I went on vacation – from making art. It’s been years since I did that, maybe never. I’ve been a working artist for over half a century and I can’t remember ever just, well, stopping – I worried I’d forget how to do it.
I’m now back in the saddle and painting from a long list of patient people waiting – and this wayside panel is soon going to my local park, Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Washington. Here’s the original concept sketch.
This park is a beautiful place, but all is not paradise here – alien plants are everywhere. European dune grass and Scotch broom have infiltrated all over the dunes, choking out natives like the yellow sand verbena that needs shifting dunes to live. This plant actually has it’s own pollinator. The sand verbena moth was just discovered in 1995, and it turns out this new-to-us fuzzy creature needs this plant to live, and only this plant. There are only 6 locations in Washington State where it still survives. The moth uses the verbena for everything, from eating flower nectar, to laying its eggs in the same flowers, to the larvae eating the flowers and leaves. The plant, in turn, uses the moth to pollinate it – a symbiotic love affair.
Here’s the sand verbena moth.
The area where the dune restoration is progressing will soon have this wayside sign installed to tell this story, and help keep people off these dunes – and off the verbena and moths. It doesn’t look like an endangered habitat, but it is.
This is, in a nutshell, what I do – I make art to educate and help people to understand their roles in helping nature. I’ve always thought it’s a good reason to make paintings.
And here are my little inset paintings for the lower left area. Fun little studies by themselves.
Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.
I sail around in my little boat (whichever one I have currently – there have been 6 – 6 break-out-another-thousand stands for ‘boat’). It’s a floating studio, and learn about what I’m seeing. I’ve done this for decades, but since 2012, I’ve made one-page art stories of these little journeys for 48 North magazine in Seattle, 118 stories total, once a month without fail.
Anemones, whales, worms, birds, urchins, clams, salmon, it’s all been fair game, researched and painted. Time to do another issue? I just go for a sail and there would always be next month’s story.
This month, I wrote about this guy, a hermit crab – a crab that borrows other shells to live in. Here were the drawings I did to get it started.
Then it turned into this refined page, and I wrote some text to go with it.
This one will be my last. Time to go in another direction, don’t you think? I mean, really, 118!! And some artist’s claim they need, what, motivation or inspiration to get started?
For me, it all started with this issue in 2012. At the time, I had been writing similar stories, but much longer, for 48 North but also the Seattle Times, using my art with the words. It was in that order, write it, then paint it. These sketchbook journals were the opposite. I did the art first.
July 2012-The the first issue.
This was a colaboration with Nancy. Her photo, my drawings and words. Our boat!
And at the same time, I made a few covers for them. This one of our boat of the left, 1939 Sea Witch, and the otters that were living there as well. We had geraniums on the dock in summer. Locals will probably recognize those other boats, three historic woodies living together. The guy on the right makes high-end violin bows, the black hulled boat belonged to an architect, and us – painters of nature.
It’s been fun, but time to move into other types of paintings and writing. Time to explore other ideas and continue on with these huge National Park Service projects – and, boy, are they piled up awaiting.
More soon. Stay tuned. Feel free to pass this around. People seem to enjoy seeing my process.
Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.
I was asked to paint a wayside for our nearby H. J. Carroll County Park. A nice interlude between some fairly big efforts, it was fun to do – and here’s the final result. Two fearless women, Linda and Robin, keep this garden together, raise plants in a nearby nursery, find seeds for about a dozen ecosystems and have done this for years. It seemed like a fine effort to help with and I don’t often do any local stuff for nearby parks, especially the county.
To begin, I did some smaller sketches of plants, the species that our local butterflies like. This was great information to learn about, provided by Wendy Feltham, and it helped me narrow all this down to fit on one panel. Then I painted a sort-of sketchbook page of the life cycle of a butterfly.
And all this came together to make a nice effort that has a lot of knowledge all crammed into a small area. If you’re local, stop by the park and have a look.
Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.
This painting is available and is part of my current series of wildlife portraits. Getting up close and personal with some of my friends around here.
Rose hips from Nootka roses are seemingly everywhere right now. It’s an important winter food for many birds during the colder winter months. Swainson’s thrushes are favorite birds here, but usually only in the summer. Here’s the thing: Swainson’s aren’t supposed to be here in winter, but I saw one around our little pond recently – which fits the fact that we haven’t had winter yet. Birds are opportunistic, and why endanger oneself flying south if it’s not really necessary. So here it was, staying put and deserving of a little portrait.
This is a framed acrylic original painting, 11″ x 14″ frame and painted on paper board. The painting itself is 7″ x 10″ and we’re offering it for $195, including the frame – plus a bit of UPS Priority shipping costs depending on your postal zone.
Thanks for reading this week. Just send me an email at larry@larryeifert.com if you’re interested in the painting.
Click on the painting to enlarge it. I like the textures on this one.
A little songster portrait today. This varied thrush painting is framed as you see it below in an 11″ x 14″ frame with acrylic plexiglass for easy shipping and less reflection than glass. The painting itself is 7 ” x 10″ on paper board and is $395 framed plus a bit of Priority Mail shipping depending on your zone.
We’ve watched countless families of varied thrushes raise their young here along our meadow’s edge. Varied thrushes are in the same family as robins, another singer of great ability, but the varied has a song like it came from a flute – as if Pan is out there drawing you to him with a tempting tune not yet played. There are other, lesser little notes you can hear if close enough, but it’s that single loud note that gets me every time. We hear them singing just at dusk in our patch of forest, and see them coming to the feeder near our pond. They’re what birds should look like, colorful and yet blending in with the forest bark and dark shadows. Once they land in the duff, they seem to just disappear.
Here it is matted and framed, definitely not invisible.
Thanks for reading this week. Just send me an email at larry@larryeifert.com if you’re interested in a nice Christmas present.
We live in a forest, beside a meadow. Every time I leave the house, go down the back steps on my way to the studio, I see a little flash of tail scurry by – swish, and it’s gone. It’s like a mouse, but with wings. I think this little Bewick’s is a pretty good reason to live here and I’ve painted images of them often. After getting bird drawn, I simply went a few feet from my studio steps, snatched up a fern frond and grabbed a bit of branch the last storm blew off one of the alders. Right there, the makings of ‘still life with little bird’, a painting was born.
I’ve always painted this way, taking careful notice of what’s around me, piecing together a design and putting it down on paper. I can do this at my home or in some alpine meadow, and it always seems to give me a thrill to see it come to life.
Here’s one of the oldest efforts I have record of doing this routine. Someone sent me this painting from 1979. What was with all that black? I don’t even own a tube of black paint today. I don’t have the foggiest idea, but this has been a long journey of trying things out, refining my efforts and trying to make each one better. This little hummingbird painting is 41 years old now! It was painted in opaque watercolor, a paint I worked with for a couple of years while trying to figure out how to use this stuff most call kid’s poster paint.
And just one more showing a section of this new painting – I have improved a bit. Maybe.
Two new published stories, both in 48 North magazine a couple of months ago, the summer of 2020. This first story was about possibly the showiest and most colorful rockfish in the Pacific Northwest. It is sort of rockfish heaven here, with 17 different species, all somewhat different.
Here’s my sketch before the color version.
My story was about rockfish that can live to be over one hundred and how conservation can actually work using science. Imagine that, using science! BELIEVE IN SCIENCE! By the way, DID YOU VOTE?
Just as their name suggests, these guys prefer to live around rocks. 28 species of rockfish live in the Salish Sea, from 3-inch tide pool dwellers to 3-foot lunkers that live in deeper water and weigh in at 25 pounds. Most are slow-growing and long-lived, some live to be more than a century old. They have a completely different lifestyle from live-fast and die-young salmon. Foraging for other fish, they may swim only a few hundred miles in their lifetime. Rockfish tend to hang out together in groups around rock pinnacles or cliffs, places with lots of tidal current (which helps bring meals to them and not the other way around). Canary rockfish usually have three stripes angling down and backwards on the head, the middle one often runs across the eye. This is a very bright and distinctive fish.
The conservation of this fish is a real success story, and one that shows how science and government work together to make our lives, and the fish’s lives better. After discovering how good rockfish tastes, a definite over-exploitation of these tasty fish began in the 1800’s until canary rockfish were declared overfished in 2000 when it was discovered that rockfish had declined 70% since the 1960’s. Fish and Wildlife submitted a petition to have 14 rockfish species listed under the Endangered Species Act (eventually, all these were not listed). Enter science-based studies of them, plus just plain asking fishermen “where are you catching canary rockfish so we can have you fish elsewhere”. Fishing rules were changed, different gear was introduced and suddenly, in half the time it was thought it hopefully might happen, we have plenty of rockfish.
My second story was about another Northwest creature, one that has adapted to its environment in a beautiful way, but hiding underground from its predators.
A delicate flower-like anemone that is actually an animal. Yes, an animal that you’ll find just beneath your keel in sheltered mud-bottomed bays. While it looks more like a tube worm, this creature is actually related to jellyfish. Confusing, but to me it just shows the complexity of the underwater world we rarely see, and why I enjoy writing this page. These animals appear to have stout tubes below their tentacles waving in currents as they search for bits of food to snag, but they are actually soft and vulnerable. To protect themselves, they burrow into the mud and generate a fibrous string-like material they weave around themselves, almost like they’re knitting a sock. This can extend from above the surface down beside them into the mud as deep as three feet, a woven structure they live in, safe from predators. When one threatens, the anemone quickly pulls itself down into the protective tube.
While many anemones have stout fans of tentacles and large bodies holding them up into the current, this species relies on the mud substrate and a house of its own making. When its main predator, the giant nudibranch, grazes on the anemone’s tentacles, it also lays its eggs right on the outside of the anemone’s tube, putting the young’s first meal close at hand. You might think this would be the end of the anemone, but nature has evolved tentacles aplenty so both species survive. The anemone commonly lives up to 10 years and often congregates in colonies that resemble flower-filled meadows, the tenticles waving as blossoms in a gentle breeze. Flowers they are definitely not, animals are certainly are.
And here’s my original sketch before the color was added. Notice the unfinished part on the right, just part of the process.
I’ve written for this magazine for over a decade now. When it was a sailing journal, they used my art on the covers and published many of my longer stories. It’s a broader publication now, trying to a bigger audience, and it still gives me pleasure to contribute. It was sold to the Port Townsend Northwest Maritime Center a couple of years ago, bringing it closer to my home port where I continue to sail and kayak. It’s a meaningful bit of life to me, experiencing nature here at home and then writing and painting it for others to enjoy.
Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.
Catchy happy dance! That’s because of this new yellow device clamped to me – filled with paint brushes and watercolor paper. My new gear from Six Moon Designs arrived and I’m beginning to try some of it out. (top photo of the Elwha River last week with winter water.)
For 2020 I’m being sponsored by Six Moon Designs in Oregon, a family company that makes award-winning ultralight camping equipment. Here’s the pack they sent me recently and this is the first try-out. What better place than where the Pacific Northwest National Scenic Trail crosses Port Townsend on it’s way between Glacier National Park in Montana and Olympic NP to the west of us. It’s 1200 miles of some of the best scenery in America and it goes right through town.
I’d have to say, this appears to be the best pack I’ve ever had on my back. How many I’ve had total, I cannot say, but this one is the most comfortable and much of the time it didn’t even feel like it was back there at all. I loaded it up with all the dry gear I’ll be carrying this summer, which means everything except fluids and food, and it came in at about 15 lbs. That’s FIFTEEN pounds for the pack, sleeping bag, cook kit, sleeping pad, TENT and all the rest of the stuff it takes to travel comfortably in the backcountry for a few days.
A decade ago, my fully-loaded pack was about 40 lbs. I’m in my 70’s now, and the only way I can stay ‘out there’ is by traveling light. Thankfully, the camping industry has stayed with us older people and ultralight equipment is making my life easier each year. I wish I had this stuff decades ago.
This pack is their Fusion 65, a big pack for me but it’s still just a tad over 3 lbs, or about half of my former ones. It has a variety of shoulder harnesses and attachments to make it fit perfectly – and it does! It also has some thoughtful features, a roll top on the main bag to make it compress and be waterproof no matter how much you cram into it. It has 7 other pockets, enough to divide up your goodies, and four on the front I can get to while walking. Cue the snacks.
So, why is all this about art? For me, a painter or nature, it’s about getting out and staying out in wilderness as late into my life as possible. Day hikes are great, but nothing hits it for me than sleeping in a mountain meadow with the marmots and deer. It’s clearly a spiritual-thing, going to these untrammeled places. We may build churches to go inside where we close our eyes and try to find spiritual meaning, but isn’t it better to find the same thing with eyes open? For me, as it was with Muir and Thoreau, it’s sitting in a mountain meadow. I take my paints or at least a sketch pad, of course, because by running my hand around a page it heightens the experience about 10 fold. I see, really see what’s there – a real meditative pleasure I never get tired of. These days, I don’t believe anyone is too ‘old’ to do this, it’s simply a matter of getting passionate about it – and the rest will happen. 71 years ago, I got that passion right away and it simply hasn’t left. Questions about how a 73 year-old guy does this, just ask.
First solo camp at 2 years. Mom slept in the car but I didn’t know it.
Wow, I get to paint something local for a change. And the scenes are local, but these were actually painted on a picnic table on the other side of the Cascades at Lake Chelan State Park a few days ago.
These are two of six paintings for a trailside project at my local park, Fort Worden State Park, funded by the Friends of Fort Worden and state parks. The trail wonders beside Chinese Pond and then into a mixed-age conifer forest. These trail panels will be like a little gallery in the forest. It’s been fun to work on something much smaller than what I usually do. I’ll have more soon.
This second painting shows the pond in winter, Nootka roses without leaves or flowers, green grass and flocks of migrant widgeons. There was discussion of the deer – too close, too big, but if anyone has been to Port Townsend, they’d understand how critical it would be to add this one species – THE species here in town. Love them or hate them, it’s life for all of us here.
I’ve been painting imaginary scrapes of landscapes for a long time. I find it very rewarding to take a moment in time and build a little painting around it, a memory for me of ‘being there’. This one is actually a streamside rock pile up the Big Quilcene River on the Olympic Peninsula, Olympic National Forest. I remember, it was raining, had glistening rocks, lots of varieties of color and texture, a few bits of wood as well. It was near the old log bridge at Bark Shanty. These are cold waters, so I primed the board with Mars Red to give it all a warm cast.
The spotted sandpiper is the same, a nice memory for me of bumping into this little guy on a hike. They’re around most Western mountain streams throughout the summer, but head south to Argentina when the snow flies. You might normally think of sandpipers as birds that flock for safety, but this one is always singular. They poke around stream and lake shores, banks and beaches for lunch and have a curious habit of teetering up and down as if it’s lost its balance.
The first time I ever saw a spotted sandpiper was in the High Sierra. I was walking along a meadow bank beside the river above Tuolumne Meadows a few miles south of the campground. What a place! And here was a sandpiper, just meandering along and minding its own business as if I didn’t exist. It spent time, and so did I. Those memories make for good paintings, no matter if it’s decades later.
This painting is now for sale. It’s framed and the outside measurements are about 24″ x 20″ matted and under glass for $1295 total. Shipping is a bit more. Let me know if you’re interested at larry@larryeifert.com.
