Tag Archives: Olympic

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

The Sound of Falling Water

Sure, the Northwest has all those  grand peaks, glaciers and giant trees, ocean beaches and alpine lakes, but for me it’s these little seasonal waterfalls that always get me going.

I think it’s the fact they’re always different, always changing – and mostly temporary. As winter snows melt, hundreds of valleys, cliff faces and forest slopes echo with a cacophony of pure and cold rushing melt water, all of it seemingly too eager to get down to the sea. This is a very noisy place, and I really don’t care if I sound anthropomorphic or maybe sentimental – for me, these waterfalls are alive. Most of the time these little streams cross our trail under a little bridge or log instead of our having to slog through it, and this gives me a place to study the motion, blur, colors and mossy rocks inthe spray zone. Most of these little channels are dry by mid-August, but, because we’ve had a cool and wet past few weeks, they’ve begun again in earnest. Sure it rains a bit up here, but this is what you get. It’s not all that bad.

So, I’m not there at the moment. And neither are you. Look at the painting again and let’s pretend we’re standing on that nearby log. Close your eyes and listen. Hear it? The rush of water over rocks, a blur of sounds, the smell of nearby warm hemlock in sun. I live for this stuff!

This acrylic is 14″ x 20″ on paperboard and is offered  for $790 unframed, but if you lean on me I’ll toss in a nice frame to boot.
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.

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

Art in the Old-growth

(Click to enlarge so you can read the text by Janet Scharf, Olympic NP)

‘An art gallery in the woods,’ that’s what I like to call these paintings.

Thanks to the kind folks at the park, I now have 24 paintings, well, reproductions of them, scattered along the road in Olympic National Park’s Sol Duc Valley. This one was one of the first, and until recently I didn’t have a digital file of it for my portfolio. The fabricator finally sent it to me, so now I’m passing it along to all of you. It tells the story of the unseen-by-us happenings in the old-growth when the sun goes down, how all sorts of critters appear and carry on their lives when we’ve all gone home for the day. In the foreground, a flying squirrel is diggin’ ‘shrooms and upon hearing the rustle of forest duff, a northern spotted owl begins its predatory plunge from a high perch. The black-tailed deer is browsing oxalis and isn’t aware of the mountain lion’s stealthy approach. And the marbled murrelet is coming home on the last flight of the day, returning to it’s mossy nest with a load of herring for it’s chick from the distant Pacific 20 miles away.

I’ve always liked the idea of using my paintings to present an interpretive idea or story about nature. I learn about it. I paint it. I pass it along to the next guy. Outdoor fabrication technology is pretty good these days, so this panel will last for decades unless a 500,000-pound tree falls on it (which has happened). I love the thought of a car full of visitors driving up this beautiful road, eyes open in wonder at the scenery and pulling off to read this wayside panel – and suddenly they’re immersed in a painting telling a story about nature they never knew about. I think art should teach and inspire – and then move the viewer to positive future actions. Is this art? I’d say it is.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was posted 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 has new work up of her garden after a morning rain.

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

Dipper on the North Fork

A Larger Painting today.We’ve added some names from Gallery Nine in Port Townsend, so if you’re getting this email and don’t know what it is, this is the weekly art-blog for painter-writer Larry Eifert. Don’t want it? Just unsubscribe below. I sent it about once a week.

North Fork of the Sol Duc River. Now this is a special place. No one goes here because the trail doesn’t GO anywhere and today’s peak-bagging goal-oriented hikers  hate that. No lake, no peak, no stunning overlook – just miles and miles of stately old-growth forest and rushing river awaiting. Elk, deer, salmon – and lots of dippers like this one.

The Sol Duc is about 70 miles west of here in Olympic National Park. After hiking over a hill for about a mile from the Sol Duc road, we put on our water shoes and forded the river that was up to our thighs. Cold – but absolutely delightful – and these two natural barriers are what also help to keep most hikers out. On the other side, with hiking boots back on, we ambled up the trail beside the river. Sometimes we were down on bedrock, other times up in maple glades festooned with hanging club moss and occasionally up onto deeply forested benches with enormous trees. There’s a lot of bedrock basalt exposed along the river, creating punchbowl effects and some very deep pools (like the painting). It’s a place to just sit and listen to the endless harmonies of water over stones, wind high in the 300′ hemlocks – and think about how lucky it is we still  have these places.

Click the images to enlarge them.

This original painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 22″ x 28″ and is offered for $790 unframed.
We can custom frame this for you in any style you’d like using our wholesale framing discounts (meaning you’ll save about 75% of what a normal custom framer would charge).  This is the original painting, NOT a print. However, we offer custom prints as large as 50 inches on the shortest side.
Email us for details in your interested.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was published 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, Uncategorized

A Fantastic River Glow

Sundown on the Hoh River

Sundown on Olympic National Park’s Hoh River.Yes, I’m still finishing up stuff I began while sitting in the lawn chair beside the Hoh River – and why not, it’s a great place. This way I get to experience it twice. And this amazing evening color wouldn’t repeat itself every day. Someone once asked me if I ever did hard drugs in my early days. Nope, I painted. I thought it was better in every way. On the other hand, I AM a child of the 60’s, and, well, you know. …

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas board, 9″ x 12″ and $125 unframed.
The gold or mahogany frame with a linen liner makes it a total of $150 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. Right now, this painting is in a dark frame with a linen liner behind it, sitting in Gallery Nine in Port Townsend. It’s also a bit more if you buy it there.

This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details if you’re interested.

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, Uncategorized

Red Alders – Lots of Details

I really liked these trees, and they were right there in the campground, so, of course the paints came out of their box. Red alder is a tree that likes streamsides and damp areas and many times they’ll come in after logging until young conifers take over – like they did here. I think they’re very beautiful trees, with various and interesting bark patterns any painter of nature would find interesting. Red alders don’t live very long – they’re old at 50 – and those rare older ones become very gnarly and shapely, bruised and battered by winter storms.

I tend to get lost in the details, so after this initial sketch was drawn, I turned the chair around so I could paint them in my mind’s eye (with considerably less detail).  There are other alder species here in the West – white alder, Sitka, mountain, speckled and several more, but red alder always have leaves that curl under just slightly along the edges.

This mixed media painting is watercolor and ink on paper, 9″ x 12″ and $125 unframed.
A dark mahogany frame with a double mat makes it a total of $150 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.

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

Finding One Square Inch of Silence

No painting this time, instead it was a treasure hunt. After five years of reading about it, Nancy and I set off to find the now-legendary “One Square Inch of Silence”. Ever heard of it? Designated on Earth Day – April 22, 2005 – to protect and manage the natural soundscape in Olympic Park’s backcountry wilderness, OSI is an independent research project that has a website and board of directors – and has been in the national news on occasion. As the website says: “if a loud noise, such as the passing of an aircraft, can impact many square miles, then a natural place, if maintained in a 100% [human] noise-free condition, will also impact many square miles around it.” In support of this crazy idea, all Northwest commercial airlines have pledged to not fly near it. Gordon Hempton, a acoustic recording engineer and author dreamed this up – and I think it was a great idea waiting to happen.

So, off we went in seach of a little red rock that represents – the one square inch of silence. Beginning at the Olympic National Park Hoh Rain Forest Visitor Center (which is already way the heck up a remote valley and fairly free of human noise anyway) we hiked a little over three miles. Past huge trees, hanging moss, occasional views of the blue-gray glacial-fed Hoh River we went until we reached a significant-looking octopus-hemlock (that’s the top photo). The instructions are to climb through the hole and immediately take a faint elk trail to the left for a few minutes, climbing over blow-downs and then circle a swamp – we did, and there it was:  a little red rock on a mossy log symbolizing much more than it appeared.

The whole point of this is, to me, the sad fact that while we stood beside the log and its sacred rock, we heard people talking far down the Hoh Trail and were aware of a very distant small plane somewhere. And if we experienced that plane and were offended by it, how many other wilderness travelers heard it too? If there isn’t pure peace from human sounds even here in this remote place, a spot people actually work at to make pure, I think it’s hopeless. We’ve lost something we didn’t even realize we had – a place we can go to listen to nothing. On the other hand, the experience of just going there and being aware of all this was immensely rewarding.

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, Uncategorized

Backwater on the Hoh

We’ve spent the better part of two weeks camping along Olympic National Park’s Hoh River, and I have a bunch of fun mixed media paintings to report. We’re home now, watering some very thirsty tomatoes, yanking out the gone-to-seed stuff we forgot about – and trying to figure out how to return to the West End for a few days more. Probably won’t happen soon, because there are some very patient people waiting for us to do our art-tricks – and we thank you. What? This little watercolor and ink created on my lap in the camp chair while I was being eaten alive by the moskies isn’t art-trick enough? Well, the spash of paint followed up by a dead run to the camper was a pretty good trick. “Moskies” was what I heard a Brit call the evil Hoh River mosquitoes. Pretty good name.

This ORIGINAL painting is watercolor and ink on paper , 8″ x 10″ and $140 unframed.
The dark mahogany frame with a double mat and glass makes it a total of $180 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 if you’re interested.

AND……………..

 

Here’s a friend that came by the campsite to visit one evening. We’ve not seen such a perfect bull elk  up close and personal in years. Had to have been 1200 lbs and not a mark on him. I guessed from ground to antler top was at least 8.5 feet, and you sure didn’t want to stand in his way as he came past. At the closest point he was about 15′ from us, and the tree I was hiding behind seemed pretty darned small. Olympic NP has the largest unmanaged elk herd in the country, and this guy truly seemed ‘unmanaged.’ Whooie.

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, Uncategorized

Twilight on the Hoh River

We’ve been camping along Olympic National Park’s famous Hoh River this past week, and the next few  posts will be watercolors I did out there, mostly after hikes in the late afternoon. I could have spent the time soaking my feet in the 49-degree water coming straight off the Blue Glacier, but thought better of it. It’s an amazing valley, that quintessential Rain Forest Experience, surrounded by miles of giant 250′ Sitka spruce, red-cedar and hemlock. The visitors are all pretty civilized there too. It’s as if they realize they’re in a special, almost sacred place, and treat it (and other visitors) that way. There’s a lack of amenities, to be sure, no water in the restrooms, no power, no showers, and the park store seems to always be out of our puzzles and books – but it’s also pure clean ancient forest an hour drive from the nearest stoplight. Wonderful.

And speaking of the nearest stoplight, that would be in Forks – the little bedraggled West End logging town that has fallen into a Hollywood gold mine. They should make Stephenie Meyers, or maybe Hollywood location people, the patron saints of Forks for their gift of filming the Twilight Series there. We delight driving through it nowadays, seeing every store in business and the town full of vampire-seekers (or maybe vampires themselves). I’ve never seen so many dark haired, pale makeuped teenaged girls with cameras in my life. Stores: there’s ‘Dazzled by Twilight’, and ‘Twilight Natives’, and even ‘Twilight Firewood.’ We saw a rows of girls all lined up in front of the closed-up high school, pulled over waiting their turn in front of the town sign, even photographing the Twilight Gas Station sign. Amazing!

So, here’s my Twilight take on it with this little watercolor of the Twilight on the Hoh River. Nancy says I’m trying to cash in on the Twilight Craze, but I know who has all the money – pale-skinned teenage girls, and I just know one of them will buy this. Oh, no vampires in it? Well, you never know. There could be one lerking behind one of those big spruce.

This watercolor and ink painting is on cold-press paper, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
A nice mahogany frame with a double mat and glass makes it a total of $180 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.

Next time I’ll tell you about the “One Square Inch of Silence” 3.5 miles up the trail on the Hoh.

Uncategorized

“Vanna White” – 20 Years Remembered

Painted just last year, my two best friends, “Vanna White” and Nancy in an interpretive painting for Olympic National Park. For decades to come, visitors will see but not fully understand what this painting represents to us.

I’m greaving  today over a separation from my second best friend, “Vanna White”. For 20 years and a third of a million miles, as a research vehicle I’ve driven this VW Westfalia Camper to just about every park in the Western United States. We’ve camped in her in places you wouldn’t think a 2-wheeled car could go,  talked to her like a person, and some people thought I would be buried in her – a ready-made coffin! 

One favorite story is the burned-up water pump-event north of Bakersfield. We got her stopped before the engine blew up, and were hauled into town by a good-hearted Chicano tow operator. Saturday night, all shops were closed (and there’s almost no civilized camping in Bakerfield), so he took us over to a friend’s house for the night, where we slept in the driveway in a neighborhood filled with Spanish-speaking kids and dogs. Early morning, our new friend found a pump somewhere and had it in by nightfall –  and event that included tasty food being brought over by the neighbors. I remember lots of fried chicken and lots of kids, all very interested in who we were and what we did. Vanna was like that – drawing a crowd no matter where we landed.

Now, while my Dad would buy a new car every three years no matter what, we camped more times than I can count in Vanna during the past 7,300 days, from Mexican beaches to Banff in the Canadian Rockies. I wrote park guides in her, painted watercolors on picnic tables and woke up with snow on the roof.  Burning through 17,000 gallons of gas, most parts were replaced as we went along. Cosmetic surgery and new paint (by me – after all, I am an artist and own a spray rig), but also a new engine, transmission, three clutches, four or five water pumps, three stereos and more carpets than I can remember. And, like another Vanna White we all have known for decades, she just never seemed to age!

2006: Here’s Vanna next to a 90′ mural we were working on in 29 Palms California. We painted two murals here, a decade apart, and Vanna was there both times.

And so, after driving her a distance of from here to the Moon and half way back, we recently decided to find her a new home. It didn’t take long!  Just a couple of days on Craigs List and yesterday Vanna went off to Portland with a delightful younger couple who, we’re sure, will have the time of their lives continuing on with this same boundless spirit of adventure. AND, I’ve been told of a local support group I can go to of former Westfalia owners.

And why did we do this heart-wrenching thing? Well, we now have a little Scamp trailer waiting for us in the Tampa area. That’ll be a 6,600 mile trip to bring her home – and a good start on the next 340,000-mile adventure!

Vanna on her last adventure with us. California’s Anza Borrego Desert State Park, December 2009.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

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

Salmon Cascades – Olympic National Park

Salmon-Cascades
I spent the entire week drawing concept sketches for a new project, and I couldn’t have imagined a more fun time. And since I have graphite all over the place –  drawings for 130 running FEET of new murals and am completely disorganized, I thought I’d just post this finished painting here instead of showing you the sketches. Maybe it’ll calm me down. When I get the pencil drawings pasted together in some sort of publishable form, I’ll post them.
This painting is of Salmon Cascades – just west of us in Olympic National Park. It’s a favorite for many locals, because in Fall huge salmon come right up along the rock cliff on the left as the big fish prepare to jump the cascades. You can be within two feet of a very powerful fish waiting for just the right moment to make the leap, and it’s pretty thrilling. In late afternoon, the sun comes around to illuminate the mist from the falls, bathing the entire area in silver light.
This painting is acrylic on board, 12″ x 20″ and we’re offering it for $700 unframed. Email us for details. Click the image to enlarge.
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***