Tag Archives: Olympic

Murals

Welcome to Sol Duc Valley

Since this wayside panel is being printed this month, I thought I’d pass it on here. I published another one of these back on November 8th, and you can see it here. For this project, I painted 21 paintings for 3 panels at Olympic National Park’s Sol Duc Valley entry kiosk. With the others last year, that makes 24 images you can see while driving the 17 miles from national park gate to road’s end where a trail leads to this grand waterfall – Sol Duc Falls. At 4′ x 6′, these are pretty large panels.

So what? Well, I like to call these efforts “public art galleries in our parks”, and I now have hundreds of these things in parks, preserves and wildlife refuges around the West. You’re hiking or driving along, and suddenly there’s a piece of art and a small story to tell you, or interpret, what you’re seeing. It’s just a great way to experience a beautiful place, and, I hope, to heighten your experience beyond what nature is providing (if that’s possible). These panels don’t use the original art itself, but are always fabricated out of fiberglass, stainless steel or a Formica product, so they’ll probably last longer than I will. I’d like to image someone coming along decades from now and stumbling over one of these things – and having it enhance their day.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff.

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New Painting Post

First Serious Snow – Olympics

Fresh-Snow-Oly-framed

Click the image to see a larger version.

Boy, we’ve had some weather lately. Going into town yesterday, the eastern Olympics showed their best with fresh snow. Strong westerly winds were blowing it off Mount Townsend in great banners, and the clouds were alive. Mile-high Hurricane Ridge was supposed to have gotten 18″, and you can see this for yourselves here at the park web cam mounted on the visitor center roof. The camera lens is currently 90% plastered with snow and you could barely see anything. At night, even on a cloudy evening, you can still see the unearthly glow of the snow, but seeing it on a normal clear day (without the snow on the lens), the view of Mt. Olympus is stunning. The little thumbnail next to the web cam is what you’d see in the summer. This is only about 45 air miles from here and we go there often. And with the web cam, now so can you. Check back to see it ‘unclogged’.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $120 unframed.
The gold 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, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

To check availability of the other small originals I’ve blogged about the past few weeks, check the blog here.

Thanks for reading this time.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

New Painting Post

Snow Creek Estuary

Happiest Halloween, Everyone. Tonight we helped hand out 40lbs of candy in downtown Port Townsend at Gallery Nine. 40lbs from our gallery times about 40 stores is a LOT of sugar! It was a wonderful home-time event for a bunch of very cool kids from towns as far as an hour away. My favorite was the H1N1 pig costume.

This week I was supposed to have the bristlecone mural all finished up and ready to show you – but other life got in the way, including new keel bolts for the boat and a maybe never-ending exhibit project now almost in its fourteenth month. But who’s complaining. Both those diversions were artistic in their own ways. The keel bolts kept that 70-yr old boat from sinking in the slip, so you could call it art-rehab.

I did, however, find some time to do this little acrylic of Snow Creek Estuary. (click on it to enlarge. If not, click here.) This place is very close to our studio, right here on the ‘back’ side of our local Quimper Peninsula. Snow Creek comes down from the eastern Olympics and drains into Discovery Bay, the site of George Vancouver’s first anchorage here-abouts in 1792. Few live here, and it still has a pretty healthy run of chum salmon. It was from here that ‘our’ Chimacum Creek got a hatch box full of these genetically-similar salmon eggs about a decade ago. Nature worked her wonders, and now there are over 1000 chum salmon that come home to Chimicum to spawn each fall, right below out house.

Just at dusk a few weeks ago, we stopped here for Nancy to do some photography, and while out in the meadows, we discovered a giant population of garden spiders, all sitting patiently in their webs for some insect action. These are some serious spiders, so we backtracked gingerly the way we had come. We felt we had intruded into their world – which we had.

And now, back to the studio and the bristlecones of the Great Basin.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
The gold frame 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, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

To check availability of the other small originals I’ve blogged about the past few weeks, check the blog here.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

This week I also remodeled the Interpretive Section of larryeifert.com and added some new projects.

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

New Painting Post

Late Afternoon – Lillian Ridge Trail

Lillian-Ridge

SOLD
Obstruction Point area, Olympic National Park.
Acrylic on linen canvas – a small easel painting this time.

This trail is a favorite – I can’t paint it enough. It’s about 35 miles, as the eagle flies, west of our studio in the eastern Olympic Mountains – a serious set of rocks. I painted another version this last spring and posted it here in March. It’s not the amazing scenery or that it’s an almost level trail (well, that might be part of it), but it’s also the fact that, at over 6000′, it’s above any glaciation that’s ever occurred there. To walk here is to trod on the exact same stones and sit on the very same overlook that the mammoth hunters did during the last Ice Age. The shattered shale that crunches under my boots is unchanged, and I could very probably be the very NEXT person since that Pliocene hunter to sit on that rock and look for Olympic marmots, those alpine animals that are only found here. The only difference might be that it would have been the hunter’s dinner and not mine.

For an artist that wishes nature were a bit less mild these days, that wishes he were born a few years earlier so he could have seen more of our now-vanished legacy, this is heady stuff.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
The gold 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.

Still working on the bristlecone painting, but painting in the boatyard (our boat) has gotten in the way.

Thanks for reading this week. For new readers, I try to alternate between park interpretive stuff and easel paintings, but they’re all about nature. It’s what I’ve done for over 40 years.

Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive art and other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing with her photography.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of these emails – or just ‘talk’ with us.

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

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New Painting Post

Elwha River at the old Humes Ranch

I’ve painted two large murals of the Elwha River for Olympic National Park, and so in the interest of science, art and fun, of course we had to hike up the river to check it out. We’ve backpacked up this valley several times in the last two seasons. The Humes Ranch area is only a few miles from the trailhead, but its scenic beauty would be worth miles more. As someone said, this is a big messy river, with snags and piles of old-growth trees strewn along its shores. We’ve camped here several times, right on the grassy knoll above the rocks here, taking in the vastness of this place as the sun sets behind the peaks. This is what Western National Parks are all about, experiencing wildness that used to be taken for granted, but isn’t any more.

Oh, and Humes Ranch used to be here prior to the park’s creation. In fact, the oldest building in the park, the old ranch house, was just restored just up the slope. The only livestock left today are the bears, deer and elk.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
The gold frame 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, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

To check availability of the other small originals I’ve blogged about the past few weeks, check the blog here.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

New Painting Post, Wildlife

American Fishers return to Olympic National Park and make whoopy!

Our web host has been messing with our shopping cart this last week. You’d think a company the size of France could figure this out, but not these days. And, I admit it, painted this image last year, but I just had to put a blog entry about it now because the Olympic Peninsula recently got a bit more crowded.

Fishers had been extinct on the Olympic Peninsula for decades, having been trapped out of the entire state of Washington for their plush fir. Last year, Olympic National Park commissioned this painting to coincide with the release of the first groups of fishers seen around here in 80 years, animals the Park resource people brought down from Vancouver Island. The painting was used for a bunch of interpretation, educating everyone about the event. It was fun to attempt to paint something I knew little about. This house cat-sized critter is between 2 and 4 feet in length including a giant tail. All four feet have five toes with retractable claws, and because they can rotate their hind paws 180 degrees, they can grasp limbs and climb down trees head first. So, unlike similar martens or weasels, this allows them to hunt birds in trees.

Disregard the arrow! It was a proofing issue.

So, it’s one thing to reintroduce animals into the wild, but it’s another to keep them there. It appears to be happening. The park set up an automatic camera in the backcountry near a female fisher’s den in the Elwha Valley. It showed the mother taking four babies, known as kits, out of the den, which is located fairly high up in a rotting snag. The animal appears to be moving her young to a new den, presumably closer to the ground so the kits won’t have far to fall as they grow.

I really hope that in a few years there might be fishers all over the Olympic Peninsula, maybe even passing through my backyard (but that’s a stretch).

Currently you’ll have to email if you want something, but we now have museum-quality prints available of the fisher painting available here of three sizes for between $39.95 matted and $239.95 fully framed.

Or, you can go to our Giclee Print Index here

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

New Painting Post

The Chattering Winter Wren

I’m attempting a new and “improved” emailer and I’m a bit worried to hit the send button. If it’s botched, don’t give up on me.

Several have asked if I’m still painting wildlife as stand-alone images. Of course! I’m still hooked on doing these single-focus themes – sort of a wildlife moment.

Here’s a new effort along those lines. This little winter wren and its stump are soon to be on an interpretive panel for Olympic National Park. We have these little birds right here in the meadow below my studio, so studying the real deal was pretty easy. So was the stump. I used a broken and leaning mossy log down by the compost pile as the model.

Winter wrens are about the size of my big toe. They have amazing courage (or stupidity) and come boldly out of the ferns to confront you trespassing in their territory. They’ll let go a stream of sizzling, bubbling chatter that goes on for ten seconds or so, possibly a rapid series of threats in wren-lingo. Recently, I had one fly from a nearby fern frond and land on the brim of my cap. As it landed I could hear the flutter of its little wings, like the sound of a deck of cards being shuffled. To them, that must sound very loud, like an airplane propeller.

Sorry, but this painting already belongs to the National Park Service who commissioned me for it.

Link here to many other wildlife prints on our website.

Or, you can go to our Giclee Print Index here

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

Thanks for reading, now I’m going to start painting.
Larry

New Painting Post

Olympic National Park Bugler Cover

Bugler-cover
We’ve been away for two weeks, so no posts for awhile. We were in Hilo Hawaii, better known as Hi-Town, enjoying sea turtles, Coqui frogs, volcanoes and the most interesting blend of people, music and art we’ve seen in awhile. The Big Island has turned into quite some place.

Meanwhile, the summer visitors are a’comin, and this year’s Olympic National Park’s Bugler cover is a painting I recently finished of the Sol Duc Valley for Olympic National Park, northwest of Seattle on the Olympic Peninsula. It was commissioned for a roadside wayside exhibit, but these paintings often end up doing double duty. Now, I’m pleased to say that, for the second year in a row, the park has used my work on the cover of the park’s summer newspaper (that’s the giveaway publication you often get at most national park’s gate or visitor centers). I heard that the initial spring printing was about 100,000 copies.

Of course there’s a back story:
Here’s one of the many Sol Duc River reference photos I took to get the painting going.

And here’s the draft sketch for this painting. You can see the exhibit text blocks that will eventually overlay the painting, which never makes it easy for the painter. I have to not only create a good painting that might be used for, say, the Bugler cover, but also allow areas for text when it’s used for a roadside exhibit. After decades of doing this, I guess it’s just all in a day’s work – but I continue to be very interested in the serious challenge of making it all work up into a good artistic work of art and not just a photo-like exhibit. Some work better than others.

If you’re interested in more of the interpretive art I’ve completed, click here to see lots of other national and state park art on our website.

If you know someone else that might enjoy these occasional emails, you can always send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

Thanks for reading this post.
Larry Eifert

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New Painting Post

Bark Shanty Bridge, Olympic National Forest

Greetings to all our friends: This email begins a slightly different slant of our on-going Blog. For years, Nancy has sent out periodic emails announcing new printed products to our customers, clients, family and friends. While this has worked well, there is much more we’d like to share, such as published articles, fine-art paintings and special interpretive projects for many parks. So, here’s our first ‘edition.’
To opt out or say hello, just click this to send us an email.

Bark Shanty Bridge
Here on the Olympic Peninsula, it’s called the Big Quil River. And this little bridge is called Bark Shanty because many years ago there used to be a squatter’s cabin nearby made of big slabs of Doug-fir bark, probably the easiest building material he could have found here. The shanty is long gone but the bridge remains.

Thirty miles south of our home in Port Townsend, we hiked the two miles from road’s end, a flat and level trail along the Big Quilcene River. The entire trail was in an emerald-green tunnel beneath enormous old-growth firs and hemlocks. This is national forest land, and past administrations have left it pretty much butchered up by a forest industry that cared little for our national legacy. However, here and there you can still find the old lowland forest, and here along the Big Quil life goes on much as it has for centuries. The trail eventually crosses two beautiful wooden bridges, and this one is the second, probably installed in the 1930’s by WPA crews. After 80 years, the two old-growth logs that make most of it are still in fine shape. We stood on these rocks and listened to the rush of clear water. A winter wren competed with a very loud dipper as they both tried to overpower the crash of the river. It was as pure a scene as could be imagined. As a painter, I especially liked the swirling mist beyond the bridge, indicating more whitewater upstream. It intrigued us to go farther.

We have eight-color Giclee prints either unframed or framed, between $39.95 and $239.95 available of this painting and the original painting is available for $700 unframed. Email us.

Link here to the Bark Shanty Bridge print on our website

Or, you can go to our Giclee Print Index here

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

New Painting Post

Salmon Cascades – Olympic National Park

We were doing some research up the Sol Duc River, about 70 miles west of our home in Port Townsend. I was painting some images for Olympic National Park, and we stopped at the Salmon Cascades to see if any fish were there. They were – a group of coho circling below the falls waiting their moment when a big perfect jump would take them to the top and on to the rest of their journey to the spawning beds upstream. It was a thrill to see these big fish, and the scene with the sun shining through the water’s mist wasn’t bad either.

We have eight-color Giclee prints either unframed or framed, between $39.95 and $239.95 available of this painting and the original painting is available for $700 unframed. Email us.

Link here to the Salmon Cascades print on our website

Or, you can go to our Giclee Print Index here

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.