Tag Archives: San Juan Islands

Interpretive Art, Nature Art, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

MacKay Landing – Lopez Island

This is one of three paintings for MacKaye Landing on Lopez Island – in the San Juan Islands of Washington State. It’s another restoration project to enhance altered shorelines and make them healthier for forage fish, salmon’s main food source. I THINK, these three a total of 38 waysides in the San Juan Islands, a place I called a summer home in the 1980’s, so they all have good meaning for me.

They were commissioned by the County, another project like the Orcas Landing panels a few years ago. Katie and Frankie wrangled me into submission (in good ways) to produce these. I’ll show the others in the next post.

This photo below is from the boat ramp area where the panels will go, a peaceful and beautiful place, Canada’s Vancouver Island in the far distance, the Cattle Point Lighthouse just peeking out – where I have two murals (one is the 37′ Indian wall). This is a prime launch for kayakers and fishermen aiming for the archipelago of islands near Cattle Pass. A truly beautiful place.

As I was deciding what this habitat panel would look like, I happened to view a YouTube video of two Canadians doing a kayak trip here, with lots of underwater photography showing the amazing variety of aquatic life along these south-facing rocks, which I love to paint – so it was easy to focus on that. Below is the concept sketch I made just after watching that video.

I anchored here several times in the 1980’s, and as I remember, it was a rolling anchorage with swells coming in at 90 degrees from the boat’s angle – not good for sleeping. And here I am, back with some art that will live here for decades – and be seen long after I’m gone – my favorite public art. For me, it’s a small world in hopefully a long life of art – and I’m just trying to remain relevant while I’m still here.

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, New Painting Post, Sailing, Waysides, Wildlife

Orcas Landing Waysides – San Juan Islands

This was the Orcas Landing in the San Juan Islands of Washington State a couple of years ago, cleaned up from when there were giant fuel tanks here. In the 1980’s I tied up at this dock, and did it again with another boat in the 1990’s. Now the tanks are gone, a new dock that’s not falling apart is there and, some of my art.

I received some photos of the final installation and it looks very good, so I thought I’d share it here. It took three years to get this figured out, but my part was just a small piece of it. If you’re waiting in line for the ferry, just walk down the ramp and enjoy the view.

I did two wayside panels here. One about the rich aquatic ecosystem right under the docks – a landscape few of us ever see.

And a panel about the tribal connections here.  For hundreds of years, the Tulalip tribe would use their canoes with a complicated cedar fiber net system to create an artificial reef to trap salmon. Reef fishing, it was called. Back in the 80’s, I saw some of this actually happening and I’ll bet I’m probably the only artist around that could paint reef fishing from memory. For the bottom part, I used artifact photos from the Burke Museum as references for the tools, and a photo of the planking of our own cedar-sided house as a background. I thought it worked pretty well to tell a complicated story. These two images enlarge if you click on them.

San Juan County removed the wooden decking, added seating and new metal and cement decking, a huge tribal mural painted on the nearby building and some really wonderful iron blacksmithing of bull kelp.

In my mind, this is exactly how public art should be approached. Not ‘art by committee’ where a group selects some strange design by low-bid, but working it out with a broad number of skilled individuals coming together to contribute what they each do best. Check out the seating and native plant garden. I’m proud to have been a part of this, and it sort of comes full-circle for me and my history here.

And here’s a story in the local paper on Orcas Island.

A new experience, three years in the making, awaits you at the ferry landing

This makes a grand total of 24 paintings now installed on Orcas Island as public art. I get around!

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.

Murals, Wildlife

Moran State Park – Orcas Island

Please click the image so it enlarges in your browser. The painting is 12 feet wide, the deer life-sized, so it’ll take a bigger screen than your phone to see it.

This is soon to be installed at Moran State Park on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands of Puget Sound. It’s going to be high atop Mount Constitution, almost 2400 feet above the sea level. A new visitor center there will feature this large set of paintings as the main exhibit. I painted the background, all the art in the circles and deer separately. It’s all being fabricated in high-pressure laminate so it’s tourist-proof. EDX, the fine exhibit company I work with in Seattle did the design, text and all the rest for Washington State Parks, and Beth Gibson at EDX handled me – never an easy thing.

With this installation, I’ll soon have 18 exhibit paintings on or near Orcas Island. Another five are on San Juan Island next door, and two are soon to be installed on Sucia Island, a remote offshore park just to the north – wayside panels about salmon recovery. I’m thrilled with all this, because I spent much of the 1980’s living aboard my little boat right here and know the place well. It’s like I’m giving back for some very fine life experiences I had in that area, and especially Sucia Island, a really special place.

The strange deer! Because of the isolation of Orcas Island, the Columbian Black-tailed Deer that live there have a closed genetic pool (it’s an island), and so have evolved into what’s called a pie-bald form. These deer feature odd unpigmented skin areas, white skin and fur, but they are also smaller and somewhat oddly shaped. It wasn’t an easy subject to paint, but this little guy will be life-sized in the final installation. I took the most interesting features of several and stuck them together.

Spread across the background of Mount Constitution are a dozen smaller circle paintings with the real interpretation, stories about the geology, orca whales, forests and marshes. These had to be interesting paintings but not too complex as to be confusing. This one is about the mountain ‘balds’, areas of open prairie, gacial boulders and few trees.

All this was great fun for me. I love the challenge of painting big walls with lots of details all having various stories packed into one wall.

Plan a trip to Orcas next summer and see it for yourselves. Say hi to the piebald deer. 

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.

New Painting Post

Orcas Ferry Dock art – A Rich and Vibrant Home

This is only the first draft of the layout, but the painting is almost there. The San Juan Islands, full of life. A bit of tightening up, fiddling about and sweeping the corners – the usual stuff and it’s ready to go. I tried to make the viewer sense the relative bland wildlife offering above the water’s surface – and compare it with the lush and complex nature below the ocean’s surface, a place teaming with life. Lots of words to paint around, but I still think it tells the story pretty well with the painting.

And here’s the draft sketch from a few months ago. This text was written by the San Juan Islands Marine Resources Committee and commissioned by San Juan County. It’s part of the bigger project I’m working on for the Orcas Landing Ferry Dock. More on this soon as it progresses.

Not many posts are coming from me this summer. It’s not that I’ve been out hiking (I have), it’s that I’ve just finished 17 (yes, seventeen) paintings!! for a park in Georgia. Here’s a sample. Not your normal Eifert effort of focusing on nature, agree? I’ll post all of these as soon as they’re put together.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Here’s the blog on the web. And 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 here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

Uncategorized

Clark Island and Mount Baker

I ran across this unfinished watercolor in my studio. Clark Island is one of the more remote places in the San Juan Islands, about 40 miles north of here. Very few people ever stop here, but I sure have. Boaters all seem more interested in getting to the bars in Friday Harbor or Roche, or the beaches on Sucia Island. Nancy calls it the herding instinct.

So, I was anchored here in our little boat, just around the corner to the left, and went ashore to do this painting – it was maybe five years ago. As I sat there, I remember a single wasp landing on the water glass. And then another. And then a whole family – and then some. Well, time to leave, which I did at a somewhat rapid pace after dumping over the water with my shoe. I figured it was the fresh water they were going after. Fresh water’s actually a pretty rare commodity here on these rocky islets, and in summer it doesn’t often rain. That was enough for me to just say to myself that I’d finish this thing later.

And so I just did! Pretty fun, like I was back there again enjoying this quiet little anchorage with the wasps and a very big view of Mount Baker. And if someone asks, as they sometimes do, “just how long did it take to do this painting” I can honestly say “oh, about five years”.

This ORIGINAL painting is old watercolor and new ink on Arches paper, 10″ x 14″ and $239 unframed. (that works out to be something like $50 a year, or about $4 per month. Typical artist wages!
A nice mahogany frame that’s double-matted 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 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.