Tag Archives: Olympic

New Painting Post

Demise of a Favorite Bridge

Bark Shanty Bridge – Big Quilcene River: If you’ve been reading these posts for a few years, you might recognize this painting. Recently we hiked the same trail under those same giant trees, the Lower Big Quil a few miles south of us. At just under the three mile mark, first one beautiful old bridge, then Bark Shanty Flat with giant cedars and Doug-firs, and around the bend to a very disheartening sight. Bark Shanty Bridge has been hit by not one, but two giant trees, and the far end is crushed to pieces. It’s cleared away and open to hikers only, but the deed is done and the bridge will soon be history. The Forest Service says it’s letting a contract this summer for a replacement, and if the new bridge on the nearby Dungeness Trail is any example, they’ll do a good job of carefully replacing it with another hand-carved log span. BUT, OUR bridge is soon to be gone – the one I used as the model for this painting. It had real character – a fish net nailed across the tread to improve traction, mossy handrails, notched logs for the cross beams. The Forest Service isn’t sure how old it is, but I’m guessing 1950’s at least – probably not WPA-age because wood just doesn’t last all that long up in those wet forests. As my painterly-life has gone on, this has happened more times than I can count, and I’m beginning to think it’s bad luck – or good luck, maybe, to recognize something beautiful and interesting – and instill some sort of painterly immortality upon it before it’s gone.

The Bark Shanty Bridge the other day. You can see where the trees hit it on the far side, and the splintered spire of the second tree’s base. Evidently during a winter’s high water, the upper sections of both trees then washed back downstream and lodged under the bridge.

We still have prints available of this painting. Here they are on the main website.
Or, you can 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. I think she’s cooking up a blog post of this too.

New Painting Post

The Marmots of Hurricane Hill

A local project this week. Olympic National Park is just to the southwest of us, we see the snow shining on the peaks just a few miles away. The Olympic Peninsula is a biological island, with water on three sides and lowland on the fourth, so Olympic’s alpine is really isolated from the rest of the continent. Because of this, there are at least twenty-three plants and animals that are only found here – although a couple are on Vancouver Island peaks too. Take a walk in the alpine and you’ll see nature you can’t see anywhere else. One of these is the Olympic marmot, a big meadow-living woodchuck that spends its summers eating sedges and grasses as it prepares for the next 8 months of underground sleeping. We often see these guys hanging out on their den “front porches”, watching for preditors. But recently, their meadows have been changing – and not for the better. One might say the neighborhood has been going to the dogs (coyotes).

So this bit of art will alert visitors as they climb the Hurricane Hill trail to watch for a rare critter that is in trouble. Climate Change? Well, the Park might not say this, but I see thousands of brand new little confers invading the upper meadows, where trees haven’t been before. It’s like winters aren’t as harsh, the growing season just a bit longer. More trees equal better cover for lowland coyotes to sneak through as they go after the marmots. And the coyotes are here since the wolves have been exterminated!

For me, it’s another chance to learn more about nature – and figure out how to illustrate it so you can too.

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

New Mural – Exploring the Nearshore

Nearshore of the Elwha River

For the past few months I’ve been working on some projects centering around the dam removals on the Olympic Peninsula’s Elwha River – located about an hour west of here. This painting has just been finished, so I thought I’d pass it around. You and the clients are both seeing it for the first time! It shows the shoreline, Olympic National Park behind, the Elwha River delta on the right – and of course the critters and plants that call this place home.

This is a collaboration between Olympic National Park and Feiro Marine Life Center in Port Angeles, just to the east of where this scene is. One of the big beneficiaries of freeing the Elwha will be the unrestricted flow of nutrients, sediments and drift material from the river into the ocean and then along this shoreline. The river has been blocked for almost a century and this beach is pretty starved, not only because of the dams but also because the shore is ‘armored’ with boulders (read: very bad for critters). In this scene, I’ve hopefully given you an idea of how dynamic and complex this place should be. The painting is destined for the Feiro Center, along with other panels that will tell the story of this, the largest dam removal project in our history. I’m pleased and proud to be part of this forward-thinking environmental project.

These big paintings are always fun for me. I just never get tired of figuring out how to somehow ‘build’ all these 3-D plants and critters into a somewhat realistic and complex world of only two dimensions. It’s a real puzzle. If I continued working on this painting, it would become a very tight and almost photographic work, but I’ve always thought they should be more an “impression” of a scene, and so I try to paint them that way – in an impressionistic style. While it might look realistic on your screen, it’s actually fairly loose in technique.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was to. If you know others that might enjoy my musings, they can sign up on the blog page – or by sending me an email.

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

Calm Corner of the Hoh

Forgot to post this when I painted it – but it’s never too late for new art, right? This little painting was created with me in the camp chair, paints balanced on my knee – glass of wine nearby. Life was good.

On the Olympic’s west side, the Hoh River is a pretty messy place. Just below our campsite was this little backwater. Big water from the rainiest mountains in the United States tear out enormous trees and drag them along, crashing into the shore and causing all sorts of mayhem. A tree could be dragged along in periodic storms for decades until they finally come to rest in places like this, backwaters that stack up the 8′ diameter trees like cordwood. For the next hundred years or more they’ll slowly decompose, create rich habitat for all sorts of birds and animals, and shelter young salmon. Without these big trees in this wild river, the Hoh wouldn’t be as ecologically healthy as it is. It’s quite a place – to put it mildly.

This original painting is watercolor and ink on paper, 9″ x 12″ and $125 unframed.
If you’re interested in a frame, we can do that too. 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

Pulse of the River Wayside Panel

(image should enlarge with a click)

We’ve been away on a field trip to the Shulman Bristlecone Pine Grove near Bishop, CA for some new paintings soon to come – so I don’t have a fresh painting this week. But it’s glorious Fall here now, with the maples and alders loosing their leaves – so here’s a wayside panel I just received the digital file for. It’s already installed, but I had never seen this in its final digital form.

This one is installed at the same location it was modeled after, right along the river. As you can see in the photo, snow was still on the ground when I did the field research, but along the way the painting turned into a Fall scene with bronzed vine maple and returning salmon. Paintings can do that, while photography has a more difficult time – which means I still have a great job because of 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.

New Painting Post, Uncategorized

An Eifert Look to the Marine Life Center

Feiro Marine Life Center gets a dozen Eifert exhibit panels and new “look”.

 (Click the image and it should enlarge)

The Feiro Marine Life Center in Port Angeles Washington. We’ve been working on this for a seven months now, and it’ll be probably another year before it’s completed, but I thought I’d pass some of it around here today.

The place needed some freshening up, so they asked us to help. Much of this is centered around the ‘big deal’ that’s coming down locally in Olympic National Park – the removal of the Elwha River dams, largest dam removal in the US to date – and it really is a big deal, at least around here and at least for me. I’ve been involved with the dams project for several years now as a provider of art showing what the river will look like post-dams, so it was logical I also help create some exhibits about it at the Feiro. Here’s a link to some of that other Elwha River work.

The image above is only the quickie-watercolor concept sketch, but I thought it interesting enough to pass around. Everyone sees the finished products – complex paintings or big visitor center exhibits – but few see where it starts, the basic skin and bones of ideas. And while it may (read: probably) not end up this way at all, it’s a good view into the creative process. So here goes: This wall is actually three times longer than this. It goes off to the left where there are also windows, so to keep it simple, I just focused on this area for a concept sketch. The sign is all they really requested, which includes a changing banner up top for programs. I’ll do all that here in the studio, but the rest will likely be done on-site. We went to the big Seattle Aquarium for some field research into how kelp and fish look underwater, how fish circle, and how light filters down into the ocean. The two herring balls – thousands of little fish circling for protection, will mimic the oval sign, and the octopus encircling the sign shows a popular critter they have in their tanks. There will be more and larger fish, likely salmon, and more extensive bull kelp, but this shows the basic idea.

Stay tuned, I’ll send more as this goes along.

For local readers: Nancy is opening a show of her photography at Gallery Nine in Port Townsend Saturday night, 5:30 to 8pm. Come on down and see her new work.

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

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.