Tag Archives: Parks

New Painting Post

The Little Tarn on Lillian Ridge

Lilian-Ridge-Tarn

“Little Tarn on Lillian Ridge” acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ framed: $145.

Actually, the little tarn doesn’t look anything like this, but it was a starting point. It’s a favorite place of ours, maybe yours too for a few or you that hike the Obstruction Point area of Olympic National Park. For me, this area is about as close to ‘goin’ to church’ as I can find. It’s one of the highest roads in the Northwest, and once out of the darned car bumping along that ridgetop, there are miles upon miles of alpine landscapes to wonder.

We hiked down here a couple of weeks ago, below the ridge and away from other hikers. The loudest sounds we heard were big bumblebees working the lupine and bluebells, and a couple of gray jays giving their soft greetings. So I painted it, and then get to live it all over again in the studio – like a memory of a good dream.

Little-Tarn-framed

This ORIGINAL FRAMED painting is acrylic on paper board, 6″ x 9″ and $145 custom FRAMED and a tad bit more for Priority Mail. Glass is 11″ x 14″, outside frame measurement is 14″ x 17″. This is the original painting, NOT a print. Remember, I’m offering this with the frame and a triple custom mat. Email us for details.

SOLD, THIS PAINTING IS GOING TO TEXAS TO SOMEONE WHO WANTS TO BE IN THE OLYMPICS.

Thanks for reading this week. Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Badlands Jigsaw Puzzle – Now Available

Badlands-18x24-puzzle

Finally, our summer load of new puzzles have arrived, and Badlands National Park might prove to be a real winner. By my count (somewhat fuzzy) this is somewhere around the 80th jigsaw puzzle we’ve developed or licensed from my paintings. The original mural is installed at the main Visitor Center in Badlands National Park in South Dakota. What, you say? You even have work in South Dakota? Yes, and this painting was done to commemorate the release back into the wild of the black-footed ferret, a native hunter important to that prairie ecosystem.

 

This is the box back, chocked full of enough critters to fill a field guide.

12762-Badlands-puzzle-box-bottom

 

 

And here’s a detail showing you what color carpet we have (just in case you want to know these things). The main thing is to know these are now available, because I received a bunch of emails requesting such things. You can order them here from the website store.

 

 

Eifert-Badlands-12762-box

All the other available puzzles are there too.
Email us for details if you’d like.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs or see what she’s currently offering in the WEBSITE STORE.

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Ochre Stars in Trouble – My July Story in 48 North Magazine

2014-7-starfish-wasting

Click to on the story to enlarge it and read the most interesting and disastrous events unfolding around the Northwest’s starfish populations.

I wrote and painted this page about a month ago for 48 North – but since then we’ve been looking more intently for ochre stars, or any starfish for that matter. It’s not good. So, this is one of the current environmental tragedies unfolding in the Pacific Northwest. Starfish of all sorts are dying by something we humans have called “Starfish Wasting”. No one knows exactly why this is happening, but many think it’s some sort of virus. Stars are the top dog in the nearshore food chain. Without a healthy population of these guys, other critters like shellfish and urchins tend to take over, throwing everything out of control. The stars simply waste away, arms fall off, bodies turn into a mass of molten goop.

SAM_1900

Yes, those are ALL mussels at Tongue Point, without a star in sight.

We’ve already seen this ourselves. On the lowest tide of the year last month, we went to Salt Creek and Tongue Point, west of Port Angeles and where there should be good populations of stars. Instead, we found shellfish completely out of control, acres of them. The ONLY star we saw was this little blood star, surrounded by shellfish in all directions.

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Then we hiked the Ozette Loop a week later, a 9.5 mile loop on the west side of Olympic National Park, same thing. After two nights on the beaches and scouring 3 miles of coastline, we did not see a single star of any kind. Not a good sign, for sure (but the hike was as wonderful as like gets).

A friend, Camille, is a Washington Dept of Fish and Wildlife clam-expert, and she’s now telling me there are young ocher stars along the Hood Canal – possibly signs the disease is passing, but who knows? Certainly not us! We are really only visitors here, and contrary to some, we are simply not in charge or even know much about the planet we share.

I also can see that using art to enhance awareness of environmental events is probably a high form of communication. What do YOU think?

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Some Small watercolors for the Whidbey Island Land Trust

Guillemot

I’ve been working away at some fairly large and complex murals for the Whidbey Island Land Trust project, but the project also involves a bunch of these smaller and fairly loose acrylic wash/pencil sketches – so I thought I’d pass them around. Fairly loose; I know some of you will say they’re not loose at all. But for what I normally do, they’re pretty loose. There are about 40 of them, and these are some of the finished ones. That’s a pigeon guillemot on the top, here’s a coyote below, and a little gallery of some more. Fun to do these loose images after plugging away of some pretty details larger painting.

Coyote

These will all go below the larger paintings on wayside panels, spicing up the educational components of these outdoor exhibits. Yes, pencil and acrylic! 

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

How to Show the Art of War With Art?

Triangle-of-Fire-vs7-all-art

Click to enlarge this in your browser.

This is another panel for my project at the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve on Whidbey Island with the Land Trust. While all the rest of these outdoor wayside installations are about nature, this one speaks of Fort Casey, the reason this pristine place still exists in the first place. Without the fort and this history, the Land Trust would surely have had nothing to restore, preserve and protect, and I would have nothing to paint – because it would have long-since been made into mansions owned by Microsoft guys and lawns that look like carpet.

So, how to go about this painting this story using art? I changed up the realistic style to something a bit more ‘loose’ and tried to focus on the human side of a fort that had huge guns that protected the seaward approach to Puget Sound (it was never fired upon and became obsolete in a decade). Mark at the Land Trust, with help from Steven who appears to just love this stuff, found a very appealing photo of three guys enjoying themselves right outside their workplace at the fort – the Fire Station where they triangulated the gun’s shots. They lived here, and the building they’re standing in front of is the location where this outdoor wayside panel will live, and is right on the cliff’s edge. The building is gone, but the foundation remains as a point of reference.

While the other panels are all acrylic on board, for this I used acrylic wash and pencil for the illustrations, pumping up the color so the pencil looks more like ink. I think it has a nice textural quality. I kept this somewhat loose, making the reality of giant machines of war hopefully  seem a bit more palatable. I hope I succeeded.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Crater Lake NP New Puzzle Has Arrived

Whitebark-Pines-of-Crater-Lake-1000pc

Yesterday we received a shipment of new puzzles for spring. This is the first 1000-piece puzzle we’ve produced in years, and it’s fun for us to see the bigger image, bigger box, bigger everything. Finished size is 20″x 28″, it has an interlocking border, and it includes a reference poster inside. You can order it here.

Eifert-Crater-1000-boxback

The box back, with lots of great info and species key.

Eifert-Crater-1000-boxtop

We’ve also included a free poster with reference key and a bunch of information about the whitebark pines at Crater Lake that are in serious trouble due to Climate Change, an introduced pathogen and the ravages of bark beetles. It’s our way to cram some great interpretation and nature into one product – and it should also be a fun one to put together. Below is the poster that comes with it.

Whitebark-Pine-Crater-Lake-box-insert

Order this puzzle simply by clicking here to go to our cart. $18.95 plus shipping at our cost.

This was funded by the good folks at Crater Lake Institute and Foundation. Thanks, Ron. I think it’s a great puzzle.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

A New Old Poster – California Coast Redwoods

 A new 18″ x 24″ poster – coming soon!

Cal-redwoods-poster

Click all these to enlarge them in your browser

Thousands upon thousands of the original poster “Events in the Life of a Coast Redwood” have gone out the door over the past twenty years. Originally commissioned as a museum exhibit for Redwood National and State Parks, the painting lives it’s life in Prairie Creek, just the best redwood forest I’ve ever known. There’s a lot of art and photography here in our studio, and many of these past images go out of print, out of our lives – but we felt this one deserved a continued  present, so this week I redesigned it to look more like an old botanical poster someone might have created 200 years ago when redwoods hadn’t even been discovered by Europeans yet. You’ll see this in a month or so after the printer does his job.

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The story of how this originally came to be is somewhat fun – at least for me. In the 1990’s I was living in Ferndale, Cal just north of one of the biggest redwood parks. I always tried to be a thorn in the side of a local timber-killing company, always looking for ways to counteract their lying press releases ranting on about how wonderful they were in eliminating the world’s tallest trees – our heritage being made into hot tubs. (My real thorn was the fact I had hired the wife of the CEO to work for me in my gallery, and he thought we were having an affair – used to sneak around in the alley watching her.) Anyway, that company put out a poster much like this – tree in the center, but instead of nature they showed little images of subjects like Joan of Arc, Hitler, the atom bomb, Christ on the cross – stuff completely unrelated to redwoods.

So, I was dared to challenge it with a poster of my own – and got Redwood National Park to pay for it, and off we went. My poster was meant to show the rich diversity in redwood forests, something the redwood choppers denied (we need to get rid of those old, stagnant forests), and put them in a context with humanity as well as ecological history (something they also denied the existence of). Fast forward: the company crashed, people are now out of work, I get mail thanking me for standing up for something few believed in at the time. Ah, it’s all in a day’s work for the naturalist-artist!

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I’ll let you know when this is available in most large redwood parks – from Redwood National to Muir Woods –  and on our website.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

A Rare Forest – Whidbey Island Land Trust

Click to enlarge in your browser

A new painting for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust project at the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve. In case you missed the last several posts of this, here’s the last painting before this. I think I’m about 75% to completion on this new one. It speaks to the windy extreme weather on the bluff tops of Whidbey Island, Washington, how that weather shapes these 350-year-old trees, how the forest changes farther inland, how, one gnarly branch at a time, it’s slowly grown here over centuries. A rare forest indeed.

Rare-5

Great changes occurred in this design, logs moved, an entire underground section vanished – it was evolution right before my eyes. 

Rare-4

You can see some of the design changes in the lower right of this third photo. Compare this with the newest photo at the top.

Dark shapes help me focus on overall design. I sometimes stand back 25 feet to look at these 4′ paintings.

Rare-2

And here it is initially laid out, sky and ground, warm and cool. A free and fanciful non-objective painting just waiting to be hung in an art gallery somewhere. But these paintings don’t exist anymore. After I photographed it at each stage, it’s as if I’m then throwing away the image – because soon after it’s gone for ever under the progression to the next stage.

Rare-1

And here’s the original sketch showing the underground sections that are now gone from the painting.

Forest-ecology-sketch

By next week, I’ll have this finished up for a show-and-tell. Thanks for the interest in these images of the progression of a complex painting. Fun for me to see too.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve – Forest Wildlife mural

Forest-Wildlife

Click the image and it will enlarge in your browser.

Feeling pretty good about this painting, and that’s saying something for me (who’s usually a real curmudgeon about my own stuff). With several more paintings right behind this one, I didn’t hesitate to finish it up this week. Some details need to be refined, a couple of  minor changes I can already see, but we’re close – very close.

This is all about wildlife in the forest, so I designed it to show the actual trail meandering down and around the viewer. It’s as if YOU were back in the woods with all the critters, watching hikers come and go, come and go. The coyote shares the trail with people as I often see them doing (they can cover a lot of ground that way), a Douglas squirrel shucks a Douglas-fir cone, a chickadee lands on an old uprooted snag. I enjoy piecing this together, one critter at a time, and hopefully in the end it all makes sense. The critters should all be sized relative to each other, spaced in such ways that might really be true. I still need to alter the rose color, fix the shine on the squirrel, a couple of other things – and, well, what do you know, just this moment I realized I forgot the deer mouse in the old stump. Back to the easel! Next time you see this painting, look for it.

And here’s the sketch again, finished just 13 days ago. I’m telling you, I’m on fire! Can you see the deer mouse?

Forest-animals-sketch

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Progress Report – Whidbey Wildlife

I often get emails about blogging progress reports of these larger paintings. Someday I’ll set my camera up and do a little film of it, start to finish. This painting has some degree of pressure with the calendar, in other words, no time to mess around. So here’s a little progress report in a couple of photos.

 

Wildlife-4

Click the images to enlarge them in your browser.

Top image is how it’s looking this morning. Many things get in the way of painting the hours I need to put in, like new spring printed projects, puzzle redesigns, trying to find resource material for the other four paintings – but it’s moving along well. Last week I blogged about the sketch and an overview of the entire project here.
Wildlife-1

And here’s a couple of days ago. Background’s in place so I can begin defining the foreground’s details, critters, closeups that take the time. There have already been major changes in that area, but only I will know.Forest-animals-sketch

And here’s the original sketch I showed last week. Thanks, Mark and Jessica at the Whidbey Camano Land Trust for making this a very fun project. I don’t often get the chance to paint these complex murals of my backyard forest, but this project comes close.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web.  And here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

Click here to go to our main website – with jigsaw puzzles, prints, interpretive portfolios and lots of other stuff.

Nancy’s web portfolio of beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.