Tag Archives: Wildlife

New Painting Post

Ochre Stars in Trouble – My July Story in 48 North Magazine

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Click to on the story to enlarge it and read the most interesting and disastrous events unfolding around the Northwest’s starfish populations.

I wrote and painted this page about a month ago for 48 North – but since then we’ve been looking more intently for ochre stars, or any starfish for that matter. It’s not good. So, this is one of the current environmental tragedies unfolding in the Pacific Northwest. Starfish of all sorts are dying by something we humans have called “Starfish Wasting”. No one knows exactly why this is happening, but many think it’s some sort of virus. Stars are the top dog in the nearshore food chain. Without a healthy population of these guys, other critters like shellfish and urchins tend to take over, throwing everything out of control. The stars simply waste away, arms fall off, bodies turn into a mass of molten goop.

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Yes, those are ALL mussels at Tongue Point, without a star in sight.

We’ve already seen this ourselves. On the lowest tide of the year last month, we went to Salt Creek and Tongue Point, west of Port Angeles and where there should be good populations of stars. Instead, we found shellfish completely out of control, acres of them. The ONLY star we saw was this little blood star, surrounded by shellfish in all directions.

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Then we hiked the Ozette Loop a week later, a 9.5 mile loop on the west side of Olympic National Park, same thing. After two nights on the beaches and scouring 3 miles of coastline, we did not see a single star of any kind. Not a good sign, for sure (but the hike was as wonderful as like gets).

A friend, Camille, is a Washington Dept of Fish and Wildlife clam-expert, and she’s now telling me there are young ocher stars along the Hood Canal – possibly signs the disease is passing, but who knows? Certainly not us! We are really only visitors here, and contrary to some, we are simply not in charge or even know much about the planet we share.

I also can see that using art to enhance awareness of environmental events is probably a high form of communication. What do YOU think?

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

New Life for an Old Painting – Arcata Marsh, CA

Arcata-MarshIn the 1990’s I was commissioned to paint this wildlife mural for the City of Arcata, California’s marsh project. A fairly innovative idea at the time, they were using old log sorting ponds to purify their sewer water, using them for settling ponds. Of course, being Arcata which is mostly Humboldt State University, it involved wildlife, and lots of it – and so a visitor center was built and this painting is an exhibit there, but it’s inside the building.

Now, two decades later, they’re using the same image as their entrance sign at the gate, so I did a redesign last week and it’s at the fabricator now. This simply wouldn’t have been possible back when I first painted the image, but nowadays I can digitally create this huge sign, send it off over the cable – and soon this beautiful,  6′ x 6′ and 3/4″ thick, it’s going to be made out of something like Formica – with a life span longer than I’ll be alive.

Arcata-marsh-installed

Of course, this is all possible because I retained the copyrights to this painting, so when Denise at the Marsh wanted to do this project, she needed to come to me. It’s a way we working artists make a living. I only signed away the rights to one large painting – the first one I ever did for the National Park Service at Redwood National Park. It ended badly, with me having to actually buy my own posters from the parks’ bookstores and not even having a digital copy of it to put on my website. A cautionary tale, don’t you think?

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.

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

Ratfish – My 48-North Page for May, 2014

2014-5-Ratfish

This is my sketchbook page for 48-North magazine for May. Almost forgot to post it while it was still relevant. I caught one of these crazy-looking fish a few years ago (while I was still fishing), and hauling this over the gunwale made me wonder why I continued to sit there with a pole in my hands. They’re pretty crazy-looking critters. Below is the story that went with it.

“Have you ever seen a ratfish? Odds are you haven’t, and yet these odd-looking creatures make up fully 70% of all the fish mass in the Puget Sound main basin. Their family name, Chimera, was a mythological monster with a lion’s head, goat’s body and serpent’s tail – pretty close if you toss in a rabbit’s nose with two incisor teeth. Where are they? Rats like it deep, looking for clams and worms on the bottom at 250 feet, which probably accounts for their covert lives, but when I caught one once off a dock in Port Ludlow, I thought I’d hooked a space alien. And I’m here to witness that they bite – just like a rabbit does with those incisors.”

“Why are there so many? No one knows for certain, but I’d imagine an unhealthy ecosystem might be a place to start looking, because nature needs diversity, not one species that takes over. I used to think of rats as strange and ugly, but as a painter, I now see they are truly beautiful, with glowing green cat’s eyes, copper orange and blue shades of glimmering white spotted skin and that rabbit nose. Gliding along on bat wings, they’re not speeders like salmon, and yet the ratfish has been around for 300 million years – a true survivor – and as we eat our way down the food chain, the rat will eventually come be on our plates beside cockroaches and algae.”

2014-5-fawns

And I just had to add this of our deer. Our 2014 crop of black-tailed fawns are all over our meadow – two singles and one set of twins. Four fawns, three moms and all jockeying for position, attention and learning how to live together. It’s quite a visual feast.

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

Sugar Pine Point – Lake Tahoe and Climate Change

General-Creek-2014

Some years ago I was commissioned for two paintings of Sugar Pine Point State Park, a park that has two miles of Lake Tahoe’s forested coastline and one of the most pristine creeks to enter that lake. Fun project, I got to go there and poke around. The images were eventually made into outdoor wayside panels, and the originals are in the visitor center – pretty typical. We made lots of book store products from the images, and now the poster of General Creek has been redesigned and will soon be available.

For me, the real story is on the poster’s backside, and it’s possibly more important than first version the first time around. I rewrote the essay, and I was struck how the theme, the story, the very reason for this poster and painting has changed in just one short decade. I finished it up, sat back and breathed a ‘WOW’ to myself. Here’s the thing. The original essay spoke of each of the critters, plants and everything else that lives here as being no more important than any of the others. That’s nature’s way, after all. And it went on to say humans were no better nor worse too.

And the updated text? It now speaks of human-caused Climate Change, proving I was wrong about that last sentence. Nature will survive here, of course, but in what form we can’t yet say. Will this ecosystem still be in harmony with itself? I suspect not. Will General Creek, the main focus of this painting, still be flowing in summer when the critters need it most? Doubtful. We just don’t know, but we can guess. In my final statement, I say this: Climate Change is now effecting this landscape, which will alter what we see here in many ways – and add to the stress on a fragile place. In the future, this painting of General Creek may become a historic record of what once was.

Eifert_General_Creek
The original wayside panel beside General Creek.

All of a sudden I realized that all these large-scale murals I’ve been creating for the past several decades might become something more than their original intent. I thought they were painted to educate people about what’s here. As human-caused climate change evolves, now I see these images might be about what once was. A scary thought, for sure, but maybe one that’s more valuable and long lasting.

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

Crater Lake NP New Puzzle Has Arrived

Whitebark-Pines-of-Crater-Lake-1000pc

Yesterday we received a shipment of new puzzles for spring. This is the first 1000-piece puzzle we’ve produced in years, and it’s fun for us to see the bigger image, bigger box, bigger everything. Finished size is 20″x 28″, it has an interlocking border, and it includes a reference poster inside. You can order it here.

Eifert-Crater-1000-boxback

The box back, with lots of great info and species key.

Eifert-Crater-1000-boxtop

We’ve also included a free poster with reference key and a bunch of information about the whitebark pines at Crater Lake that are in serious trouble due to Climate Change, an introduced pathogen and the ravages of bark beetles. It’s our way to cram some great interpretation and nature into one product – and it should also be a fun one to put together. Below is the poster that comes with it.

Whitebark-Pine-Crater-Lake-box-insert

Order this puzzle simply by clicking here to go to our cart. $18.95 plus shipping at our cost.

This was funded by the good folks at Crater Lake Institute and Foundation. Thanks, Ron. I think it’s a great puzzle.

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 New Old Poster – California Coast Redwoods

 A new 18″ x 24″ poster – coming soon!

Cal-redwoods-poster

Click all these to enlarge them in your browser

Thousands upon thousands of the original poster “Events in the Life of a Coast Redwood” have gone out the door over the past twenty years. Originally commissioned as a museum exhibit for Redwood National and State Parks, the painting lives it’s life in Prairie Creek, just the best redwood forest I’ve ever known. There’s a lot of art and photography here in our studio, and many of these past images go out of print, out of our lives – but we felt this one deserved a continued  present, so this week I redesigned it to look more like an old botanical poster someone might have created 200 years ago when redwoods hadn’t even been discovered by Europeans yet. You’ll see this in a month or so after the printer does his job.

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The story of how this originally came to be is somewhat fun – at least for me. In the 1990’s I was living in Ferndale, Cal just north of one of the biggest redwood parks. I always tried to be a thorn in the side of a local timber-killing company, always looking for ways to counteract their lying press releases ranting on about how wonderful they were in eliminating the world’s tallest trees – our heritage being made into hot tubs. (My real thorn was the fact I had hired the wife of the CEO to work for me in my gallery, and he thought we were having an affair – used to sneak around in the alley watching her.) Anyway, that company put out a poster much like this – tree in the center, but instead of nature they showed little images of subjects like Joan of Arc, Hitler, the atom bomb, Christ on the cross – stuff completely unrelated to redwoods.

So, I was dared to challenge it with a poster of my own – and got Redwood National Park to pay for it, and off we went. My poster was meant to show the rich diversity in redwood forests, something the redwood choppers denied (we need to get rid of those old, stagnant forests), and put them in a context with humanity as well as ecological history (something they also denied the existence of). Fast forward: the company crashed, people are now out of work, I get mail thanking me for standing up for something few believed in at the time. Ah, it’s all in a day’s work for the naturalist-artist!

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I’ll let you know when this is available in most large redwood parks – from Redwood National to Muir Woods –  and on our website.

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

My 48-North Story for April, 2014 – and Cats

2014-4-Mergansers

Click the image to enlarge it in your browser.

Here’s my article in 48 North magazine for April, 2014. I almost forgot to toss this into my blog until I received my copy in the mail a few days ago. You can see this on page 48 on their website. This sketchbook was all about diving and dabbling ducks, the interesting differences between them, and how each makes their living. And, it was just a chance to make sure I knew all this stuff without looking it up.

I’ve discovered that the best pages I write and draw have big eyeballs. What, you say? The tube worm story didn’t have huge ratings? Well, it’s just that we humans are drawn to those with big eyes – like Nancy and our deer herd here in the meadow that keep looking in the windows, eyeball to eyeball with the big-eyed house cat that we won’t let outside. Big moon last night and there was a coyote-chorus right below our windows. The local bobcat has come gaping in my studio window before, looking right at me as if to say: where’s the cat?

 But here’s the thing. The neighborhood is littered with ‘missing fluffy signs written by names the likes of Tiffany and Heather, neighbors who let their cats roam free to murder wild birds that have a hard enough time of life as it is. Hey, I look at it as nature attempting to maintain a healthy situation. House cats kill over a BILLION wild birds each year and the predators take care of a few of the cats. It’s obvious to me that cat-owners who allow their pets outside are people who (lazily or egotistically?) could care less about nature. They’re targets of my unending quest to open their eyes, one eyeball-painting at a time.

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.