagles, a ruffed grouse strutting his manly stuff, hooded mergansers, trilliums and bleeding hearts, violets and salmonberry in bloom. It just couldn’t have been nicer, and I wanted to share. This photo is in about 2 miles, Nancy photographing a little waterfall coming down into the Dosewallips (that’s doe-see-wollips for those out of town)

Thanks for reading this week. I’ve got a dusy of a painting project almost ready to show, and it doesn’t involve canvas or paper, but more sea-going.
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

2011 Olympic NP Bugler cover

Summer’s almost over and I almost forgot to post this while it’s still current.

On September 17, the official ceremony for the removal of the Elwha River dams will kickoff, but I’ve been involved with this for several years now. I was pleased when the park’s summer newspaper (the handout at the park gates) featured a section of one of the two murals I painted showing what this big river might look like a few years from now. In the upper left corner you can see what will remain of the upper Glines Canyon dam when the river will hopefully become one of the largest salmon producing streams (again) on the peninsula.

My task for these paintings was to show how the river and its salmon influence everything else there. Many plants and animals rely on a healthy salmon runs for nutrients. It’s not just the bears and raccoons, herons and jays that eat the spawned-out fish, but as they drag the fish into the forests, this soon becomes ‘fish emulsion’ for the big trees too. The forests provide a stable environment for a new generation of fish, while the fish give back fertilizer when they return. This cycle has been stopped for a full century by the two dams that will soon be gone.

And I’m affected too. Learning this stuff is the best part of painting nature for a living. It’s not just a painting, but more knowledge I get to cram under that size-8 1/4 hat.

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.

Murals, New Painting Post, Waysides

A National Treasure- Sol Duc Valley in Olympic National Park

National_Treasure

I ran across this post I had originally written last year, but somehow it was never published. I probably had a bunch of posts and this one didn’t make the cut, but it’s never too late for good art, right?

As one drives up the Sol Duc Valley, on the northwest side of Olympic National Park west of Seattle, there are lots of pull-outs with overlooks to the river or trails leading to some of the best forests I know. This isn’t quite temperate rain forest, but it’s close. It truly is a National Treasure, and it’s a big thanks to the folks at Olympic N.P. who continue to allow me to paint my “backyard”.

Readers seem interested in the artistic processes that go into these more complex paintings. It’s one thing to paint a fine-art image of an old-growth forest. I can just be, well, “artistic” and I paint what I see or what I like, but these complex collages with lots of species are a different beast. Not only do I have to paint the bear, but it has to at least appear to be very accurate. It has to be sized properly with reference to dozens of other critters, and it has to be animated and not stiff. I can’t place, say, a bobcat right next to a rabbit, or a shady plant out in the open. Sometimes it’s a real challenge.

Here’s the fourth draft of the initial sketch.

Wayside UniGuide Grid v. 2.0 (September 2006)
Wayside UniGuide Grid v. 2.0 (September 2006)

As you can see, the finished painting ended up being wildly different than this sketch. Critters appeared, then disappeared, then arrived in other locations. (Sort of like the squirrels that continually try to break into our barn. I chased one out today that was attempting to hide in the Fiberglas insulation over my workbench.) I also had to figure out what to paint behind the text, so this painting could also be used for other things such as park publications and exhibits maybe without the text – or maybe even a future jigsaw puzzle.

And you thought being an artist was easy! Well, maybe not easy, but after 40 years it’s still a lot of fun. It’s often said that being a painter is an old-man’s game. I’m starting to believe it.

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.

***previous*** — ***next***

New Painting Post

Acres of Glacial Lilies – It’s Finally Summer

On August 6th, the park finally opened the road out to Olympic National Park’s Obstruction Pass. From the acres of cars and people at tourist-center Hurricane Ridge, as soon as we hit the dirt road we transended into acres of glacial lilies and almost no cars or people. It’s amazing how park visitors all clump together in herds.

With the drifts still melting on one of the largest snowpacks on record, neither of us have ever seen such an amazing display of alpine flowers. It’s not just summer August flowers, but spring glacier and fawn lilies to mid-summer tiger lilies. The place is awash in perfume, and as we sat on the edge of this field of color I watched a big bumblebee slowly weaving around like it was drunk, going from one bisort bloom to the next, completely ignoring all the other species. So, was this bisort Sunday, followed by lily Monday and paintbrush Tuesday?

Click to enlarge both images.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $120 unframed.
The nice wooden frame makes it a total of $145 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

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.