Tag Archives: Wayside Panels

Commissioned paintings, New Painting Post, US Fish Wildlife Service, Waysides, Wildlife

Similk Bay Beach Restoration Art

I’ve painted many pieces of art for the Northwest Straits Foundation. They’re the shoreline restoration folks in Bellingham, WA that coordinates the restoration funding with actually getting the job done. And, they often come to me for the final, interpretive panel that explains what they did.

This time it was for Similk Bay along the eastern side of Whidbey Island, just northeast of Deception Pass in Washington State. It’s a very shallow bay, full of critically important eelgrass, but at low tides you could actually drive on it – it was that shallow. And people did drive on it! For years they used a small launch ramp right here, running over the eelgrass with its crabs, young salmon, forage fish, all manner of fragile aquatic life. Then: why are the crabs gone? Where are the fish?

There were people disgruntled to loose their launch pad, but sometimes progress backward is good. Below was my five-minute concept sketch. I put it in the design program to see how it fit with some text. Pretty well, I thought.

Below is my refined sketch. You can see how it’s basically it’s the same drawing, but all the details are now worked out. It still changed a lot before the final color version. All of this, including the final painting, took less than a month.

And here it is in the design program. It fits pretty well. I wrote the text, as I often do, but it was altered many times as all good writing is a collaboration before it’s final publication.

And below is the site where this printed panel will live. Cars drove right down here past the driftwood to launch their boats. The final panel below.


Here’s a sample of the beach, part of my process is to take lots of reference photos. I needed this in the studio later to figure out how the beach and bay bottom might look.

And my house model. The old launch ramp is right next to the house. I really enjoy these projects because it allows me to place art where you’d never expect to find it – ON A BEACH SAVING AN ECOSYSTEM! My paintings end up on people’s walls, but they also end up in place like this.

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

And thanks, Lisa, at Northwest Straits Foundation for continuing to support this guy, one man with a brush.

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, Everett Washington, New Painting Post, Waysides, Wildlife

City of Everett WA Madison Morgan Park

ALL THESE ENLARGE WITH A CLICK

I’ve been painting some outdoor wayside panels for the City of Everett, Washington. This is my 3rd and 4th for Everett, which is north of Seattle and is becoming a real city with some real money to spend on this stuff. But it’s also becoming a ‘real city’, with its nature gone. They have a small nature park in the middle of it and so I’m working on some installations that tell about its nature. Lots of shrub plantings are going on here, putting the place back to some assembly of a native forest.

This is the original concept sketch and you can see how the design really stayed the same as the painting progressed. The boundaries for me were not hemmed in at all, they were just pleased I was doing it.

This panel is sort of a nature guide, birds on the top and animals on the bottom. It was a fun image for me to figure out, as these are all the same critters as we have here in our own little forest just 40 miles to the west on the Olympic Peninsula. And I’ll say this, we have better by far, right here in our own meadow. That makes these paintings show how fortunate Nancy and I are to have these acres of trees and critters that feel safe here. We even have old snags that serve as homes for many.

This is the original finished painting before it went into the design. It takes a variety of skills to make these, design, writing, making art and a deep background of the nature. Somehow it all has to come together to make a dramatic and beautiful piece of art that, hopefully, lots of people will stop and learn something. A bit of art in the forest.

And this is the corner of Madison-Morgan Naturescape Park where these two panels are going. The second wayside is being painted now and is coming soon, so stay tuned. Then between 15 and 20 more are going around Silver Lake in Everett, another urban nature park being spruced up by my stuff. In total, I should have about 24 paintings on panels here that will all last beyond my life – it’s a good legacy.

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, Waysides, Wildlife

Everglades Preliminary Drawings

This is the fishing camp we could have stayed in, accessible only by air boat – but NO, I had to sleep in the Best Western in Homestead, Florida! Yes, I checked it out and the python had left.

Sorry I haven’t posted in a few weeks, but the art has been flowing out of here like a narrow channel after a King Tide. Meaning fast and furious. I was in Everglades National Park in July for a site visit for this and now have all 17 drawings in refined versions finished up. After this, let the paint begin so this gater-guy can admire the installation right next to his home slough.

All these are for outdoor waysides, so they’ll have text blocks.  That’s what the empty white areas are for. I know, it would be better if it was all painting, but these installations will teach people about this place for many decades – long after I’m gone, kids will wander down these boardwalks and maybe learn something. One is bigger, an 8′ wide mural, but I haven’t started that yet.

These are some photos of the site visit. Lots of walking slowly around and talking, the pros telling us Northwesterners the scoop about this rare place. I learned a lot about a lot, from one end of the Sea of Grass to the other.

This drawing is about the strange and wonderful anhinga bird, and it’s actually going ON the anhinga trail. These birds hunt by slowly swimming along underwater and stabbing fish, and I got to watch that in action.

And several pieces of art are about herons. Lots of herons. There are TEN species of herons in this one painting and shows how they follow the receding water level as the season’s change and the ‘river’ dries.

There’s an algae that grows all over the place here. Periphyton. It’s food, shelter and covers the ground pretty much everywhere the shallow water is. It floats, then dives to the bottom, then dries out then the water recedes. All in one painting!

Stay tuned as this project develops. I want to thank the good folks at EDX Exhibits in Seattle for taking another chance on me, for traveling across the country and then still speak to me! Life is good.

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.

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

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.