Tag Archives: Port Townsend

New Painting Post

More Paintings of Our Black-tails

Last week I posted a painting of one of our backyard Columbian Black-tailed Deer. Remember: Apple Please? This week I’m showing two more. (Sorry, but the little fawn above was taken quickly and isn’t available.)  A year ago we had two does that birthed three fawns. There was another mom that showed up occasionally with twins too, and one afternoon they were all here at once: three moms with FIVE fawns! It was crowded, but everyone seemed to get along Okay – but what do we know. The more I watch them, the more I see the social life of these guys seems very complex.

 

This painting is of the dominant doe that’s been here for years – the mother of the fawn above.  She has this look! See the way she just pierces you with that blank stare? She’s checks out the house, circles around it to find out where we are – which room we’re in, then comes right up to one of our big windows where she gives us the ‘stink eye’ for a handout. No movement, no blinking, no acting coy or cute, she just stares until you give in. Cats do this, we know (boy, do we know), but a 160 lb deer doing it is something else again. And Nancy gives in pretty quickly: “okay, okay, meet me at the back door” and it’s as if the deer understands completely. Back door it is!

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on canvas, 9″ x 12″ and $140 unframed.

I have a nice gold frame on it for an upcoming  gallery show, which makes it a total of $160 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you want to take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

 

Thanks to everyone who have been buying my new Virginia Eifert Kindle books. Amazon doesn’t give me a list of buyers, but lots of people are rediscovering her work – including me. Three up, seventeen to go.

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

An Apple Please!

“Meadow Herd #2 – Second-year Buck”
8″ x 10″ acrylic on canvas. 

I’m currently working on a painting series of our “Meadow Herd” of 12 Columbian black-tailed deer – that’s right – 12! This one is of the sweet but persistent velvet-antlered buck that was birthed two years ago. He’s still here, along with a total of 11 others that seem to never stray far from the house. The other morning 9 were in the meadow at once. When we moved into the ‘Lodge’ back in the 90’s, hunting was still allowed in the ‘neighborhood’. The deer were here, too, but always moving, passing through, edgy. Early mornings, we’d sometimes hear gunshots down in the estuary and figure it was probably out-of-work ex-logger-types in a desperate situation and in need of protein for their families. Now there are no shooting zones here and in Port Townsend, and the deer are everywhere, calm, friendly, stopping traffic, creating gawking tourists who, at first, think they are mechanical yard ornaments (well, maybe they are).
Oh, and then there’s Nancy, happily feeding them apples, pears, buckets of oats mixed with molasses – right out the back door of the barn! The local feed store-guy told her that he sells dozens of 40 lb bags of the stuff each WEEK  to Port Townsend deer-feeders, and she’s one of them. What, you say? You’re FEEDING them? But she doesn’t see any difference between the chickadee feeder and a deer bowl – and I get models for paintings. (The photo below was taken a couple of days ago from the office window.)

 

It takes patience to live with wildlife on the Olympic Peninsula. We sometimes forget that this isn’t just a normal American suburban place – we forget that wildlife is more plentiful here than people. I mean, there are only 9,000 people living in Port Townsend – but there are over 5,000 elk on the peninsula.

 

We have bats in the shingles (I washed the roof and 7 flew off of just one pitch) and we hear them come and go each night. Squirrels continually prob any weak spot to get into the attic or crawlspace. I’ve counted almost 90 different species of birds and critters either on the ground or flying over the property. If you count the deer, snakes, chipmunks, weasels, bobcats, raccoon and the rest, I’m sure I see many more critters than people in my daily life – and for a life-long painter of nature, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Sure the roses get eaten, the bulbs are chewed on, the flowers chomped down to nubs, but we also have 200-lb. deer going nose-to-nose with our freaked-out cat on the inside of the window. It takes Nancy’s breath away when a full-blown bucks just stands there as she brings him a bucket of oats – as he snorts at her from 24″ away. It’s a very high Quality-of-Life thing that I can’t imagine NOT having.

And so, this ORIGINAL painting of “Meadow Herd #2 – Second-year Buck” is an acrylic on canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $125 unframed. The custom wood frame makes it a total of $145 and shipping for either adds just a bit more depending on your zone. This is the original painting, NOT a print. And I’ll bet that one of you starts a collection of these – especially if you’re from Port Townsend. I have four finished with a fifth almost there.
Email us for details – and I can send you a photo of the frame.

 

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. We now have three of her books available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

48 North Magazine Cover for November

 I write a monthly feature page for this magazine, 48-North, and occasionally they put one of my paintings on the cover. This month they have my sketchbook story about moon snails and the cover painting is of our 1940 classic wooden Monk sloop, Sea Witch. Wow! While we sold the boat to a Canadian couple two years ago, I still have vast and fond memories of this craft, and of the four big boats we’ve owned, for me Sea Witch was the best – a perfect boat. This painting is called “Otters on the Dock” and when I painted it, I offered it up as a totem to the two river otters that would occasionally pay us a visit and poop all over the cockpit and bright work with stuff that is too awful to even think about. I thought that maybe if I payed homage to these two, they’d cut it out. No such luck.

As I go down memory lane right now, 30′ Sea Witch is a pretty famous boat in the Northwest, having been used as a floating adventure for not just Nancy and I, but also Jo Bailey, who for decades used the boat to write countless cruising stories and several books. Also in the painting are my summer dockside geraniums. There’s a sweet wooden sloop without an engine that my neighbors would sail in and out of the slip with only an oar to stop them. Sparkle in the back that was by far the fastest wooden sailboat boat in town, and the Portside Deli (a fine place for lunch or afternoon coffee). But marinas evolve, and today the only subjects of my painting left in place are the engineless sloop and the otters. And I’m not sure about the otters.

Here’s a photo of Sea Witch at her launch in 1940 in Seattle, sent by Pete VanAtta, son of the gal christianing the boat. She was the daughter of the builder standing in the back.  These old boats seem to create extended families.

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

A New Monthly Series for 48-North

If you’ve read my recent posts, you recognize this style of art and the layout. I think it’s how art, nature, humanity evolves – we all borrow from each other, or even ourselves.

I recently developed some sketchbook pages for a project in the Schulman Grove of bristlecones near Bishop, Ca. I showed them on this blog here and here , but it was the Forest Service’s kind words about the style, content and design that got me thinking that this might work well in a publication – like a magazine.  So, of all the many stories, articles and books I’ve published, my connections with 48-North, the Northwest’s largest sailing magazine has been the most fun. I’ve written for them for years, and so I banged on Rich the editor, door and asked if he’s like to give me a full page once a month for my little sketchbook idea. Above is the first effort coming up for the July iisue. For June’s online issue (my otters will be in July), click here. 

As I was casting around for my first month’s subject, I was in Port Townsend standing at the front door of Gallery Nine, the gallery that both Nancy and I show in. Tourists were coming and going, delivery trucks were bringing wine to the next door wine store, UPS truck was parked in mid-lane – and here comes a big river otter meandering right by us. They’re pretty common down there since Water Street is only a few hundred feet from the ocean, but seeing a 30 lb, 4-ft long adult river otter dodging cars always gets your attention. A couple of tourists were plain flabbergasted. So, I realized that’s what the first sketchbook had to be about, and I learned a lot about those interesting critters.

Cheesecake Desert: And speaking of critters, here are two of the three new kids in our meadow next to the cherry tree, taken by Nancy from the dining room window.

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 Old-growth of Fort Townsend State Park

 

This should enlarge with a click. Please do so as there are lots of details.

Just a mile or so from our studio is one of the rarest of all Northwest places – a lowland old-growth forest. It’s quite a park, and for Nancy and me, just walking the road into this place is often almost spiritual. Here in Port Townsend, we’re on the dry side of the Olympics so these trees aren’t huge like rainforest giants, but there’s an open and ancient feel here that always gets my heart going. Giant glacial boulders dot the forest. Signs of old wildfires are evident. We watch pileated woodpeckers hammer out old snags. Cougar warning signs abound. For about 8,000 years or since the last ice melted, this place has been left to itself. Even when there was a small military garrison here, the only trees cut were a few for firewood.

So, while thousands of miles of forests, our heritage, have been whacked away and the land irreputably ruined, this place has what few lowland forests have these days – some very, very rare plants. All those weird and odd plants that line the painting’s foreground are saprotrophic fungi, plants that don’t produce their own food but instead borrow it from the trees. You won’t see them in cut-over forests – if the forest goes, so goes most of the other stuff like gnome plant, sugar stick and pinedrops. Even calypso orchids won’t reappear. I won’t go into it more here, but I consider this forest to be something of a sacred place, a place much like a world-class museum that holds our most meaningful treasures – our  heritage. These great forests won’t return ever again while humans are here, and so along with the few other scattered lowland patches of old-growth, this is IT!

Somehow the very active local friends group for the park, The Washington State Plant Society, came up with some funding for me to paint a mural for an exhibit at the park. Seriously, I can’t imagine anything more fun for me to do than paint this exceptional forest. I mean this is like a gift, a chance to actually paint my own backyard. It just doesn’t get any better than this. Here’s a picture by Nancy of the ol’ guy at the easel, half way through this effort. Was he dragging his feet? Well, maybe! 

Thanks Ann and Nancy of the friends group, this was just plain fun.

And as usual, 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

Yellow Rowboat

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

A classic double-seat rowboat with a wineglass stern of the Whitehall design, this is one of many similar boats at Lake Union’s Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle. I just love the two blue paint swipes on the oars – the only paint anywhere on the boat, and masked off to hit the water at just the right angle when someone is rowing with them.

For me, it’s a painterly study of reflections and bounced light, the subtle way varnished wood both brightens wood color, and reflects the glow of sky light. If you know me, you understand I think of these historic craft as sculpture, the perfect union of form and function. There’s nothing frilly on this boat at all, and every piece of wood is there for a purpose that’s been worked out through trial-and-error. Yet there isn’t a single thing that was put on to make it more beautiful for the sake of beauty. It doesn’t need it. Even the cotton (not synthetic) string holding the asymmetrical oarlocks to the boat has a graceful arch. Some say art should be thought-provoking and culturally relevant of today’s society. I’d say this is just that, showing how far we’ve fallen from the desire to create functional beauty – but don’t get me started about today’s constant mantra of cheaper-is-better.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on board, 14″ x 20″. The custom gold frame with linen liner has a second inside gold edging that measures at 18″ x 24″ on the outside.
Including the gold frame as you see it here, Yellow Rowboats is offered for $690. Shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone. 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. Her sea otters are hot. She had a feature color front page story and inside as well this week in the Olympic Peninsula’s Peninsula Daily News.

New Painting Post

Low Tide

Low Tide Clouds

After all the past big mural posts, this week it’s a simple painting. I love constructing small stories into paintings, especially these little calm inlets of saltwater around the Northwest. If you read this blog, you’ll see these fairly often. Not much tells a story here except the reflections of the hillside conifers and the high bank in sunlight, yet there’s a lot crammed into this, but, then again, not really. Northwest glacial rubble, firs and hemlock on the shore, partly cloudy, shallow clouds with blue sky breaking through. Minus tide. Logs on the far beach, not much kelp on the rocks so it must be winter. That’s it – a story painted into a 9″ x 12″ rectangle.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9″ x 12″.
A custom wood frame makes it a total of $330 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

Low Water at Point Wilson

Low-Water-at-Point-Wilson

This is, I think, one of the most intriguing places here in our little town of Port Townsend, and I’ve painted it often. Every container ship, submarine, aircraft carrier, sailboat or killer whale going into Puget Sound has to go right by here, and at low tide it’s a pretty dramatic and busy place. On a recent walk, we were here on a minus tide, just before the big rush of water began that would completely submerge this spot, so I spent a few minutes of peace and quite, unusual without waves or noise -just a perfect moment to compose a painting.

I get LOTS of comments on this blog about my painting process. Do I paint on location (well, certainly not when it’s 45 degrees), do I work from a photo (it’s just a basic starting point, like a sketch where I can remember details)? So here’s the reference photo I took with my phone-camera. An interesting transformation from photo to painting, don’t you think? Where’d the kelp go? Well, after working with it on the sketch, I realized kelp was completely unnecessary and made the rocks look like mush. Better to focus on the luminousity of the water instead. I say, learn to spot a locked door and climb in a window instead!

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on hardboard, 22″ x 28″ and $700 unframed.
We have some good frames for this one, but it’s a big enough painting that we’ll figure that out when you buy it. It’s going into a show at Gallery Nine, so if you’d like it, better jump quickly. Not that I’m bragging, but the last one went in 20 minutes and there were five who wanted it. This is the original painting, NOT a print and it’s being sold without the gallery commission. There will soon be prints of this on the website for our normal prices – here’s an example of another one).
Email us for details if you’re interested.

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’s just posted a blog about the new sea otter pup at the Seattle Aquarium. Amazing.

New Painting Post

A Brown Pelican – Really?

Brown pelican in the Boat Haven!

Thanks to DDT, by 1970 the California brown pelican was almost gone from the West Coast of the United States. Even today, these great fishermen with a wingspan of 6.5 feet only nest on the Channel Islands off Los Angeles. Sometimes, but not often, a few migrate northward during the late summer.

So, imagine my amazement when Nancy spotted one here in Port Townsend in the middle of January – and while it was snowing to boot. There he was, down in the marina right under the fish boat dock awaiting the next toss-out of not-so-good fish. And he probably wasn’t cold either, as the water this time of year is a full 20 degrees warmer than the air.

So, like the journalist that I am, here’s a little painting of Port Townsend’s wintering brown pelican. My hat’s off to him! And my hat’s off to Rachel Carson, an old family friend who stood up to the chemical industry over 50 years ago so this bird could eventually make its way to Port  Townsend in January, 2012.

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on paper, 7″ x 10″ and $85 unframed.

A nice custom frame with a double mat and glass makes it a total of $110 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

Autumn – Still Hanging On

 

Merry Christmas – but where’s winter? Here in the Northwest, as well as along most of the West Coast, we’ve had the driest December on record. Winter just doesn’t seem like it wants to get started. Days have been warm and sunny, nights clear and cool. Sure, it’s not summer when during June you can read a book outdoors until almost 10pm when there are 16 hours of daylight on the Olympic Peninsula – but this is just fine.

I find it just awful for painting landscapes during summer around here. Dramatic light is simply non-existent – sunset lasts about a minute and a half, tops. Sunny, then, wham, it’s dark. But Fall and Winter, now we’re talking. These days it seems like the sun goes on setting for hours and we only get 8 1/2 hours of sunlight each day. I’m not complaining, because finally I have something dramatic and interesting to paint – and it doesn’t take much of a scene to make a light-filled image just bursting with color. Luminous!

Sorry, this painting is not for sale, but we do have custom 8-color prints available either matted or framed in a variety of sizes.
Email us for details and we’ll fill you in.

Thanks for reading this week, and Enjoy Christmas or whatever you’re celabrating – and get outside for a walk.
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.