Tag Archives: Salmon Recovery

National Park Service, New Painting Post, People Paintings, Waysides

Lewis and Clark National Park – Installation

This is a long post, lots of photos, but I wanted to document this. In 2019, I was commissioned to do a series of paintings for the Dismal Nitch unit of Lewis and Clark National Park at the mouth of the Columbia River. Astoria is just across the river, the huge Megler Bridge is just to the west.  We were recently there and I took some photos of the installation, along with a big bronze sculpture that’s there as well.

This is the spot where the Corps of Discovery, fighting a stormy southerly with huge waves and rain, hunkered down for days. Aptly named, Dismal Nitch, it really is just that, a little nitch in the cliffs. Giant logs were banging together, they were almost out of food, soaked and cold. Their quest, the Pacific Ocean was almost in view, but here they were fighting for their lives.

This is an important place in America’s history, just before Lewis and Clark connected our country together, east and west, in early November of 1805.

Just prior to me in 2008, artists Gareth Curtiss and Bill Clearman installed this 6′ x 4′ bronze at the site, and I fell gratified to have my stuff in the same location. It’s a stunning bit of lost wax casting. My part of this was the design and illustrations of the wayside. Giving credit also to Rosene Creative from Georgia handled the top end of it, Faye Goolrick of Atlanta did the text and Eric Kittelberger from Cleveland did the final maps. It’s how these projects go, a nationwide effort.

To make this project even sweeter to me, in 1963, my mom published a book about Lewis and Clark and The Corp or Discovery for Dodd Mead in New York, 1962. It’s the story of the Corps and all the wildlife and botany they discovered – almost daily – on their three-year journey. And here I was, a half-century later, painting the same story.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com.

Larry Eifert

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New Painting Post

Dugualla Bay Preserve

Last week I posted the other wayside panel for Dugualla Bay Preserve. This second one shows the dike removed to allow saltwater to refill the old shoreline and provide forage fish and salmon new habitat. The photo below is the ‘cut’ and then below that my reference photos to the crab and mussel habitat, newly formed tidelands full of life.

We found many little crabs in these holes, all snuggled up and giving us the stink-eye.

And below in the main channel, the NEW channel created by breaching the dike, a major mussel bed teaming with life had developed. As soon as I saw this area, I realized THIS was the story for the art – new places for life where there weren’t just a year before.


Here’s the process of developing this panel. I started with a really rough concept sketch, a few blocks with ‘x’s showing where the text overlay might go. It was fairly close to the final design, right out of the box. From this rough draft, you can see the process.

And the final art featured the mussel beds, crab caves and broken dike. A good story.

Thanks to many groups and individuals, I’ve had the wonderful adventure of doing dozens of these Pacific Northwest salmon and orca recovery panels over the past couple of years. Always challenging, always different, it’s been great fun to take a muddy shoreline or messed up culvert and make some art about it. Stay tuned, there’s more on the horizon – a LOT more.

Thanks for reading this week.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings

Commissioned paintings, Murals, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

Smith Island Estuary painting

All these images should enlarge in our browser, so please click to see the details.

Making Art – Part of Salmon Restoration

While the words are only in placeholder form, I wanted to show off this new painting. It’s going to be installed as a public wayside exhibit at the Smith Island Restoration Project on the Snohomish River Estuary, north of Seattle. This project has been going of for years, heavy equipment removing old dikes, building others and generally restoring a vast area of junk yards and farmlands to wetlands so that it becomes salmon habitat. It cost over a billion dollars and I’m proud to have been involved in a tiny way with my painting.

Here’s how it started on this painting. I had photo references that showed me how it looks at low tide. They gave me much latitude on my design and how it looks and feels, so I made it more of a dramatic sunset image. Below is how a corner of the place actually looks, a brackish slough, perfect for young salmon. I made some basic sketches and just started painting. I imagined a mid-tide level so I could show the fish.

Smith Island Slough

You’ll notice the great-blue heron on the left suddenly got bigger as it gained a more important place in the story.

Closeup scans of the left and right sides show the level of detail.

Below, I’m closing in on the final painting before I added the insets and text blocks.

The final installation will be 48″ x 24″. I pleased that people will be looking at this for decades as the place grows into itself again. A few years ago it was a landscape that’s unrecognizable now. I remember part of it was a junkyard and tire dump that caught fire awhile ago, burning for weeks. I could see the smoke miles away. The absolutely lowest level of what we can do to wreck a natural place – it’s no wonder salmon are in trouble. Now, there are salmon and herons, kingfishers and Nootka roses in bloom (or soon will be).

Thanks for this commission go to Snohomish County, WA and Gretchen Glaub who worked with me to make it happen.

Thanks for reading this week. You can sign up for emails for these posts on my website at larryeifert.com, down the right side of the home page.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

Waysides, Wildlife

Orca Recovery – Pigeon Creek

I’m now painting a bunch of art for 5 new wayside panels to be installed around  Puget Sound. Recently, Washington State decided to help the remaining 80-some iconic Southern Pod in a big way, and a tiny part of that effort is going to me for some wayside panel art for outreach at some of the locations. Rain gardens and stream restoration – and my art telling about it. I’m happy and proud to be involved.

The Southern Resident orcas – or killer whales, are a large extended family, actually a clan, comprised of three pods hereabouts. Within each pod, families form into sub-pods centered around older females, usually grandmothers or great-grandmothers – I like this structuring a lot – we could learn a few things here. They live in Puget Sound and the Salish Sea in Washington State and British Columbia and primarily eat salmon, that are also in dire straits. I’m not new to painting orca or salmon as I just finished a bunch of others at Lime Kiln Point in the San Juan Islands, so this was an easy transition.

Above is the first panel almost finished. Pigeon Creek is in Everett, Washington and the water comes from urban neighborhoods and flows down into this green lush valley where the forest slows and purifies the water before it hits the bay. People think it’s just a place to walk their dogs, but this shows it’s more, a strainer for pollutants heading for orcas and salmon.

Here are the sketches, concept first. Then below is the enhanced version showing details. It’s actually fairly true to the final art.

It’s a pretty messy riparian forest, but I made a painting out of it anyway – including Bob who showed me around on a very rainy day. I got what I needed, as you can see up top – and even put in this little bridge. I’ll show more of these panels soon.

Thanks for reading this week. Now, get out there and take a hike in your nearby forest – and tell them I sent you.

Larry Eifert

Here’s my Facebook fan page. I post lots of other stuff there.

And Instagram is here.

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

Nancy’s web portfolio of stunning photography and paintings

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.