Tag Archives: San Juan Island National Historical Park

Commissioned paintings, Murals, National Park Service, People Paintings, Wildlife

Installation Photos San Juan Island murals

Panorama of my 35′ x 17′ tribal wall. Possibly the biggest painting in the Pacific Northwest about prehistoric Indian life before European contact.

While the furniture and other exhibits aren’t installed yet by the good folks at Capitol Museum Services from Manassas, VA, I received these photos from the Park Superintendent, Elexis Fredy, and they’re good enough to pass around. This is at American Camp, San Juan Island National Historical Park in Washington State. Thanks, Lexi, for sending these. I thought I’d show them here because I rarely get to show actual installation shots of the process. I paint this stuff, go home and start the next one.  I know, you’ve seen these paintings before on my blog, but not in the actual space they were designed for. The back wall is 35 feet across, 17 feet high, the prairie mural is 7 feet across. My part of this is finished, and I’m currently working through 35 new paintings for other parks.

This secondary mural is 7 feet wide and shows today’s prairie, which is most of American Camp’s landscape. It will have a reader rail with an additional 5 paintings of mine along the bottom.  

I painted my first visitor center exhibit 60 years ago! Not a typo. It wasn’t exactly good, but it was my start, and later I figured I’d not improve much if I went to art school and learned to paint like everyone else – so instead, I just got to work. It’s been a long and most interesting path, to put it mildly. It used to be that I’d travel to the site, get a room to live in or camp, and start painting. Sometimes it’d take weeks, a couple of projects took more than a month. The food was generally awful, and it wasn’t easy, living out of a suitcase. One, a huge project in the Denver International Airport, meant I had to clear security each day, have ALL the materials xrayed, get crazy badges and walk to work going beneath 747’s that had just landed from Germany.

Today, this has all evolved to a much more civilized process. I get to paint in my studio at a smaller size, send a digital file that is then printed on vinyl and actually looks better than the original. The installation in this new building will show off my stuff for many decades, probably upwards of a half a century and be seen by people long after I’m gone. If the place burns to the ground thanks to domestic terrorists, they’ll just put up a new version in the new building (hear that, Bundy Clan). If someone throws acid on it, they can just change out a panel instead of the entire wall.

And here’s the installation crew getting things ready. Better them than me, I’ll say that without hesitation.

A little back story on the art. In 2020, I was commissioned by EDX Exhibits in Seattle to design this wall, and the only real guidelines given were that it should show the real location at South Beach on San Juan Island. I lived on my boat in the 80’s near here, so I already knew the place – and that was of great help). I set the scene of a summer tribal salmon camp, where for centuries families would come to fish and dry salmon – and pick and process camas bulbs that were the two main staples of their diet. It’s a pre-contact scene without iron or steel tools, so it might be any moment in time between 8,000 years ago to about 1700 A.D.

How Did The Process Start?

It was great fun for me to research this, and I’m thankful they gave me almost complete freedom to do what I wanted. It took dozens of site photos, Google Earth views and every Edward Curtis photo I could find to do this. The web has many helpful photos, but some were completely unreliable. The park and tribes checked accuracies of hundreds of details, but not the overall design of people working and meeting on the prairie where the park is today. For example, they had Wool Dogs, a now-extinct breed of canine that were both pets, babysitters and wool sources they trimmed clothing with. There are several in the painting.

The visitor center will open at the end of June 2022 – come out and see it.

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

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.

Commissioned paintings, National Park Service, New Painting Post, People Paintings

Wrapping Up My American Camp mural

This photo was sent by Margy Emerson of her sister next to the installation.

Getting close to the final brushstroke on this 35-foot wall for the San Juan National Historical Park visitor center mural. How does a painter know when it’s the final brush stroke? When he can’t stand to make another one! (or so the old saying goes.) This wall was probably more brush strokes that I would have liked, but the entire process was interesting, challenging and really fun. I can’t help but feel grateful for the opportunity.

Here are some section shots that should enlarge in your browser so you can see it better. I think there are around 105 Indians, 18 gulls, 3 eagles and 2 wool dogs. Those wool dogs are an extinct species of dogs tribal weavers would use for wool, and I have one of them spinning with a drop spindle.

The scene is at South Beach, San Juan Island, Washington, a place that is now a national historic park. Historically, It’s a park because of the Pig War in 1859 between the U.S. and Britain. In reality, the “history” is more about the giant salmon runs in late summer, when millions of fish coming down the Strait of Juan de Fuca would crowd the shoreline. For thousands of years, many different tribes would show up here to catch and dry a few of these fish, and also dig camas bulbs, and catch up on the news. Both the salmon and camas flour were important winter foods.

The painting is supposed to show pre-European contact, so no iron, steel, or woven cotton fabric. It was fun to research all this, but it’s also why I enjoy making art so much for the National Park Service. We both feel art is a good way to show our legacy, our history and future (see the current generation and future generation down in the right corner). The NPS seriously pushes me to paint beyond what I’ve ever thought I’d paint. This project made me realize how grateful I am for taking physics and algebra in high school!

Here’s a photo of my studio with part of this being painted. See those reference photos down along the bottom? Nancy was my model for almost every one of the people.

Below is the visitor center wall this is going on. It’ll be installed by early summer if we’re all lucky, along with another 11 paintings from me, and all the other exhibits. Capitol Museum Services from Manassas Virginia is doing the installation.

The outside of the new visitor center with Nancy in front and a truly amazing Douglas-fir that they basically built the building around. Most commercial projects would have just bulldozed the tree, cleared the land and then planted little Mall-Ready trees, but not the NPS!

And the last two photos are the location of the painting a quarter mile from the visitor center. It’s actually a couple of square miles of landscape all pushed together into one painting, add people, voila!

When I was growing up, the kid of two people who worked for the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, Illinois, I would go down to the museum after school. My babysitters were the curators who were building giant habitat exhibits much like this new wall mural. Most of the exhibits were about nature, but a couple were of Indian life. Robert Larson, a famed painter in charge of this (and a big man who didn’t need a ladder to paint the sky) would talk to me as he worked about what he was doing. I was always a little kid with his mouth open in awe. That was 60 years ago! I know Bob would have enjoyed this, wanted to be a part of it. His kindness and friendship, along with all the rest of those wonderful people in the museum’s back end, are still a factor in my life.

Here’s a photo of Larson doing a plaque of my mom after her death. It’s in the Virginia Eifert Book Store in the museum. And below, one of his big Indian paintings at the museum.

Robert Larson paints the Archaic diorama in the ÒPeoples of the PastÓ exhibit. Photo courtesy Illinois State Museum

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.

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.

Commissioned paintings, National Park Service, People Paintings

American Camp mural progress report

One man with a brush! One brush stroke at a time! (these blow up in your browser to see details)

Personally, I think there must be an easier way to pass the time in my 70’s, but here I am none-the-less – cranking away on a super-complex wall mural in my studio.  I’d  have to say this project sure is fun and a real challenge, and keeps my brain about as sharp as it can be.  I’m just glad I took physics and higher math in high school.

This is being painted half-size for a 35′-wide x 17′ tall wall in the new visitor center at the San Juan Island National Historical Park near Friday Harbor, Washington. Same project, I  finished the first one, a big prairie ecosystem painting. This is a bigger thing by far. This is the entire side wall of the building, and has all sorts of stuff complicating things, wall plugs, fire alarms, a door, a reader rail with tribal artifacts – makes me dizzy just trying to work it out.

What’s Going On?

This scene shows the summer gathering on the prairies at South Beach and Salmon Banks in the San Juan Islands, where many tribes would gather in late summer to fish and dry salmon, dig and roast camas bulbs and lay in winter stores.  The buildings were temporary. This went on for thousands of years and so the painting is set in a pre-iron, pre colonization time, maybe 500 years ago. So far, Nancy has been the model for almost all the people. I think there are about 30 of them. Some facial features I found online in the Curtis photo library, some I took from modern tribal gathering photos but just slimmed everyone down. This was also pre-refined sugar and wheat times.

So how is this installed?

I’ll do the sky as a separate painting using a car paint sprayer, scan and photograph all of it, piece it together into on giant digital file. Then Capitol Museum Services in Manassas, Virginia will put it on vinyl and up it goes (thankfully, I don’t have to do that part).  I’m just the guy with the paintbrush.

More soon. Stay tuned. Feel free to pass this around. People seem to like seeing my process.

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

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.