Many of you know that I like to paint from experiences. These birds: they’re just so . . . full of themselves. Or so it seems. We have a family of these guys here that spend their entire lives not 30 feet from the big six-foot tray feeder. Recently, one, possibly the kid from last year, showed up without it’s long and almost gaudy tail, hobbling around and looking truly messed up. The local sharp-shinned hawk if I had to guess. But in a few weeks there were new tail feathers and the limp was gone. So, here he is in a painting.
This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $149 framed. Outside edge of the frame is about 12″ x 15″. This custom frame has a triple liner and glass. Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print. Email us for details.
Beethoven, because – well, it’s a song sparrow. There are dozens of subspecies of song sparrow, all singing dozens of tunes, but they all include four specific notes that sound like the first four notes of Beethoven’s Symphony #5. Ta da da – daaaa. And once you relate the bird to the song, you’ll have a friend wherever you travel in America – because they’re everywhere. I know this one well. It likes to sit in a gnarly winterized berry patch at the edge of the forest where it lifts it’s head high and blasts away – sometimes for hours. I’m fond of calling them LBJs, for ‘little brown jobs, and the other day it was right outside my studio window, so, a painting appeared in front of me as if by magic.
This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $149 framed. Outside edge of the frame is about 12″ x 15″. This custom frame has a triple liner and glass. Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print. Email us for details.
SOLD
Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. I’m trying to expand my list. An email will work. Larry Eifert
Not once have I ever seen a golden-crowned kinglet on any of our feeders, but they sure are all around us here in our little patch of forest. I had one flitting around the hummingbird feeder today, not five feet from where I sit right now – and so that’s enough of a reason for me to paint it. I think kinglets just focus on eating insects and seed or suet feeders aren’t on their radar.
So, I brought in a little sprig of winter Nootka rose hips for a prop and painted away. This fairly glows with glazing on the background, but the computer screen just can’t handle that, so you’ll have to imagine it.
This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on board, 6″ x 9″ and $189 framed. Outside edge of the frame is about 12″ x 15″. This custom frame has a triple liner and glass. Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print. Email us for details.
SOLD
Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. I’m trying to expand my list. An email will work. Larry Eifert
After watching a little song-and-dance on the beach, I wrote this for my monthly page in 48 North magazine. You can read it online at their website too.
Here’s the text for the story:
A recent beach walk showed us something we’d never seen. Meandering along a sandy stretch that had just a gentle bit of wave action, we joined a glaucous-winged gull (the most common gull in the Salish Sea) who was walking here too. It seemed to know exactly what it was doing – looking for something right where the little waves were breaking. Soon it stopped, turned to face the incoming water and started doing a little dance. Dabble, dabble, dabble it went for about 20 seconds, turning slightly but keeping it up. As each wave came in, the gull used the rushing water to prance ever deeper into the sand – and then it looked down – and began to grab the mole crabs and other small burrowing crustaceans it had forced to the surface in the wash zone.
Mole crabs like to bury themselves right at the tide line where food is abundant. They sense when the tide is receding and slowly follow it out, a few feet at a time. This young gull had learned the crab’s ritual and realized that just a little dance, up and down, left and right – and lunch would magically appear. We watched it long enough to realize that it was nothing but normal for this smart bird, and then wondered why all the other gulls didn’t do this too. Maybe it was evolution happening right before our eyes. Most of the time, watching nature isn’t seeing a giant whale surface or an eagle dive on a salmon, but it’s the small rewards of seeing daily lives of creatures that share our world that is normal – if you’ve smart enough to see them.
I took a couple of phone videos of this little guy dancing along at the surf line. Click to see one here on YouTube. Sorry, it’s a bit shakey in the wind but you can still see the little guy dancing away while Nancy does commentary.
Thanks for reading this week. My big mural is coming along just fine. Next post I’ll show you how it’s going.
Larry Eifert
Here’s my story in 48 North magazine this month, available far and wide. I’ve been told people even get this in the boat stores in Hawaii. This story is about what was undoubtedly the biggest living creature that’s ever come so close to our little meadow here in Port Townsend!
This is the text:
In early September, the Puget Sound Express whale-watching boat crew spied a rare fin whale off Whidbey Island, the first one spotted in the Salish Sea in decades. The Fin is the second largest mammal on the planet and named for its slender, fin-backed shape. I honestly didn’t know much about them, so I did some reading – and this is such an interesting creature that I wanted to share what I found. These whales are gigantic, for sure, and can become almost 90 feet long and can weigh 165,000 pounds. How big is this? A single fin whale could produce 660,000 whale burgers, or enough for every person in Seattle with leftovers. Don’t worry, I’d be willing to bet most of us would order something else.
Like other whales, this one was hunted (and still is), and it’s reported that between 1905 and 1976, 725,000 were slaughtered in the Southern Hemisphere alone. Fins, or finbacks have been described as the greyhound of the sea for their slender body that is “built like a racing yacht … which can surpass the speed of the fastest ocean steamship.” What caught my eye was the somewhat hidden description of the Fin’s eating style. Being a baleen whale, it filters small fish and crustaceans, shrimp and krill by simply opening its mouth wide, lunging forward and taking in whatever is in front of it – and then straining out what’s unnecessary (including about half the ocean). But it’s not just a dainty mouth! My drawings tell it all, and by this technique, a fin can consume about 4,000 pounds of food each day, probably explaining how it can grow so large in the first place.
And just to make a size comparison, here’s my little boat sailing along with its typical line-clutter everywhere (a quick boat has lots of strings attached). An adult fin whale would be 5 times longer than the boat and eat 6 times more than it weighs.
On Saturday, there’s a little show of mine opening in Port Townsend at Gallery 9. Thought I’d just pass it around. This is possibly the first gallery show I’ve ever put up where the main attraction isn’t for sale! One wall – one painting, and we were worried it would even fit.
Left side of the painting. 18 feet x 4 feet.
ABOUT THE PAINTING (from the press release)
Port Townsend painter Larry Eifert has painted large-scale nature murals for parks, refuges and nature centers for many years. This 18-foot x 4-foot painting was commissioned for the Polks Nature Discovery Center in central Florida, and is painted on synthetic and tree-free paper. This is the original painting and was completed in 2013. It has never before been seen locally, and intertwines four separate ecosystems of Florida’s pine forests and cypress swamps. When completed, the painting was digitized, then enlarged 200% to 32 feet x 8 feet and printed on Dacron for its final installation.
Behind the scenes here in the studio I’ve been working on two outdoor wayside exhibits for my local park, Fort Townsend State Park. I was commissioned before for a painting for this lovely place several years ago, an old-growth forest mural that’s installed on the green near the campground. This time it’s the beach area of the park where they’re removing tons of rock and shortening the landing to make it more ecologically healthy. A few months ago I received the award to create two outdoor panels that will be installed when the heavy equipment leaves.
This panel tells the story of why all those giant boulders are being removed, that healthy shorelines are created by eroding bluffs and not rock walls. Erosion brings fresh sand and gravel to the beaches – rock walls stagnate the process – and young salmon like overhanging branches and leaves. This may not be the final version of the text, but it’s close to finished. It’s a difficult subject to try to illustrate – erosion, beachside house without retaining walls, logs on the beach and all the critters: guillemots, herring, crabs, seastars, kingfishers and the rest.
I have an interesting history with this park. It was the place I camped when I first came to Port Townsend in 1973, over 40 years ago. I remember it as one of the best campgrounds I’d ever seen – and it still is. I also remember the showers were the very first I ever had to pay for – 10 cents a shower. I was outraged! The costs have changed, but that wonderful campground is still there – but now I live right behind the park.
My life is brim-full of four things: Nancy, painting, hiking and sailing. The Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival begins tomorrow and through the weekend, and we’ve been in it many times with various boats. With a fresh coast of Doris Day-green deck paint, a friend thought I should post something about my on-going sculpture project, the smallest sailboat I’ve ever owned called “Thriller”, a 1959 Lightning #7108. If you’re in the festival, drop by and say hi. We should be along the outside of one of the lineal docks.
If you’re not heard of this festival, Port Townsend’s population triples this weekend when 300 classic boats come to town. It’s quiet a scene, with workshops, races, music and food – and a Sunday Sail-by with hundreds of boats from canoes to giant schooners.
Click to enlarge
This boat: amazing construction above and beyond what most Lightnings look like, Thriller was built by the Livingston Boat Shop in Northport, Michigan for the grandson of Kroehler Furniture Corporation owner – a rich-kid’s boat. It’s 56 years old. Much of the restoration was done by the previous owner in the Bay Area, but I’ve finishing it off, made the rig better and the hull ‘bright’. Almost all the wood is original, including the mahogany seats. With a stainless centerboard now (the original would have been cast iron) and rigged for single-handed sailing, my three-season routine is to spend a joyful couple of hours in late afternoon on Port Townsend Bay, joining the guillemots, auklets and seals exploring the best place I’ve ever sailed.
See you at the Festival!
Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. I’m trying to expand my list. An email will work. Larry Eifert
This month’s sketchbook and published story in 48 North magazine is about Caspian Terns. These few summer weeks are the only times I see these birds while I’m sailing about Port Townsend Bay. Actually, I almost always hear them first, then spot these big guys, and since I try to paint what I see, this was an easy choice for August.
Here’s the story:
This is a sound I hear often on quiet summer sails. Kaaaaarr – like a smoker attempting to clear a raspy throat. I instantly know that sound, and always turn and look up to find the hacker. Then, here it comes, flying fast and high, head down studying the water for a vague shape that indicates dinner. Seeing this, I know two things: it’s summer, and the Caspian Terns are back! I watch as the fast and effortless white bird glides past. Then, fish spotted, it goes into a corkscrew spiral, then into a dive and fully submerges – out the tern comes and quickly takes off with young salmon in mouth (unlike similarly sized gulls that are unable to truly dive).
Most Caspian Terns in Washington nest at the Columbia River estuary, and after family duties are over, both young and parents spread out to spend the summer fishing along the coast and into the Salish Sea. Their numbers are expanding, mainly due to dredged materials that offer new nesting islands, and since terns have a fondness for young salmon – well, you see the problem. Dredge the Columbia River estuary and suddenly you get more birds, the birds eat the salmon, we’re spending millions trying to save salmon. Some Caspian Terns in Washington are medium-distance migrants, wintering on the coast of California, while others travel greater distances, wintering as far south as Colombia and Venezuela. But between now and October when these elegant birds head south, I’ll enjoy them here very much indeed.
Larry Eifert paints and writes about wild places. His work is in many national parks across America – and at larryeifert.com.
Click image and it should enlarge in your browser.
Still available for $1750, framed.
Lots of very low tides recently, and this view (at least to me) of our local lighthouse never disappoints. This is a fairly large painting, 24″ x 48″ acrylic on canvas, and framed right now as you see it (but we can change that for you).
I can also change the frame to this one, a hemlock simple and varnished.
The most interesting thing about this place is not that it’s a beautiful spot right here in my town, but that it’s the very point that divides the Strait of Juan deFuca with Puget Sound, a direct connection to the ocean that’s about 90 miles northwest of here. It’s real ocean environment here on the west side, with a cooler and wilder ocean with kelp beds, real waves and a feel of the north. East of the lighthouse, just a few hundred yards from here, it’s Port Townsend Bay, Admiralty Inlet and Puget Sound – a vastly different place with sheltered bays, a calm and collected environment where most of the people around here live. They say the richest and most interesting locations are ‘edge’ places, just like this. I love it!
This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 48″ and $1750 our price, not gallery price. Outside edge of the frame is about 28″ x 51″. This is the original painting, NOT a print. Email us for details.
Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. I’m trying to expand my list. An email will work. Larry Eifert
