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.
Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing.
Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email group – or just ‘talk’ with us.
Finally, I got this puppy finished up. It was quite a handful with lots of other work coming and going through the studio. If you click on the image, it should enlarge. If not, go here to the blog.
This is destined for The Crater Lake Institute, that, through the years, has commissioned me for many of these types of paintings. Next summer we’ll have products like puzzles available, but there’s lots of design work to do before that happens.
When I sent out the sketch for this awhile ago, I received lots of mail about where to see these trees and just how to do a painting like this. The 3′ x 5′ painting is on hardboard so I had a smooth surface to begin with. I primed it with dry-brush latex to rough it up slightly, making for good textural effects. These are worked up from the back forward, so the foreground flowers are the last to go in, and there’s lots of hidden stuff in that foreground. I recently put up a page on the main website with a page of murals. There’s currently about 50 for you to see, so check it out here.
SO: Where can you see these bristlecones (that DO have bristled cones)? Well, you’re not going to this time of year, but if you’re looking for a great trip next summer, check out the bristlecones east of Bishop CA in the Whites or at Great Basin National Park way out near Ely Nevada, or Brice Canyon National Park in Utah. They’re high-elevation trees – at 10,000 feet or so on dry windswept ridgetops in limestone, a place where nothing else can easily grow. It’s worth a trip to walk beneath the oldest trees on the planet, some dated to almost 5,000 years of age. Even the downed branches are beyond my comprehension – some have been dated back 9,000 years from the present. To put that into context, the woolly mammoth was still around then!
Here’s the original pencil sketch:
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. There’s some good new stuff here on her blog about the Day of the Dead Celebration in Seattle.
Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us. If you know someone else that might enjoy this, let us know. Our list is growing.
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 $420 unframed. The gold frame makes it a total of $445 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. Sorry, this painting is sold.
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.
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.
Progress on the Bristlecone Pine mural I sent out the pencil sketch for this painting on September 8. and now, after several review comments and changes only a dendrologist (tree scientist) would recognise, I’m moving along pretty well on the final. Many large-scale painters do a complete smaller image first, then recreate it in the larger final version. I’ve never been comfortable with that process because it seems like I’d just be painting something twice. It’d be like remarrying the same person you’ve already divorced – all those little issues you hated the first time ’round are still lurking there. Nancy and I have done several 90′ paintings without a finished ‘baby’ painting and it was truly exciting – for both us and the clients that were scared numb. Nancy once stated: “we are in SERIOUS trouble here” but we still pulled it off nicely. Next week I hope this’ll be close to finished and I’ll send another update. But that’s not all:
Stream Stones
This is another painting from our recent alpine excursions. If you know your Pacific Northwest geology, you’d pick up that these stones are from the North Cascades and not the Olympics. Cascade stones are very much more diverse in color and texture – brownish iron oxides and lots of gray speckled granites. If you see these stones around the Olympic Mountain edges, they undoubtedly came there from scraped streambeds in the Cascades by way of the mile-high Cordilleran Ice Sheet 80 centuries ago, and they match pebbles you’d find in any Cascade river today.
You might think 80 centuries is awhile ago, but consider this: there are bristlecone pines in the White Mountains and Nevada that approach 50 centuries. And that’s the way I tie the top part of this entry with the bottom part of.
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.
Ancient Bristlecone Pines
This is straight from the artist’s studio.
You’re receiving this weekly email blog because a friend or associate thought you’d like these occasional postings. This is from Larry Eifert, long-time artist and writer, the guy who has more art in America’s National Parks than any other. These postings show some of the personal inner workings of an artist creating everything from large wall murals to smaller easel canvases. All are about America’s Nature. To not receive these emails any more, simply hit reply and write “unsubscribe” in the subject line.
If you click on the image, it should enlarge. If not, go to the blog here.
And so: For years, I’ve wanted to paint the ancient bristlecones of the high and dry western desert mountains. Thought I had it at Wheeler Peak, Great Basin National Park (where I experienced as close to a spiritual moment as I’ve ever had), then later at Utah’s Bryce Canyon, but budget problems or scheduling always got in the way. Now, thanks to a nut (and NOT a pine nut) burning down the visitor center in the Shulman Grove of California’s White Mountains just east of the High Sierra, and the generosity of the Crater Lake Institute that is spearheading a high-elevation pine interpretive program, I’m having a go at the most iconic and picturesque grove of them all.
Here’s an updated version of the initial sketch that has changes from comments from all the bristlecone-pros.
This image shows two ancient trees, both possibly 4500 years of age and living at 10,000 feet of elevation in a super-dry limestone mountain landscape. The bits of dead trees strewn around the ground could be thousands of years older still. Birds and animals shown all live here, at least during the warmer months, bringing the only other sounds to this stark and beautiful landscape besides the singing winds through branches and past needles. It’s quite a place.
As I did with the similar whitebark pine painting last year, I’ll send an update on the progress of this one next week. This is going to be fun.
Thanks for reading. If you’re received this in error, we apologize.
Larry
We have posters and jigsaw puzzles of the last “High-Five” painting (whitebark pine = five-needled high-mountain pine).
Posters are here.
Jigsaw Puzzles are here:
The main website at LarryEifert.com is here.
Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.
Bagley Creek is what you’d call the perfect “river runs through it” stream. It meanders out of a high alpine lake and into this narrow glaciated valley past basaltic cliffs and meadows. Our trail was along the west bank – the morning sun casting long shadows on the far cliffs. Nanc and I could have sat in these meadows for hours, listening to the bumblebees making slow passes on September pearly everlastings and watching a northern harrier canvas the grass for mice. On the slopes above these meadows, blueberries were everywhere, and with the warming sun each one turned into a little berry tart.
There’s a favorite essay of mine by Virginia Eifert (yah, mom) who wrote “I stand by the river and I know that it has been here yesterday and will be here tomorrow and that therefore, since I am part of its pattern today, I also belong to all its yesterdays and will be part of all its tomorrows. This is a kind of earthly immortality, a kinship with rivers and hills and rocks, with all things and all creatures that have ever lived or ever will live or have their being on the earth. It is my assurance of an orderly continuity in the great design of the universe.”
This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed. If you’d like to add the gold frame, that makes it a total of $180 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. Sonja (who bought one of these small paintings) says I need to say this: This is an original painting, 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.
SOLD
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.
Level, easy and hopefully endless. Now, that’s my idea of a trail. It meandered through ferns for awhile, then came out into this glade filled with false lily-of-the-valley and scattered trillium. All these flowers had long faded, but no matter, it was just a nice place to be. Filtered sunlight came through the upper canopy, casting strong shadows behind the tree trunks. And, as usual for me, I thought this seemed like a good place for a painting.
So here it is – the Easy Trail. It’s always my hope that paintings, like photography, can bring something fresh to eyes that will never see it. It’s my joy to say that, indeed, I saw, and now you have too.
This original painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed. This is an original, not a print.
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.
Email us for details.
This one, like several others this month, won’t be listed on the main website, but will be only on the blog.
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.
Sorry to say I somehow hit the “send” button instead of the “save” button. I just had ‘words’ with my computer!
So, here’s the rest of the story.
The Marin Conservation League is celebrating their 75th anniversary, and they wanted me to create a 24″ x 36″ panel on Angel Island commemorating this. Angel Island State Park is on the north side of San Francisco Bay. I once anchored there and walked the trails. It’s a great place, and thanks to the foresight of Caroline Livermore and others, I got to do that.
And now, almost 30 years later, I was able to tell that story of how the park came to be.
The back story is another matter. Since I couldn’t actually go to the location, I had to cook up a bit of art for this, using web photos and some artistic license. That’s the bottom piece of art that’s 36″ wide. The photo of Caroline Livermore was another issue. The only photo provided was a blurry low resolution black and white snapshot. I took this into Photoshop, blew it up, printed it out and then painted it with colored pencils. Who knows what color that dress actually was, but now it’s red. I think it works pretty well.
Sorry you got two of these emails. Technology runamuck!
Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert
Click here to see a bunch of other outside exhibit panels.
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.
***previous*** — ***next***
with more art in America's national parks than any other artist
