Tag Archives: Port Townsend

Summer Getaway cover

I don’t post much of this publicity stuff, but this was a nice bit of press recently (and we just walked in the door from five days in San Diego). This is the cover for the Olympic Peninsula tourist magazine, the Getaway, probably the one most visitors gravitate to. I thought the Port Townsend Leader newspaper did a nice job of incorporating the title into the painting. It’s cropped pretty severely but still works fairly well.

That’s Port Townsend’s Fort Worden State Park, a popular place with 2+ miles of beaches, a college, poetry press, marine science center, woodworking school, 1200-set concert pavilion where there are music and writer weeklong summer workshops and over about 500 rooms and campsites. It’s one of the best things about this little town. The painting location is on the road going up the hill to the old gun emplacements, giant concrete structures that look like a deserted futuristic city from Blade Runner – and in the far left background is Mount Rainier – at exactly 100 miles away, it still looks that tall, I’m not kidding.

We have prints of this image (not cropped) that now seem popular since it’s appearance on the Getaway. Here’s the link.
OR 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 some very tasty posts on her blog.

Covergirl Schooner Adventuress

Cover Art Schooner Adventuress

48 North magazine in Seattle has always been very good to me, and this month is no exception. It was Wooden Boat Festival time here in Port Townsend, and so, just as they did last year, one of my paintings landed on the magazine’s cover. They do a good job in these days of struggling print magazines, but now 48 has begun to move into the digital world. It’s now entirely online and free. Check it out. Only thing lacking this month is a story by me. To see past stories, check our website archives.

The timing of this worked out pretty well, because the original painting is still available. SO, I’ll shamelessly pitch it here. You were waiting for that anyway, weren’t you?

Adventuress at Union Wharf is acrylic on board, 14″ x 20″ and $1000 unframed.
A nice triple matted frame and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you want a custom frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print. Lean on me for the non-gallery discount.
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.

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Otter Tracks

River Otter Tracks on the Beach are a fairly common sight around here. In fact, otters are, themselves, a really common sight right in downtown Port Townsend. Recently, there’s been a big one down there on Water Street, dodging cars, running around and looking in the open door at Gallery Nine (where both Nancy and I exhibit) – and causing all sorts of photo-opportunities for the tourists who all think they’re just wonderful. Yeah, well …

There used to be a restaurant in PoTown (my word – and Nancy thinks it might be pronounced PooTown) called The Otter Crossing, with a whole little band of otters-guys that consistently hung out underneath the building. Recently it changed hands and is now renamed something fruity and upscale. Wonder if the otters know? Wonder if the new people who bought it knew what the name meant? I walked by there recently and a stong fishy aroma was still wafting around the place, but maybe it was just low tide. Otters can be over four feet long – meaning, to put it mildly, a lot of seafood goes through them.

I’ve painted otters before, paying homage to them so they wouldn’t come aboard our boat and make a big gooey mess, but it didn’t help, didn’t deter them in the slightest. Some boaters hang little bags of weird coyote urine on their lifelines, others sneak go down at night and use their own urine here and there, still others pay huge sums of money on otter-proof netting that never really works. Sheesh. To me, they’re just part of living with nature around here, and, as we say fairly often, sometimes it isn’t easy.

Now, don’t get me going on the red squirrel babies in the attic.

This painting is watercolor and ink on watercolor paper, 7 1/2″ x 10 1/2″ and is $139 unframed.
A nice mahogany frame with a double mat, outside measurements of about 13″ x 15″  makes it a total of $179 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

Here’s the website link for the new bristlecone pine. It’s been pretty popular all ready.

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.

Clickhere to check out what Nancy’s currently working on with her photography. There are some nice images of our recent Glacier and Waterton National Parks visit a couple of weeks ago.

Old Fir at Fort Flagler

I’m still on this pen, ink with watercolor-thing. I recently received an email about one of these I did back in the 1970’s that someone recently purchased in an estate sale, and it jogged my memory that they were fun to do. So, we’ll go a bit more with this.

We trailer-camped beside this stately old Douglas-fir last week. We had planned on a little camp-hike into the Olympics, but rain got in the way (oh, RAIN? in the Olympics – in JUNE?), so we simply drove over to Fort Flagler on Marrowstone Island just east of here. The Rain Shadow Effect was doing its thing, and the sun was out. We could see the rain right over across Port Townsend Bay, where it stayed, but here it was clear, soft and nice, so I got busy with the paints. Long  cool later afternoon shadows, tall spring grass that hadn’t been trimmed and a few crows flying overhead.

There are lots of old-growth trees here, but here in the lee of giant mountains, they never grew huge. You can tell they’re old trees because the lowest 8 feet or so are all fire scarred and pocked with woodpecker holes. A dead giveaway. And the reason they’re still here? This is old fort was one of the many ringing Point Wilson, gateway to Puget Sound, and they guarded it from the bad guys a century ago. The forts never fired a shot in defence, but they never cut many of the trees either, preferring to use them as camouflage for the big guns. The guns were melted down and turned into tanks in the next war, and the state of Washington turned the forts into parks. A great idea, don’t you think?

This ORIGINAL painting is watercolor and ink on Arches paper, 10″ x 14″ that fits a 16″ x 20″ matted frame. It’s $239 unframed.
A dark mahogany frame with a double mat makes it a total of $279 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.

Next post I’ll have the new Bristlecone Pine jigsaw puzzle to brag about, so stay tuned.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to the online blog this was posted 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.

Low Tide Chimacum Creek Estuary

 

Right down the hill.

No kidding – a two-minute walk. When we moved here a decade ago, the sellers didn’t even mention it. On our first walk down the hill, we were stunned to find this place! It’s a salmon stream (thanks in part to the locals that placed hatch boxes here years ago to renew the fish), and we now get something like 1000 chum salmon each year, and they spawn right around this first bend. Coho are here too, moving upstream to nest in other areas. We can come down here on incoming tides and see family groups coming upstream to perform their last living acts to create the next generation. Dark shapes in merky water, carrying the eggs of tomorrow’s fish.

This is a tidal area, connected to the bay and salt water a half-mile downstream, and so these mud flats appear, then disappear, every six hours as the water leaves and then returns. Herons cruise the shorelines and belted kingfishers fight for their bit of watery turf – yak, yak, yak, yak. Otters are here, along with bobcats, bear and cougar, racoons and eagles. It’s a busy place. And yet, up on the high banks on both sides, people live in houses, chickens and lawnmowers can be heard in backyards, kids go to school and dogs bark – all completely unconnected to this vibrant community right below them. It’s almost as if there are two parallel universes here, with few interactions between them. It’s only when a bear competes with a berry picker, or the cougar forgets and walks down the street in plain view of picture windows are there any interactions between wild and unwild. “DO something about the bear in my berry patch” the woman wrote in Letters to the Editor.” “Like what”, I wondered, “make his share his berries?”

Low Tide is an ORIGINAL painting is another watercolor and ink on Arches paper, 10″ x 14″ and $239 unframed.
A dark mahogany double-matted frame makes it a total of $279 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. I can email you a photo of it framed, but we didn’t want to junk up this post with it. 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 posted 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.

Point Wilson – Spring Driftpile redo

(It appears my server decided to only send this out to just a few on the mailing list, so we’re doing it again. I apologize if you got this twice.)

I’ve always enjoyed the vibrancy of watercolor and India ink. It was a style I learned early-on as a kid, and I’ve never tired of it. On our recent little “drive around the block”, I tried doing some of these in the car while underway, and it wasn’t easy. No, I didn’t draw and drive (as a friend said).

And so, I thought I’d continue here in my studio and on location. A bit more steady of hand, I’d say. The fun part for me is that I splash the paint on with very few indicators or sketch marks. It looks positively awful at that stage, but the ink layer brings it all together, and the image appears almost by itself. The pen I use is a green Cross, originally made decades ago when I bought it new. The first gold point it had I wore down to a nub, so that the lines looked like a felt pen. Oh, and it leaked all over the place, forcing me to keep a towl always at the ready. I dearly loved that tool, and was more than happy when I found out that Cross gladly rebuilds old pens – and for no charge. Now, it’s going strong with a major rebuild. Feels like an old friend.

This ORIGINAL watercolor and ink painting is on Arches paper, 10″ x 14″ and $240 unframed.
A double-mat and mahogany frame makes it a total of $279 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 see this post on the blog page, along with all the other posts.

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. There’s some great new flower images from  her garden.

Road Trip – The Big Easy

St Charles Street Car – New Orleans

We could have ridden this all day long! First operated in 1833, New Orlean’s St Charles Street Car Line runs from Canal Street near the “Quarter” all he way out past Uptown, the Garden District and Magazine Street. When it gets to the end, the conductor simply turns all the seats around, goes to the other end of the car and off it goes in the other direction. For most of the way, the line goes down a grand oak-shaded boulevard with grass under the tracks and branches brushing the car’s top. The driver is loud and verbal, yelling out the names of streets and how “they’s lots of really stupid people, you know”.  One time he picked up a rider but said: “Don’t you dare think I’ll stop here again. Next time, you march yourself down to the next stop”. He was yelling, and they have to yell, because the trucks (yes, train car wheels are called trucks) are screeching and grinding into turns that thousands upon thousands of other wheels have rolled on, and the brass and hardwood construction isn’t what it used to be (but we think it’s better than it used to be). All the windows open fully, so you can hang  out and watch the stately homes going by – no guard rails, no ADA compliant, just great experiences without the Nanny State reeling you in.

And, to finish the story, the neighborhood street car dumps you in the French Quarter where you can buy a hand grenade to finish up with. It’s simply one of the great rides in America, and it’s only a buck and a quarter. Oh, and a hand grenade? It’s a frozen fruit slushy with pineapple and lime … and four shots of Everclear. Don’t know what Everclear is? It’s 185 proof pure grain alcohol, the French Quarter’s most powerful drink (outside of paint remover).

So that was the good news. The bad: It is just heart breaking to see Katrina’s footprint, the ruined and abandoned stately old houses in the Seventh and Ninth Wards. We camped in an RV park in the Seventh and each morning going into downtown on the shuttle we’d pass blocks of century-old smashed up homes, which is tragic, but I’d say 80% are now coming back to life. And they aren’t just replacing them with plastic sheetrock wonders you see across America, but they’re carefully putting the old ladies back together. Most of the old oaks are still here too, unlike my town of Port Townsend where they seem to hate an old tree. Here’s they’re treating the big trees like injured old-timers, which of course they are. “Hell of a job, Brownie” is the phrase that kept going through my head, that insane Bush statement that things were just dandy in the Big Easy after the hurricane passed. It might have been a big hurricane, but it was a man-made disaster because we didn’t maintain the levees properly.

If you get a chance, I’d recommend a little vacation to this amazing city on the Mississippi. It’s worth the effort to help retain a truly special place that belongs to all of us.

Larry Eifert

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

Anna’s Hummingbirds and the December Deep Freeze

This is an older painting of mine, and the rhododendrons certainly in bloom, but I felt compelled to write about this week’s freeze and the little birds in our meadow.

From coast to coast, I know we’ve all had amazing weather this past week. The southern storms drove a giant blast of Canadian air down and west over the Cascades, and here we’ve had record lows for a week. Temps haven’t gotten out of the twenties, with nights down into the lower teens, weather we just don’t ever get in Puget Sound. None of us have clothes for this stuff. And while we’ve all been suffering, that can’t be anything compared to what our two wintering-over Anna’s hummingbirds must be experiencing. For all my decades around the Northwest, I’ve never seen hummers here in winter, but last year we had one stay all season, and we’ve heard we’re not alone with this. We put out a feeder when we spotted him, but it wasn’t because of the sugar water that he was here, because we put it out AFTER we spotted him. This year we have an adult and a juvie, and we were ready with a feeder (and a 150w flood lamp on it 24 hours a day after the freeze hit). So far it’s working.

I wrote about hummers a few years ago, and learned that they have ways to cope with this cold stuff. They have normal body temps of about 105-108F, with a sitting heart rate of about 250 beats per minute. However, at night they sleep normally, or, they can go into a turbid state where they actually drop their body temp to between 30 and 65 degrees (depending on need), and drop their metabolic rate to one-fifteenth of normal. In this way, they can maybe make it through a very long night of 15 degrees.

Before nightfall, they make one extra smart move. They find and remember where breakfast is going to be. Then, in the morning it takes upwards of an hour to fully wake up before flying. This requires a huge energy drain on this thumb-sized bird, and if that feeder is frozen when it gets to it, the bird is in big trouble (like a car on empty that gets to the gas station and the pumps are locked).

Temperatures are warming up now, but we’ve felt a great privilege to keep tabs on these two intrepid birds this week. Snow and hummingbirds just don’t go together, but if this is a sign of Climate Change, I’m happy with it.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff. We’re still shipping Christmas puzzles.

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

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our emailings – or just ‘talk’ with us.

Comments are good. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

Riverside Red Alders

I’m still whacking away on the bristlecone painting for Crater Lake Institute, but here’s something I did yesterday just for the pleasure of it. If you click the image, it should enlarge. If not, just go to the blog. I have more of these, but my web server has been ‘migrating’, so the blog has been shut down this week. Just what ‘migrating’ means, I’m not sure, but I wish I was doing some of that myself. Avalanche warnings are up in the mountains already.

For those reading from other parts of the planet besides the Northwest, red alder is a common lowland tree found in moist Northwest stream-side forests. They often appear after logging to revitalize trashed-out land and conveniently add nitrogen to the soil by ‘fixing’ it from the air. Our woods are full of them, so I know the tree well. In fact, there’s currently a red-alder log in the fire as I write this. It’s a very beautiful tree to paint because of the gray and brown, speckled patchwork trunk patterns. There are other alders, but this one has a sure identifier. The edges of each leaf curl under slightly right along the edges – a little fact that most field guides don’t tell you.

This original acrylic painting is varnished on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.
The gold 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, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website – packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy’s currently doing on her blog and website. Pretty interesting stuff on the blog.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

Herring Balls

48 N September 09

Cover art and story – 48 North Magazine, September 2009. (48 North is the premier sailing magazine for the Pacific Northwest) This month features my painting of our little sloop, Sea Witch, sailing by downtown Port Townsend. They also featured my short story about herring balls.
Sorry if this is a long entry, but the story’s a good one and I’ve shortened it abit.

Sea-Witch-Herring-Ball
Fish Balls
by Larry Eifert

An amazingly nice afternoon! Get the sail covers off Sea Witch. Back her out. Head down the channel and out into Port Townsend Bay. Then, get the sails up, sheet’r home. And away we went to the north out into Admiralty Inlet, watching the freighters and navy ships tooing and frowing. A warm northwesterly wind was gently spilling out from the hills of Port Townsend and into the bay. It was tee-shit weather.

We hadn’t made it to the Mid Channel Bank when ahead we could see a great mass of moving birds. Actually, there were several masses of birds, all wheeling and spinning, diving and making a ruckus. “Herring balls” we both said at the same time as we nodded in unison. The birds were going crazy. About fifty glaucous-winged gulls were in each group, and more flying in as fast as they could from other areas nearby. Cormorants, rhino auklets, a few pigeon guillemots and even a bunch of mergansers were all bobbing about, diving, grabbing at others nearby and generally making a “happening” as I use to say 40 years ago. The gulls couldn’t dive very deeply, being very buoyant-birds, so they just gave it their best, plunging from about five feet into the water and grabbing at nothing. “Mine, mine, mine, mine!” they all yelled continuously. It was a riot, and as we approached, none of the birds seemed to care we were there. Then a slow, huge and powerful swirl of water nearby showed something else was going on below the surface. Unseen until now, a sea lion was there as well, circling up from below to concentrate the herring ball close to the surface. A 650 lb, 8 foot-long sea lion can make an impression on everyone, including tiny fish. It was intense – and this was just one of about six riots of wildlife within our view.
Pacific-Herring
Well, I knew what was going on, but maybe you don’t, so here’s what these big events were all about.

Pacific herring are little fish, and if you’re a little fish, you can gain odds for prolonging your life if you stick together. A bunch of little fish can become a very big fishy thing if you hang out together – think teenagers hanging out! One teenager – no big deal, but a half a million of them and you get Woodstock. That’s the herring teenager’s idea too, but there are lots of bigger critters out there trying to dine on them. There’s not a moment’s peace. And while sticking together can increase your odds of individual survival, it also announces to everyone where you’re hanging out.

Most Puget Sound herring spawn from late January to early April, depositing transparent sticky eggs on eelgrass and marine algae in shallow water, mostly in quiet bays and estuaries. Each female deposits between 20,000 and 40,000 eggs a year, and it’s these sheer numbers that insure the herring’s survival. These sticky eggs cling to eelgrass stems, and, after about 14 days, hatch into small transparent larvae about a half-inch long. The little critters are at the mercy of currents as they drift about, but the larvae that survive grow until after 3 months when they are about 1½” long, when they metamorphose into adult fish, eventually growing to become six to nine inches long. Think sardines in that square little can, but bigger. Most of us know Pacific herring from bait shop freezers, where we see them lined up in blue Styrofoam trays.

On the second or third year, herring normally return to their original spawning grounds. Unlike salmon, spawners don’t normally die but continue to spawn in successive years, although most don’t make it past five years of age. A few may live to the ripe old age of fifteen. However, it’s been estimated that, for every 10,000 herring eggs, ONE adult will live long enough to return to spawn, such is the level of predation on these little fish. In Puget Sound, we, as the dominate prey species, have decided that spawning herring make up 18 different “management stocks” (because we, as herders of the world’s critters need to count all this stuff so we know how much to “take”). In the past, herring have been caught for food, then caught and ground up for oil and pet food. Some of the eggs are used (in Canada) as high-end gourmet food for Asian markets. The reality of it is that the many seabirds, marine mammals and larger fish species have a greater need and eat these important little fish to help them survive. Fewer orcas these days? Well, it might be that a bunch of us dropped our anchors in those wonderfully quiet back bays where eel grass beds live, our 45lb Danforths tearing up the bay’s bottom and depriving herring of good quality habitat for them to lay their eggs. Or, more likely, shoreline trophy home owners have altered the spawning grounds off their front yards by adding elaborate stone walls and lawns that use chemicals that then run off into the nearby waters – killing the ecosystem they spent zillions of dollars to live next to. Fewer herring means less food for salmon, an important food for orcas. Fewer herring also means less food for orcas, too, which catch them the same way seals do. In Puget Sound, 60-70% of the herring are eaten by larger critters each year, and the numbers of herring is decreasing each year. Get the picture?

We watched the herring action for awhile longer as we sailed past, then headed over to the next ball of birds and fish. Out of that cloud of wheeling and screaming gulls, a lone rhinoceros auklet flew by at top speed holding a 3” flapping herring in its bill. You could almost imagine the bird’s thoughts of “I got mine, now I’m getting out of this party as fast as my little black wings can carry me.”
Rhino-Auklet
Well, so what? So what’s the big deal with watching a bunch of birds? To me, it’s a matter of the quality of life. Sure it was a pleasant day for a sail. The scenery was beautiful, the company wonderful, the experience memorable – but experiencing the herring balls made it much more. We had watched nature at a very close range, beyond the beach and parking lots, beyond the signs that say: Wildlife Viewing Area. Out here on the waters of Puget Sound, a daysail can turn into a real experience if you just look for it. Many sailors might have just sailed by, maybe only worried their sails might get a dab of bird doo on them. Some wouldn’t have even noticed, for it seems that many of us have diminished attentions these days to the natural world around us. We spend most of our lives chained indoors, watching nature on monitors or TVs, watching movies about penguin marches or watching others do what we once took for granted we’d do ourselves which is to seek outdoor experiences. Well, I’m telling you those experiences are still there, still waiting for us, and still exciting to see when we let them into our lives. I’d like to think that, with a good-old recession now altering our grandiose lifestyles a bit, we may begin to think about returning to the old ways of enjoying ourselves. Get outside, get in a boat, get your eyes open again and see a few things. You might find you like yourself more for these experiences.

If you want more of this stuff, you can click here to go to our index page of more published stories.

Check out 48-North magazine completely online.

Link here to the same story on our website, larryeifert.com.

If you’d like to see why I write about this ol’ boat of ours, here’s more about Sea Witch.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family – or just ‘talk’ with us.

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