Tag Archives: Wildlife

New Painting Post

The Porpoises vs The Dolphins

Football! So, that said, this has NOTHING TO DO WITH FOOTBALL. Just a short weekly post about nature.

Here’s my page for October’s edition of 48 North magazine. Sailing off Port Townsend, I often see fins darting about. Not shark fins but more dolphin fins. I know they’re porpoises, but almost everyone else thinks they’re dolphins – so, here’s my bit of interpretive education using art. Nancy says I just can’t let a single person go by me without going into a full-blown classroom session. I admit it, I’m a hand-fed product of Virginia and Herman after-all; she: nature writer, lecturer and he: museum education cureator. The other day at 6,000 feet on top of Hurricane Hill, a couple of hikers were watching a hawk. “Don’t know what it is, maybe a falcon or something” the guy said to his wife. “Northern Harrier, female. Used to be called Marsh Hawk, but they renamed it” I said as I passed them by. He didn’t hear me, so I said it two more times before they both got it. “You just CAN’T let it go, can you?” whispered Nancy. Probably not!

So, click on the porpoises and you can more easily read the text. My parents would have approved! Sure as pigs have wings, it’s not likely you’ll see a dolphin in the Salish Sea.

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.

New Painting Post

Florida Gets an Eifert Mural

 

And we’re off again! This time it’s a complex habitat wall mural for the Polks Nature Discovery Center in central Florida – and this is going to be FUN. The top drawing is the right side of the 24′ mural, and I wanted to show this first because it’s my favorite part. The scene transcends from the swampy seasonal flatlands pond on the right (above) into the center pine flatwoods with saw palmento and finally, on the left into a sandhill  pines area. There’s a lot going on here, with very juicy stuff to paint like wood storks, alligators and spoonbills. There’s even an orange-red corn snake wrapped around the cypress.

Make sure you click on this bottom image so you can see the entire thing.  As  you can see, I still  have some details to work out in the sandy areas in the lower left, but we’ll get there. I began painting this a few days ago at my “downtown” studio in Union Bank where I have enough space. My little studio here won’t cut it. This will be quick; there are a bunch of other big projects waiting in line – and besides, this is the fun stuff of my life!

 

The colors, atmospheric qualities, horizon line – this is all a very different place from where I live. The Northwest  is a very deep place for colors, almost like it swallows color into a dark hole. The darks are verging on black but the light values are brilliant colors. In fact, I’ve often thought that the Olympics have the darkest forests I’ve ever painted and this creates huge value contrasts with other colors. This Florida painting is just the opposite. There, the atmosphere is so saturated with moisture is softens everything. The sky is pale, the edges of distant forests are almost blurred as they’re filtered through all that wet air. This is probably the most important thing I have to figure out in painting big landscapes: what makes a place look and feel the way it does.

 

I’ll be posting progress reports as I go along with this one.  Get the massage table ready – turn up the hot-tub. I’m ready! This gator’s smiling about it too.

 

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.

New Painting Post

The Politics of Art for Restoring Nature

I was happy and proud to donate some art recently to the Crag Law Center in Portland, Oregon for their newsletter – and here’s the result. You can see the entire newsletter here with more of my art. Crag  has a staff of legal professionals that work with local and regional groups to battle against those well-heeled corporations we all love to hate. They also help community groups organize themselves in a more professional  manner, and work to promote fiscally-responsible environmental conservation – plus a whole lot more. In other words, if you were a little bird in trouble like the murrelet, these are the guys you’d want to have on your side – and they are. As an artist who has spent my life painting and learning about nature, these types of donations are high on my priority list.

 

The pitch: If we have a new president in two months who represents not us and the nature we’re here to conserve and protect, you’re going to see a lot more of this as we all desperately battle yet-again against the forces of evil: better known as the Republicans. Why Americans continue to vote for people who are against the very citizens who vote for them in is completely beyond me, but they do. So, it will take all we have to hold on to the small gains we’ve had during the past four years. Gains? Heck, we’re not even back to what we had and where we were before the last guy drove the country into a ditch.

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.

New Painting Post

A Loon’s Story

This is to be published in next month’s 48 North magazine for my monthly contribution. Sitting at a campground picnic table the other morning I was meandering through a field guide and ran across some pretty tasty facts about loons – so, I concocted a story about them, then a few sketches, and here’s my page ready to go. The topper was that while sailing the other day I saw a nice adult out in the bay. These things sometimes just come together in a nice way.

A Loon’s Story

 

Hair-raising, bloodcurdling, magical have been used to describe the loon’s call. Often heard at dusk or dawn echoing across wild mountain lakes, I think a loon’s cry is one of true wilderness.

 

This loon spent the summer with his mate on a big lake in British Columbia, helping to raise their family of two on the almost-floating nest of grasses they carefully built. Then on a fishing trip into the deep mountains, he had clumsily landed on a small forest-lined lake and found he couldn’t take off – there just wasn’t enough ‘runway’ for the ancient design of his solid-boned body. After two weeks, an early fall gale aided his departure but by then his family had headed southwest – and so he did too. Now on salt water in the Salish Sea he was content to fish, sometimes diving to 300’, deeper than any other bird.

 

The loon will be here in our Salish Sea from September to May, when he’ll again head back to his corner of that same lake, defend it against other males and hopefully find a receptive female that will begin the process again. While not sporting their elegant iridescent black and white summer colors, these goose-sized birds are still spectacular to see. Keep your eyes open for them.

 

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.

New Painting Post

One Tree Moment for Ballard Nature Center

I still have the color to add on the five little insets, but I think this project of interpretive art is looking so good right now I wanted to share it.

It’s a very small world! I was asked by Genesis Graphics in Escanaba, Michigan if I’d be interested in doing some watercolor and ink paintings for the Ballard Nature Center in Effingham, Illinois. (So, if we did a conference call, that would be a 4000-mile round trip triangle for the words to be heard by everyone involved.) I’ve had a long and fine relationship with the folks at Genesis, and they always let me just do my thing without a bunch of hoops to jump through. My reply on this idea was, “Oh, I know where Effingham, Illinois is. My formative years were spent  just a few miles to the west in Springfield. I learned my stuff in the Illinois State Museum where I was spoon-fed nature and art by the staff and my parents.” This was relayed to the Ballard folks and it turns out two of my mom’s books are in their visitor center library. What a small world, and very soon they’ll have two generations of Eifert work there.

I know everyone likes to see the ‘behind the scenes’ stuff, so to show you how far this design was refined, here’s the concept sketch.

 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.

New Painting Post

Reprinting the Arcata Marsh Mural

This was only the third big habitat mural I ever painted, and I’m  hard-pressed to figure out the date it was finished. I’d say 1989, give or take, but it could be earlier. A printed copy of this painting lives in Arcata, California at the Arcata Marsh Interpretive Center. Its home is a sunny wall, and for that the reason we installed a copy of the painting and not the original. Now because of sun damage it’s about to have version #3 printed to replace #2.

So, this week I went into the giant lock box at the bank and fished through the hundreds of 8″ x 10″ transparencies (film they don’t even make any more) and brought this home for scanning. A decade ago was the last time we replaced this, and then we used that transparency and simply made a photo blowup. This time it’s all digital and will be printed on half-inch thick high-pressure laminate material similar to Formica. Thinking about this I was truly struck by the technical changes of this stuff in the past decade, and how artists really need to understand and keep up with it – or risk being left behind like so many other ‘industries’ – and I’ll be damned if they’re going to outsource ME to India!

When I painted this, the Arcata Marsh was a very new place, and it was difficult to imagine what it would become. Sitting on an old log processing pond at the upper end of Humboldt Bay, the idea was for the nearby sewer plant to run its almost clean water through a series of channels and let aquatic plants clean up the last of it. Birds would flock, animals would find homes, people would come to walk and view – and over the years it all came true. I’m happy to have been a part of the initial interpretation, and happy they continue to kept my painting as part of it.

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.

New Painting Post

Plumose Anemones – Flowers of the Sea

It shouldn’t have happened, but I think a few of you received a duplicate of the last post. Sorry ’bout that. Even after 5 years, Mailpress blogging software is something of a mystery to me.

This is my sketchbook page for  the August issue of 48 North magazine. I hatched this idea a few months ago while painting plumose anemones for an interpretive panel at Glacier Bay National Park and the more I learned about them, the crazier they seemed. We have these critters here in the Salish Sea and Puget Sound too, and they just seemed ripe for another few paintings. I think they’re a most amazing animal and really sensational to paint. That an animal is built like a beautiful flower is tantalizing for a painter of nature.

Here’s the story that goes with with sketchbook.

Next time you’re down on the docks at low tide take a peek down a piling into the water below. See any big white flowers attached to it that are waving in the current? Those are plumose anemones, and flowers they are definitely not! They’re actually animals, predators on the prowl for small larvae and other tasty organisms that pass by.

 While they look permanently attached to the piling or rock, if attacked by a sea star or nudibranch anemones can instantly leap for safety in an ungainly jump. In fact, large solitary anemones can be found far away from the vast gardens of larger family groups, showing they really can do a ‘walk about.’ Anemones begin life when a fragment from the base of a large anemone breaks off and grows into a tiny but genetically-identical new one. These clones start life as one sex but changes to the other when it is older. Quite a critter, don’t you think?

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.

New Painting Post

Exit Glacier – A New Puzzle

WOOO-WOO: Our new 500-piece jigsaw puzzle is now ready to ship. We’re more than happy to announce this one – the rich habitat below the toe of Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park near Seward, Alaska. I’ve blogged about the progress of this project, from our field trip and concept sketches last fall to the finished mural a few months ago. Now the printed products are arriving, and I think this would be a great puzzle to put together.

 

And here’s the puzzle box back with all the fun stuff about the painting. As you can see, it was funded by Alaska Geographic, a very involved and prolific non-profit that works to support many of Alaska’s parks. I’ve bought their books for years, and now I’m proud to say we’re ‘one of them’ in a small way.

You can either buy the puzzle on the website here, or just email us with your shipping info and we can mail and bill. Buying two puzzles saves you freight as it’s only $2 extra for the second one.

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. She has a new blog about the Washington State Capitol Campus that’s pretty fun.

New Painting Post

Glacier Bay Old-growth

Keeping it going, this week was spent working on five smaller paintings for Glacier Bay National Park. Nancy says I tend to loose track of obligations, appointments and schedules, well, try keeping five paintings with lots of details all on track. Ah, priorities! It’s like juggling. This one is a purely fictitious place but based on reality. The landscape around the Visitor Center and Lodge at Glacier Bay National Park is fresh from the ice and its forests are still pretty young. It will likely be changed before it’s finished, but my task here was to paint what WILL be there eventually if the forest there continues to evolve as it should. If things go according to one option in nature’s normal plan, this will become a western hemlock-dominated forest, a few huge trees, logs almost completely covered with moss, skunk cabbage and devils club. Everything would be green filtered light as if you’re inside an emerald. Did I get it?

Here’s the first-draft concept sketch.

And below is the second draft before I started painting. It’s still very different from the final painting, but the elements are taking shape. In the end, the huckleberries left, devils club and skunk cabbage came in after the Park straightened me out. Those two species require more moisture than I had realized was there, so we shifted things around.

I get a fair amount of mail saying that comparing these sketches are the best part of my weekly posts. It’s the ‘inside scoop’ that few see, and I think it’s easy to recognize the fact that the pencil is the painter’s most valuable tool. The second most valuable tool might be that I’m working with two guys from the National Park Service that really care. It’s such a treat for me to have interactions with people who know what their doing, both on the ground with Melenie and Tom at Glacier Bay in Alaska and Chad at Harpers Ferry Center in West Virginia. I just never tire of learning about this stuff, especially from smart people. And that we did a conference call this week featuring a land-line and cel phone joining Alaska to Port Townsend together with a desk’s top in West Virginia is even better.

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.

New Painting Post

A New Monthly Series for 48-North

If you’ve read my recent posts, you recognize this style of art and the layout. I think it’s how art, nature, humanity evolves – we all borrow from each other, or even ourselves.

I recently developed some sketchbook pages for a project in the Schulman Grove of bristlecones near Bishop, Ca. I showed them on this blog here and here , but it was the Forest Service’s kind words about the style, content and design that got me thinking that this might work well in a publication – like a magazine.  So, of all the many stories, articles and books I’ve published, my connections with 48-North, the Northwest’s largest sailing magazine has been the most fun. I’ve written for them for years, and so I banged on Rich the editor, door and asked if he’s like to give me a full page once a month for my little sketchbook idea. Above is the first effort coming up for the July iisue. For June’s online issue (my otters will be in July), click here. 

As I was casting around for my first month’s subject, I was in Port Townsend standing at the front door of Gallery Nine, the gallery that both Nancy and I show in. Tourists were coming and going, delivery trucks were bringing wine to the next door wine store, UPS truck was parked in mid-lane – and here comes a big river otter meandering right by us. They’re pretty common down there since Water Street is only a few hundred feet from the ocean, but seeing a 30 lb, 4-ft long adult river otter dodging cars always gets your attention. A couple of tourists were plain flabbergasted. So, I realized that’s what the first sketchbook had to be about, and I learned a lot about those interesting critters.

Cheesecake Desert: And speaking of critters, here are two of the three new kids in our meadow next to the cherry tree, taken by Nancy from the dining room window.

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.