Tag Archives: Whidbey Canamo Land Trust

New Painting Post

Whidbey Island Prairie – Spring and Early Summer

Spring-prairie-progress

Work in progress: a new painting on it’s way. Click the image and it should enlarge in your browser.

Unveiling of an almost-finished new project today. I’ve been working on this for some time and it’s closing in on completion. Thought I’d toss it out for comments. I still have some bit to go, like adding another layer of closeup grasses and sedge, refining some of the flowers and critters – just tightening it up.

Nancy
Nancy at the prairie – pack strapped on full of camera gear for reference shots.

This is the sixth painting for the Whidbey Camano Island Land Trust and it will eventually be an outdoor wayside panel “planted” in a piece of rare natural prairie they’ve recently acquired. It’s right along the bluff in the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve – and in the background you can see Port Townsend and the Olympic Peninsula. So what’s the big deal here? It’s rare natural prairie, yes, but also a place with some very interesting and rare plants, like the Golden Paintbrush. And the site is only one of a handful where this beautiful plant grows. While it grows here naturally, the Land Trust is actively adding thousands of new plants or all types to jump start that’s already here. It’s a massive undertaking I’m continually impressed with – and I can’t even mow my own grass on a timely basis.

Nancy1
At the plant nursery where the Land Trust is supplementing thousands of new plants to help the prairie regain its original ecosystem. It’s a long haul that will take years.

This is the first of two of these prairie paintings. Stay tuned – I’ll send out photos of this one upon completion, and keep you in the loop for the second. It’s a very fun project for me.

Thanks for reading this week. Send this to someone who might appreciate what I’m painting and tell them to sign up. I’m trying to expand my list. An email will work.

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 beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Final Designs for the Whidbey Island Land Trust

Rare-Diverse-Forest

Not just a nice painting, but an entire outdoor art gallery! This wayside panel goes to ‘press’ this week, so here’s the final design. Forest path, old-growth forest on the cliff, windblown ancient trees and a complex ecosystem – all in one painting. Since the text talks of this forest, we put in eight smaller paintings of the local trees and shrubs, so the art becomes a nature guide. Click to enlarge in your browser.

This will be fabricated out of very thick high-pressure laminated ‘plastic’ resin and cardboard with a lifespan certainly longer than mine. An art gallery in the forest – just my idea of where art should be shown.

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 beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Some Small watercolors for the Whidbey Island Land Trust

Guillemot

I’ve been working away at some fairly large and complex murals for the Whidbey Island Land Trust project, but the project also involves a bunch of these smaller and fairly loose acrylic wash/pencil sketches – so I thought I’d pass them around. Fairly loose; I know some of you will say they’re not loose at all. But for what I normally do, they’re pretty loose. There are about 40 of them, and these are some of the finished ones. That’s a pigeon guillemot on the top, here’s a coyote below, and a little gallery of some more. Fun to do these loose images after plugging away of some pretty details larger painting.

Coyote

These will all go below the larger paintings on wayside panels, spicing up the educational components of these outdoor exhibits. Yes, pencil and acrylic! 

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 beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

How to Show the Art of War With Art?

Triangle-of-Fire-vs7-all-art

Click to enlarge this in your browser.

This is another panel for my project at the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve on Whidbey Island with the Land Trust. While all the rest of these outdoor wayside installations are about nature, this one speaks of Fort Casey, the reason this pristine place still exists in the first place. Without the fort and this history, the Land Trust would surely have had nothing to restore, preserve and protect, and I would have nothing to paint – because it would have long-since been made into mansions owned by Microsoft guys and lawns that look like carpet.

So, how to go about this painting this story using art? I changed up the realistic style to something a bit more ‘loose’ and tried to focus on the human side of a fort that had huge guns that protected the seaward approach to Puget Sound (it was never fired upon and became obsolete in a decade). Mark at the Land Trust, with help from Steven who appears to just love this stuff, found a very appealing photo of three guys enjoying themselves right outside their workplace at the fort – the Fire Station where they triangulated the gun’s shots. They lived here, and the building they’re standing in front of is the location where this outdoor wayside panel will live, and is right on the cliff’s edge. The building is gone, but the foundation remains as a point of reference.

While the other panels are all acrylic on board, for this I used acrylic wash and pencil for the illustrations, pumping up the color so the pencil looks more like ink. I think it has a nice textural quality. I kept this somewhat loose, making the reality of giant machines of war hopefully  seem a bit more palatable. I hope I succeeded.

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 beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

A Rare Forest – Whidbey Island Land Trust

Click to enlarge in your browser

A new painting for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust project at the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve. In case you missed the last several posts of this, here’s the last painting before this. I think I’m about 75% to completion on this new one. It speaks to the windy extreme weather on the bluff tops of Whidbey Island, Washington, how that weather shapes these 350-year-old trees, how the forest changes farther inland, how, one gnarly branch at a time, it’s slowly grown here over centuries. A rare forest indeed.

Rare-5

Great changes occurred in this design, logs moved, an entire underground section vanished – it was evolution right before my eyes. 

Rare-4

You can see some of the design changes in the lower right of this third photo. Compare this with the newest photo at the top.

Dark shapes help me focus on overall design. I sometimes stand back 25 feet to look at these 4′ paintings.

Rare-2

And here it is initially laid out, sky and ground, warm and cool. A free and fanciful non-objective painting just waiting to be hung in an art gallery somewhere. But these paintings don’t exist anymore. After I photographed it at each stage, it’s as if I’m then throwing away the image – because soon after it’s gone for ever under the progression to the next stage.

Rare-1

And here’s the original sketch showing the underground sections that are now gone from the painting.

Forest-ecology-sketch

By next week, I’ll have this finished up for a show-and-tell. Thanks for the interest in these images of the progression of a complex painting. Fun for me to see too.

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 beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

A Rare and Diverse Forest – Whidbey Land Trust

Forest-ecology-sketch

A click will enlarge this in your browser. 

This is the second painting for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust project at the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve just a few miles north of Port Townsend. Missed the first painting? Click here. This time it’s less about the critters and more about showing this rare and diverse forest, a remnant lowland bit of old-growth hugging a bluff-top. This place gets the full unfettered west wind coming right down the Straits, so the trees on the edge are wildly “flagged” from centuries of being blasted by the Westerlies. Eagles and hawks patrol this bluff edge, riding these updrafts that also increase the wind’s velocity. Weeesheeeh, can you hear it?  Then there’s the trail snaking along, a left-over from when this was part of Fort Casey where they watched and waited for an enemy that never showed up. Farther inland, the trees are huge and less flagged, but still very gnarly. In fact, they have some of the gnarliest branches I’ve seen around Puget Sound. They’re trees you’d expect on the western beaches at Kalaloch or La Push instead of here, 100 miles to the east. Trees and wind, trees and wind. It’s a fun painting for me so far.

Rare-1

And here’s my progress so far. An old friend wrote last week to say he thought when my larger paintings reach this stage, it  was about as good as it gets – free and dramatic, non-objective nirvana. I completely agree. It’s not that the finished paintings are less good, just a different good. I could end it here, show it in some gallery for a month and maybe it’d be hung in some rich-guys house. But if I continue to paint it, thousands upon thousands will see it for decades to come – so I paint on.

Rare-2

Here’s some structure appearing – blocking out trees and distant horizon, the Olympic Peninsula in the distance.

Rare-3

And now the trail is defined, some parts are refined a bit so I can judge how it’s going to come together. Background horizon is finished enough that I can understand how much atmosphere there might be to make it appear distant. Painters out there: see how light that is! Just saying. Stay tuned, because given some time, by next week this should be well along – oh, but then there’s the magazine page I have to write, a new puzzle that needs proofing, a web site to build for Crater Lake Institute – and a spring to enjoy.

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 beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve – Forest Wildlife mural

Forest-Wildlife

Click the image and it will enlarge in your browser.

Feeling pretty good about this painting, and that’s saying something for me (who’s usually a real curmudgeon about my own stuff). With several more paintings right behind this one, I didn’t hesitate to finish it up this week. Some details need to be refined, a couple of  minor changes I can already see, but we’re close – very close.

This is all about wildlife in the forest, so I designed it to show the actual trail meandering down and around the viewer. It’s as if YOU were back in the woods with all the critters, watching hikers come and go, come and go. The coyote shares the trail with people as I often see them doing (they can cover a lot of ground that way), a Douglas squirrel shucks a Douglas-fir cone, a chickadee lands on an old uprooted snag. I enjoy piecing this together, one critter at a time, and hopefully in the end it all makes sense. The critters should all be sized relative to each other, spaced in such ways that might really be true. I still need to alter the rose color, fix the shine on the squirrel, a couple of other things – and, well, what do you know, just this moment I realized I forgot the deer mouse in the old stump. Back to the easel! Next time you see this painting, look for it.

And here’s the sketch again, finished just 13 days ago. I’m telling you, I’m on fire! Can you see the deer mouse?

Forest-animals-sketch

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 beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Progress Report – Whidbey Wildlife

I often get emails about blogging progress reports of these larger paintings. Someday I’ll set my camera up and do a little film of it, start to finish. This painting has some degree of pressure with the calendar, in other words, no time to mess around. So here’s a little progress report in a couple of photos.

 

Wildlife-4

Click the images to enlarge them in your browser.

Top image is how it’s looking this morning. Many things get in the way of painting the hours I need to put in, like new spring printed projects, puzzle redesigns, trying to find resource material for the other four paintings – but it’s moving along well. Last week I blogged about the sketch and an overview of the entire project here.
Wildlife-1

And here’s a couple of days ago. Background’s in place so I can begin defining the foreground’s details, critters, closeups that take the time. There have already been major changes in that area, but only I will know.Forest-animals-sketch

And here’s the original sketch I showed last week. Thanks, Mark and Jessica at the Whidbey Camano Land Trust for making this a very fun project. I don’t often get the chance to paint these complex murals of my backyard forest, but this project comes close.

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 beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books.

New Painting Post

Whidbey: A New Painting – A New Project

Forest-animals-sketch

Click the image and it will enlarge in your browser.

A new project unfolds! Rarely do I get to do a bunch of paintings of something I truly love and know already. Or do it for a local park and do it for a group as tasty as this. I’m painting some small murals, doing design and handling fabrication for trail exhibits for the Whidbey Camano Land Trust – just to the north of us. It’s actually part of the Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve, and, in fact, I often sail over to Whidbey Island right under the bluff where these installations will soon be installed in the Admiralty Inlet Natural Area Preserve. Here’s the location -right on the bluff-top to the left. Port Townsend is to the right just across the channel.

Admiralty Inlet Preserve looking south

Photo thanks to Mark Sheehan, WCLT

Above is the first sketch, already underway as a painting. Four other paintings come as soon as possible – and that’s the catch. All five plus fabrication and installation have to be finished up and installed in three months – a daunting task for some, but not the manic me. I’m just a slave to my paintbrush! This first painting is about the forest on the ridgetop, a very rare coastal old-growth forest. Being on a bluff at the downwind end of the Straits of Juan de Fuca, this forest sees some pretty violent weather, so the bluff-top trees have grown very gnarly and wind-flagged. But, back in the quieter part, a more normal forest shelters a marvelous bunch of critters, and that’s what this painting is all about. It’s also an island that was under ice until just 8.000 years ago, so there are some wildly odd critters missing, like native rabbits, moles, bobcats and others normally found around here but not on Whidbey. No moles? Humm. This is the part of my job I dearly love, that of learning all this stuff from people who love it, like Mark, Ida and Jessica and Janelle, Whidbey Islanders  who are helping me figure it out. And I, in turn, hope I’m helping them create something that will effect people for years to come.

And I just have to share this. An old friend and fellow artist, John Sturgeon, who teaches video at the University of Maryland recently contacted me, or maybe it was the other way around. There were four of us in the same year, same high school art classes that went on to life-long art careers – a rather high percentage, I think. John told me something I’ve suspected, but never heard from anyone who might know: “The general consensus is… that by five years out of art school about 10% are still practicing, and by 10 years out it drops to 5% . . . then more or less stays there.  However, those that make a living from it [making art instead of teaching art] . . . less than .05%, which is astounding.  You are among that small % my friend. Pretty damn cool. ”  Trouble is, I never really went to art school to learn how to do this stuff.

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 beautiful photographs

And Click here to go to Virginia Eifert’s website. Her books are now becoming available as Amazon Kindle books. I currently have five up, with 15 more coming.