Tag Archives: Washington State Parks

New Painting Post, Sailing, Washington State Parks, Waysides, Wildlife

Sucia Island State Park wayside art

I’ve been busy with no time to post here – but now I’m back with some new stuff. I was commissioned to produce two outdoor free-standing installations on one of the most remote and remarkable islands in the Salish Sea, Sucia Island Marine State Park. This place holds great meaning and many memories for me – I’ve been here countless times. It’s along the US – Canadian boundary north of the San Juan Islands and it takes some time just to get there. There isn’t ferry service, only private boats come here – and maybe a giant barge for this project.

A small muddy bay once had a sand spit beach dividing off a productive and pristine salt marsh with the bay. Years ago, a road was built on the beach top and shoreline armoring with a culvert. This stopped salmon completely from entering the marsh at high tides, a good source of insect food.

With the direction of the Friends of the San Juans and many funders, they brought out heavy equipment on a barge and removed the culvert, cement armoring and put things right again. And, at the end, I got to paint it, twice. I’ll post the second panel soon.

Here’s the original first draft sketch – pretty close to what the end result was, don’t you think?  And below is the final sketch version with text in place and a few things added.

Below is the final art, ready to be put in the design. If this image looks serene, that’s the exact word I’d use for this ethereal place – maybe one of the very best in the Pacific Northwest.

So, doing this made  me remember the history I have here. Many paintings of mine were painted here. THREE boats of mine have been purchased, restored, countless hours spent making them run and be safe – and decades of time has been used to get me (as a painter of nature) to places like this. When Shannon and Tina requested a couple of boats in this painting to show human interaction here, I realized I could put my own experiences in the painting.

So, classic wooden boat memories, all of them, here is “October” in the 1980’s. Then “Rumpuckarori” in the 1990’s. And finally “Sea Witch” in the 2000’s.

This image of Sea Witch, below, was actually taken at anchor right here in Snoring Bay, straight out front in the painting. These three boats undoubtedly helped make me the painter and person I am today. “October” got me to Alaska the first time, and another not shown got me to Mexico. Nancy and I lived aboard “Rumpy” during some of the best times for both of us, and there Nancy is in the cockpit of “Sea Witch”, below.

Thanks to Tina and Shannon from the help in making these paintings interesting and fun memories for me.

If you’re reading this on social media, I, Larry Eifert, paints and sails the Pacific Northwest from Port Townsend. My large-scale murals can be seen in many national parks across America, and at larryeifert.com.

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.

Commissioned paintings, New Painting Post, New Published Story, Washington State Parks

Jr Rangers Art at Deception Pass

The Junior Ranger program is nationwide and in most National Parks. I’ve contributed to a few in the past, providing art for the activity books. If you don’t know, it works like this: your kiddo asks at the visitor center for the book, they fill out the fun pages of puzzles and questions, many requiring getting out in the park – then get the Junior Ranger badge when you turn it back in before you leave. It’s a big deal, with millions of kids involved. Now, a few of the bigger state parks are getting into the action, and I just finished some art for Deception Pass State Park here in Puget Sound. Here’s a link to the national program. https://www.nps.gov/kids/parks-with-junior-ranger-programs.htm

Deception Pass has many habitats, beach, dunes, old-growth forest, cliffs and freshwater lakes.
This page is about soil and the bacteria and fungi that live in it.
Cliffs near the bay have distinctive plants, like this gumweed.
Oystercatcher, orchre stars, clams and crabs are around the rocky tidepools.
Sandy dunes are shown here, with the San Juan Islands offshore.

This is the sixth project I’ve done for this park, a small place packed with beauty. It’s suffering from too many people and too much noise from Navy jets training right over the park, but I still like to make art about these places. It helps me connect to them. Good nature doesn’t always have to be wilderness.

You can also see this post and all the rest coming up by simply adding your email to our list here – right side, down a bit.

Thanks for reading this week.

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, Waysides, Wildlife

Rosario Tide Pools

I just polished these three outdoor wayside panels for Washington State Parks. Soon they’ll be installed at Rosario Beach, Deception Pass State Park near Anacortes, right on the beach at one of the most heavily-explored tide pool areas in Washington. The three paintings tell the stories of how the tide works to create this amazingly rich ecosystem, how people messed it all up with boots and flip-flops – and finally how to walk here without screwing it up again.

I want to show you the third panel, the one about their rope path. These tide pools were decimated by thousands of feet, but the park stretched a yellow rope out to the best pools and signs (like this one) tell people to ‘Follow the Ropes”. It worked, amazingly enough, and the tide pool life returned – crabs and anemones, kelp and sculpins. It was such an easy idea, and now the place is returning to normal. Seeing this is one of the many reasons I still get a charge out of painting art for public places.

These panels are 36″ x 24″ and will be made of high-pressure laminate and probably last longer than I will.

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

And here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website.

New Painting Post

Ginkgo Petrified Forest

Gingko Petrified Forest Museum

Earlier this year I completed a bunch of paintings for Ginkgo Petrified Forest State Park near the Columbia River east of Seattle. In many ways, the project took me back to my kid-life when both my parents worked for the Illinois State Museum. I remember being with them and finding ginkgo leaf fossils in northern Illinois, and now here I was painting them for exhibits in a very old and remote museum in Washington State. This building was built by the CCCs in the late 1930s and is just a very beautiful and classic example of those epic times. With the place closed when we were there, the only sounds we heard out on these ash slopes were the wind through to trees and crunch of our footsteps on the trails. The ginkgo and other tree fossils are big, like full-grown old-growth. You can even count the rings showing how old they were when the volcano buried them.

New Front Door – Gingko Petrified Forest State Park
Gingko Petrified Forest State Park
Gingko Petrified Forest State Park – complicated maps turned out pretty well.
All my paintings ringing the exhibit room.

These paintings tell a super-complicated story of how this place came to be in its present state. Countless lava flows, mud flows, ash drops and Ice-Age floods involved trees from another time. They all were stuck in this mess and became fossilized. The trick, for me, was to figure out how to compress giant geologic events or Climate Change into smallish, understandable paintings. Some of these needed maps, some needed a few extra words of explanation, but somehow I think it all works. It was a fun project for me, different than what I normally paint.

All images enlarge with  a click. Not all the paintings are shown – thought I’d save you from too much geology.

Thanks for reading this week – and the entire year for that matter. This  year, especially, has been an amazing ride of art being created in public places.
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 here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.