Tag Archives: Parks

New Painting Post

Theodore Roosevelt NP finally gets an Eifert

Now I ask you: how many artists can say they have public art on display in North Dakota?

 

 

I keep painting away at this – and sooner or later I hope to have some bit of my work in most every Western national park. Theodore Roosevelt National Park is in North Dakota, a fairly remote landscape of over 100 square miles in size and it’s just the sort of beautiful and relatively pristine place I love to paint. But because it IS remote, it’s not so well funded and commissioning an Eifert mural isn’t easy. So, it was nice to get a request from them to use some existing work, a large visitor center mural I did for Badlands National Park in South Dakota. The image seems to fit nicely for what they had in mind, and really could be North Dakota, and so this exhibit panel will be installed in the park this summer.

I’m always asked how the heck I got into the somewhat rarefied line of art, and so here it is in as few words as I can make it. 50 years ago I asked my mom the same thing. Who does someone publish 20 books and write a magazine for over 300 issues? When I was young, it simply all seemed overwhelming. Since my family made it abundantly clear that I was to be an artist, and an artist of nature, I had to figure out what to paint and how to sell it. I gravitated to national parks and wilderness areas simply because I thought, and still do, that these are by far the best places in America – the best of what’s left. I backpacked, climbed, sailed (to Alaska and Mexico), and through it all I painted what I saw. Then someone asked me why I painted and left? Why not keep the paintings where they were created and belonged, in the parks they were painted in? So, I did. And, so, decades later there are Eiferts in a whole BUNCH of parks, from Alaska to Florida, the Mojave Desert to Wisconsin, Mount Rainier to Yosemite. I get it now. It’s not an issue of creating a huge body of work, but creating them one at a time. One at a time. As Henri said: “It takes 1000 paintings to become a painter. So get to work.”

And I’m not going to stop until I drop dead!

 

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.

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

New Painting Post

James Pond Waterlilies

 

 James Pond Waterlilies

 24″ x 48″ acrylic painting on  hardboard.
(I put a 16″ image on the web, so click the painting and you’ll see it enlarged.)

This is one of those places that makes me happy to be alive – it gives me a sense of what I love about painting nature – the wonder of it all. From Mora Campground beside the famous Hoh River in Olympic National Park and about a mile from Rialto Beach, there’s a little trail going into the woods – and a small sign saying so – I’d seen in many times. I hiked it at 6:00 in the morning not knowing where it went – just started walking with hopes of maybe seeing some elk. It’s a loop trail, and half way along a spur goes off into the huckleberry thickets, and then right out onto a mossy log into this amazing and ethereal place. Obviously it was an ancient oxbow bend of the Hoh that was long ago cut off and evolved into a lily pond, but it just seemed like a staged set. The morning mist was just clearing, cool shadows still prevailed, but deepening color values (by the minute) foretold a bright day ahead. I sat here a long time, watching early morning dragonflies hawking for mosquitoes – watched a kingfisher dive for breakfast.

This was the view from the log.

And when I brought Nancy back an hour later, all was flat and sunny-day values – nice but nothing like the pastel and thick atmosphere I saw earlier. How far this little pond goes in either direction I don’t know, but I don’t think any other trails hit this quiet backwater.

This painting is offered for sale as of today. 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.

Click here for Virginia Eifert’s website and see where all this started for me.

New Painting Post

Closing In – Point Reyes National Seashore

I’m about 80% finished with my current painting for Point Reyes National Seashore. I blogged about the start two weeks ago, and now I’m closing in on completion. There are still many details that need tightening up, filling in, straightening out, smoothing over, brightened or softened, fixed, repainted, moved – but I still call that ‘closing in.’ You can see it’s not finished by the black holes, unpainted treetops, critters just blocked out.

The original painting is going in the Bear Valley Visitor Center at the park, northwest of San Francisco, but it’s also going to be used on their new park map. One entire side of it is the park map, I get the other side. I needed to see how it’s all going to fit that critical space, so Jane at Harper’s Ferry Center in West Virginia (the National Park Service’s interpretive center) popped my painting into the design. The red lines are fold lines.

And here’s that first post so you can see how it’s been developing. The painting is 48″ x 63″. I sort of hit it all over the place to develop a ‘feeling’, which is much different than getting it just ‘painted’. When I look at this progress photo today, I think it’s a bit of history – something no one will ever see again (because it’s painted over). We were at Point Reyes last October for the field research, and it was really flat, dried-up and burnt out colors of nature was getting ready for winter. But Point Reyes has a singular lush greenness that I find very rare and beautiful, and that I’ve brought into the distance. I can’t use the word “unique” because that would mean that no other place on the planet is like it, but let’s just say it’s a ‘singular’ place. It’s a very beautiful landscape to paint.

Thanks for reading this week. I have one more of Virginia’s books up, and a third is almost there. I’ll tell you about them next week unless another painting gets in the way.
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

Point Reyes National Seashore mural progress

I spent the week working away on this large painting for Point Reyes National Seashore near San Francisco. Back in October, I posted the field trip and concept here, and the final sketch here, and now I’m working on the final painting. This isn’t a huge one this time, 48″ x 63″, but it’s big enough that I had to move it to my downtown Port Townsend studio above Union Bank.

So you don’t have to go back into the old posts (unless you want the real details), here’s the concept sketch again.

You can see the basic idea is there but it’s sure refined into another thing completely.

This is a very fun painting for me, not only because Point Reyes is a singularly beautiful and rare place, but because I have work installed in many other parks in that San Francisco North Bay area – and this is just about my last non-Eifert-art location. Muir Woods (9), Sam Taylor State Park (36), Angel Island, Muir Beach, Muir Headlands, Golden Gate National Recreation Area and some others all have Eifertst for interpretive exhibits and installations, and it’s fun for me to imagine all those little art galleries in the woods and ocean overlooks. Sam Taylor State Park has two trails that have a dozen or so panels each, so a walk in the woods is like hiking through a little art exhibit.

It’s also a real honor to be commissioned, yet again, by my favorite bunch of people, the National Park Service. Best to work with, highest standards of excellence, working for a noble cause and I just plain love going to these amazing places over and over for decades. I hope it never ends.

Thanks for reading this week. I’ve now had this weekly blog going for over 250 posts – that’s a lot of art in over 5 years.
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

24′-wide Digital Scan of My Portland Mural

 I wrote about this painting when it was about 80% completed on November 18th, 2012. Here’s the finished version, and now, thanks to Carl Beebe at ColorOne in Seattle (a very cool guy who’s been in his business as long as I’ve been in mine), the final scan is now finished and now ready to be printed and installed on the wall of the new Powell Butte Visitor Center in Portland, Oregon.

Short explanation: that sheared-off section on top is where the ceiling goes – and the brown box on the bottom is a 30″ tall cabinet. Chick on the picture and it should enlarge so you can see some details, such as downtown (a really challenging mess of buildings) and how the heck you go about painting suburbia from 16,000 feet, or 3 miles up. If you live in Portland, tell me if I got your street in the right place and your house color is correct.

And here it is in the building design plan. It covers one entire end of the place.

This is a fairly new way of creating wall murals. For decades I would go on location and work for weeks at painting it right on the wall. A lot of work, a lot of expense in travel time, room and board. Now, with the advent of really good color scanners and high-end digital printing, this has all changed. It allows me to paint these things in smaller sizes, like 50% of the final size so that it gets it down to a painting I don’t have to live on a ladder to create. I have a die-sublimation sample next to me here on a piece of polyester cloth that is a sample of one of these, and they tell me it can actually be tossed in the washing machine and slapped back on the wall. Amazing technology – and so many light-years from the old way of creating art that I sometimes wonder if I’ve lived too long. On the other hand, because I have these old-time painting skills, a little drawing ability and a high degree of computer skills, I seem to continue to get these amazing jobs.

Thanks for reading this week. And thanks everyone for keeping us going on a long and most-interesting path – and this one was sure that! Now it’s up to the amazing designers, Linda and Peter at SeaReach in Sheridan Oregon to finish it off.

Check out what Carl does at: coloroneinc.com. Linda and Peter are at seareach.com.

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. I now have some more giclee prints in the web store.

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

New Painting Post

Point Reyes National Seashore mural sketch

I left this at a pretty large size on the web, so if you click on it, you’ll see the enlarged version and all the details.

A few weeks ago I blogged about our field trip to Point Reyes National Seashore and the painting I’m doing for them. Now, here’s my sketch, and Jane at Harpers Ferry Center already mocked it up into the design for the park map so I can see where I need to move things around to fit the text. Vultures below the text, some branches trimmed off a little. The painting itself will hang in the Bear Valley Visitor Center, but funding for it is coming from this park brochure project. I think it’s going to be a pretty lush and vibrant painting. With luck we’ll have some support stuff like posters and puzzles to offer of the painting by next summer.

Some of have askd how I come up with these designs. Do I just copy the real place and add some critters? Well, above is the main reference photo I went by, so you can judge for yourself. It was pretty foggy so some of it was just guesswork, but if you compare this with the sketch, and then the concept drawing below I did on location, you can see how far these things change from my field hiking to field sketchbooking, to the beginnings of paint. That headland in the upper left distance is actually turned around the other way and much more distant in reality – the big bay, Drake’s Estero, is also farther away. All that actually moved back in the final sketch, and the cypress got bigger. Artistic license – or call it surgery to make a better painting. Push and pull, elements get moved until they finally settle in a place they should have been in the first place. I just didn’t know it when I began.

Thanks for reading this week. My big painting for the Polks Nature Center in Florida is so close to being finished I can taste the celebratory wine on my tongue. I’ll show it to you next week.

Oh, and we were forced to build a competely new web shopping cart over the past few weeks, so please bear with us if all the products aren’t up yet. Don’t worry, the puzzles are there at least, and a few posters, but if you want something that’s not there, just email us. Playing webmaster is not one of my favorite jobs.

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

Point Reyes National Seashore Field Trip

This week Nancy and I were in Point Reyes National Seashore near San Francisco prepping for a new mural. Here’s the concept sketch. It’s been years since I’d been here and it was great to see this beautiful place again. I’ve seen this park from car, foot, horseback and twice sailing by it in my own boat, but this time park staff showed us around and it was fun to see it through their eyes. It’s one thing to be a tourist or traveler; entirely another to see a big park with people who have great insight and knowledge of a place. As long-time Chief of Interpretation, John Dell’Osso said: “I have a huge passion for this amazing park – let me show it to you.” You bet!

The problem, of course, was to figure out a way to show all five separate and different Point Reyes habitats into one painting – ocean with whales and elephant seals, estero (like Drakes Estero in the distance in the photo), uplands with scrub, forests with cypress, fir and redwood, and of course  Tomales Bay estuary and wetlands on the other side of the mountains. Impossible, of course, so after two days of trying, I finally admitted defeat and fell back to something called reality.

So, the painting will be all about this habitat: coastal scrub with an amazing collection of critters and plants. I’ll be painting tule elk, black-tailed deer, scrub-jays, hummingbirds and quail. Oh boy! Just to be on the ground here was so much better than trying to paint a place without seeing it first-hand. Hear that you guys that don’t send us for a field trip?? This one will be GOOD!

Here are the flat-hat pros that know their stuff like few others: John Dell’Osso on the right and John Golda left. The artist with his sketchbook in the middle just wishes he could stay here forever.

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

Polk Mural Progress Report

Here’s the sketch. I blogged about this a month ago. This is for the Polks Nature Center in central Florida.

 Painting Day 1 on September 13th: 4′ x 12′ piece of Yupo paper is tacked to the wall, primed and shows progress at the end of the first day of painting.

 Painting Day 3 on September 23, and the basic structure is in place, but now the park folks want some major changes on the left side. Sigh, but now’s the time for big alterations, not when the details are in.

Painting Day 6, sandy areas appear on the left and the horizon is smoothed out. Areas of the background in the center and upper right are tested for color and value, shadows and light. Some critters are blocked in so I can check sizes.

Painting Day 10 September 28, and the thing is taking shape. More critters are defined, trees on the left are gone, trees added in the middle, water is defined better, center part of the painting now shows upper canopy and trunks of the pines in place and ground details are starting to appear.

All these photos should enlarge so you can see them better. This is not being painted on a daily basis while my life progresses in other ways, meaning there were four days out at the Hoh Rain Forest, time spent while I’m replacing 400 feet of new cedar decking, and now we’re off to Point Reyes National Seashore this next week for a field trip. Oh, and I did four presketches for paintings for a Portland project.

Again I want to thank Union Bank in Port Townsend for continuing to give me studio space for these larger projects. I’d be really cramped in my little studio here in the meadow for this one.

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

Florida Gets an Eifert Mural

 

And we’re off again! This time it’s a complex habitat wall mural for the Polks Nature Discovery Center in central Florida – and this is going to be FUN. The top drawing is the right side of the 24′ mural, and I wanted to show this first because it’s my favorite part. The scene transcends from the swampy seasonal flatlands pond on the right (above) into the center pine flatwoods with saw palmento and finally, on the left into a sandhill  pines area. There’s a lot going on here, with very juicy stuff to paint like wood storks, alligators and spoonbills. There’s even an orange-red corn snake wrapped around the cypress.

Make sure you click on this bottom image so you can see the entire thing.  As  you can see, I still  have some details to work out in the sandy areas in the lower left, but we’ll get there. I began painting this a few days ago at my “downtown” studio in Union Bank where I have enough space. My little studio here won’t cut it. This will be quick; there are a bunch of other big projects waiting in line – and besides, this is the fun stuff of my life!

 

The colors, atmospheric qualities, horizon line – this is all a very different place from where I live. The Northwest  is a very deep place for colors, almost like it swallows color into a dark hole. The darks are verging on black but the light values are brilliant colors. In fact, I’ve often thought that the Olympics have the darkest forests I’ve ever painted and this creates huge value contrasts with other colors. This Florida painting is just the opposite. There, the atmosphere is so saturated with moisture is softens everything. The sky is pale, the edges of distant forests are almost blurred as they’re filtered through all that wet air. This is probably the most important thing I have to figure out in painting big landscapes: what makes a place look and feel the way it does.

 

I’ll be posting progress reports as I go along with this one.  Get the massage table ready – turn up the hot-tub. I’m ready! This gator’s smiling about it 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

Wildflower Heaven

 

The past four days: Nancy and I did something we’ve never done. In our hurry to hike every high-country trail, climb to every lookout, paint or photograph every park, we’ve never just walked out there and plopped ourselves in the meadows and spent days just soaking it up like we lived there. It’s always such a hurry with us we never get to just sit and smell the Sitka valerian (very sour). So, that’s what we did – just walked out there and sat down at about the 6000′ feet level – and I’d say it was nothing short of heaven. John Muir said go to the mountains and get their good tidings. We did!

 

There’s this high rocky road, some say the highest in Washington State, that goes off from Hurricane Ridge in the Olympics and in 10 miles or so traverses the most glorious alpine landscape I think I know of. We heard murmurrings that after a seriously big snow winter, this week was the best flower show – but that was a serious understatement. I took three flower books – figured out most but some just weren’t listed. You see, the eastern Olympics are a place unlike any other. Isolated from the rest of the continent like an island in the sky, you can see Olympics-only marmots, chipmunks, violets, hairbells and lots of others, only found here. Red, pink, orange and purple were the meadows. Some, like the photo below looked like snow. Nancy sat herself down next to a marmot family’s communal den system and got some great closeup shots of marmot pups testing their restling skills, and I just went off and found flowers I still have no idea what they’re called.

 Avalanche Lilies

What’s the definition of heaven in this life? I’d say it would be sitting in the middle of this field of avalanche lilies – but I’m just an artist, painter of wild places and still can’t get enough of it. You: go, go now. They’re still there.

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.