Tag Archives: Parks

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.

New Painting Post

Glacier Bay National Park Forest Trail

 

 Seems like this took forever, but when I’m painting it in Port Townsend, sending the files to West Virginia, getting approvals from Alaska – well, it just takes some time.

So, this was a bit of a challange. Without seeing the darned place, my task was to paint a place in Glacier Bay National Park. I thought that would have been easy. But then there were three of them, and the first (left side) was to show it as it was when the glacier was receding (at the fastest recorded pace) just a century ago. This thing shrank 65 miles back up the valley in less than a century! You can see it in the distance. Then the middle panel shows the plants – mosses, wildflowers and willows colonizing the barren gravel, ground is greening up, even the islands in Bartlett Cove are covered with young trees. Finally, the right painting shows what it looks like today – a young forest with deep moss and mature trees. I had some photos taken last winter in deep snow as the only reference, plus a couple of Google Earth images, buy my real references were an entire lifetime of boulder-hopping glacier rubble. This is Melanie, Chief of Interpretation last spring showing me the eratic-specimen. She’s now guiding tours in the Antarctic – lucky woman. If you look, you’ll see two glacial erratic boulders in each of the three paintings to show that it’s one place in three time periods.

 

 I know some of you will ask if I also did the map. I’ve done my share of these, but the real heavily lifting with design and map fell to Chad Beale at Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia. So that makes this somewhat of a collaboration with Harpers Ferry Center (2300 miles from me) and Glacier Bay National Park (2800 miles from him).

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

One Tree Moment for Ballard Nature Center

I still have the color to add on the five little insets, but I think this project of interpretive art is looking so good right now I wanted to share it.

It’s a very small world! I was asked by Genesis Graphics in Escanaba, Michigan if I’d be interested in doing some watercolor and ink paintings for the Ballard Nature Center in Effingham, Illinois. (So, if we did a conference call, that would be a 4000-mile round trip triangle for the words to be heard by everyone involved.) I’ve had a long and fine relationship with the folks at Genesis, and they always let me just do my thing without a bunch of hoops to jump through. My reply on this idea was, “Oh, I know where Effingham, Illinois is. My formative years were spent  just a few miles to the west in Springfield. I learned my stuff in the Illinois State Museum where I was spoon-fed nature and art by the staff and my parents.” This was relayed to the Ballard folks and it turns out two of my mom’s books are in their visitor center library. What a small world, and very soon they’ll have two generations of Eifert work there.

I know everyone likes to see the ‘behind the scenes’ stuff, so to show you how far this design was refined, here’s the concept sketch.

 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

Exit Glacier – A New Puzzle

WOOO-WOO: Our new 500-piece jigsaw puzzle is now ready to ship. We’re more than happy to announce this one – the rich habitat below the toe of Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park near Seward, Alaska. I’ve blogged about the progress of this project, from our field trip and concept sketches last fall to the finished mural a few months ago. Now the printed products are arriving, and I think this would be a great puzzle to put together.

 

And here’s the puzzle box back with all the fun stuff about the painting. As you can see, it was funded by Alaska Geographic, a very involved and prolific non-profit that works to support many of Alaska’s parks. I’ve bought their books for years, and now I’m proud to say we’re ‘one of them’ in a small way.

You can either buy the puzzle on the website here, or just email us with your shipping info and we can mail and bill. Buying two puzzles saves you freight as it’s only $2 extra for the second one.

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. She has a new blog about the Washington State Capitol Campus that’s pretty fun.

New Painting Post

My New Portfolio Is Ready To Erupt

For some years now I have had a cd Powerpoint portfolio I send to clients, parks and contractors who give me these great commissions painting nature. Keeping the thing current has always been a challenge, but nothing like I used to deal with back in the dark days when things weren’t digital. It’s a great way to present what I might do for future projects or references of what I have painted, printed and produced. I also had a second disk for some of my easel paintings that was wildly out of control, so recently I’ve been working on a new version of all of it. This new one is a composite of both portfolios, and at 147 pages, it’s almost a book. I’ve also put it all together into one big presentation and divide it into clickable sections with a Table of Contents for easy viewing. So, there are murals, wayside exhibits, big walls, dainty ink drawings, watercolors, acrylic paintings on canvas, publications and other stuff like jigsaw puzzles and posters, nature guides and tours – the works, and all on one little disk.

 

It’s now ready to fly, so if you’re a park interpreter, design firm for nature interpretation and installations, past client or just interested in a copy (free) to have ‘just in case’, I can now mail one out to you. Just hit the reply key and give me the scoop, but please, no requests from my easel painting collectors. Sorry, but how much time do I have for this when I’d rather be painting?

 

And, a brand new 500-piece jigsaw puzzle is coming out this week, so stay tuned, oh my many faithful puzzle people. This one is of the mural I painted for Kenai Fjords National Park in Seward, Alaska. It shows the ecosystem emerging from the melting toe of Exit Glacier, and the only other place you’re going to be able to buy it is at the new Visitor Center there or through Alaska Geographic. So, it’s either a luxury cruise, a long flight and a rented car, OR, you’ll be able to get it from us! Come to think of it, options one and two don’t sound all that bad.

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

Heather Pass

I painted this back in October, 2011 when we were in Washington’s North Cascades. It made it past the scan, into a frame, into the blog – but I never hit the “Post” button. For the last eight months the canvas has just sat there in my studio and also on the blog software – and the title stares at me each time I start the program. “ME, ME, Post ME” it screams, but each week I’ve sent out something else I thought was more interesting. But, now that the High-Country around the West is melting out and trails are beginning to open up, maybe it’s time to show this one.

Here’s what I wrote all those months ago, thinking I would post it then:

Heather Pass is a good 3-mile climb in the North Cascades, and while we’ve been here twice, neither were in late afternoon when the sun was doing this yellow-orange-thing. The last time we were here, there was a lone hiker camped just below this heather-filled bench, and I envyed him for his upcoming sunset and evening solitary view. Beside his single tent was a back-packer’s expresso maker, and this little spring runoff stream in the painting would be his coffee water the next morning. If there’s a reason why spending the night in a place wouldn’t be anything but glorious, I can’t think of it.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 11″ x 14″ and $140 unframed.
A custom wood 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 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

Bristlecone Pine Sketchbook Journal

I posted some other pages from this project a few weeks ago here. There are 11 pages of sketches that will string along the bottom of the three mural paintings I also painted, and all these will soon be installed in the new visitor center at the Schulman Grove of ancient bristlecone pines in California. When it opens in a few months, this is going to be really fun to see, at least I hope so. Standing in front of the three huge paintings, these sketchbook panels will show how the paintings were developed, like a field sketchbook.

I’ve always loved field sketching. It gets to the heart of things, of using your eyes to see. You get to watch the results flowing out of your hand like magic. To me, it’s the very basic process of creating art, and something I’ve done all my life. Someone recently asked me if I ever took mind-enhancing drugs. No, I said, instead I draw nature outdoors and in the field, and to do it well requires great attention to details, color, texture and how nature has evolved in a single place. I mean, how much more clearly could a person see this amazing and vibrant world than with a pencil in your hand?

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

The Dosewallips – Spring Runoff

Click on the painting and it should enlarge in your browser.

No presketch on this one, so I can’t show you the process – it seemed pretty clear so I just started painting. After Nancy posted our exploits along the Northeast Olympic’s Dosewallips River a few days ago, and thereby beat me to a post about its stunning beauty, I put aside a couple of more serious projects to finish this painting up. I was moved by the late afternoon sun was streaming through the canyon and really lighting up the streamside alders. It just seemed like a painting, which it now is. With a big snow pack upslope quickly turning to water, the river was loud, frantic, seemingly in a very great hurry to hit the ocean just a few miles downstream to the east. What a place! What a place to live – and paint!

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished board, 24″ x 48″ and is offered here for $1200 framed. 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. Can you hear the river’s roar?
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

Meander Up the Dosewallips

Some weeks are just like this.Spend the entire week drawing, drawing, drawing – but in the end there isn’t a single finished painting to show for it. There’s a stack of concept stuff, in between or in progress but not a postable painting in the lot. I think there’s about 20 of them.

Oh, and did I say the weather turned, poof, into summer. So, put the top down on the little car and head for the hills – and a little hike along the Dosewallips River in the Olympic Mountains. Harlequin ducks, bald eagles, a ruffed grouse strutting his manly stuff, hooded mergansers, trilliums and bleeding hearts, violets and salmonberry in bloom. It just couldn’t have been nicer, and I wanted to share. This photo is in about 2 miles, Nancy photographing a little waterfall coming down into the Dosewallips (that’s doe-see-wollips for those out of town)

Thanks for reading this week. I’ve got a dusy of a painting project almost ready to show, and it doesn’t involve canvas or paper, but more sea-going.
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.