Tag Archives: Wildlife

New Painting Post

Fairbanks Alaska Gets Some Eifert Paintings

This week I finished up two pieces of art for outdoor installations destined for the Chena Flats Greenbelt Project in Fairbanks, Alaska. Lots of mining – lots of messed up watersheds have left this area in need of lots of repair. These paintings are about what I seem to do a lot of these days: show how a landscape MIGHT look if we give it a chance. There are many agencies and non-profits involved in this, but it really seems to be just a small group of involved citizens doing their best to improve their backyard. I’ve been working with a very impressive and diligent woman there who was willing to pare down text and make this look good – and I think together we developed it into a pretty nice piece of interpretation.

And here’s the original, first-draft sketch. Critters came, left, changed – but in the final it’s pretty much like the first idea. That’s how art should be, I think, because the first flash of thought is usually the best. Thanks, Sally.

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

Ptarmigans Drumming

Can you teach two old dogs some new tricks? Maybe!

Tom Stewart, amazing drum maker who shows with me in Port Townsend’s Gallery Nine approached me recently with a proposal. Would I like to paint one of his elegant drums; a collaborative project. Sounded like fun to me, but what to paint? It took me about 8 seconds to process from drumming to mountains, then to wildlife that drum and finally to the little prairie chicken-like ptarmigans we see and hear booming in western alpine meadows. Actually, there are several species of ptarmigans and they all do more or less the same “drumming” and dancing to call attention to themselves. We’ve almost fell over one once in the alpine heather on Mount Rainier.

So, off I went without any sketches or plans, just an idea of mountains and ptarmigans. They change color with the seasons and are pure white in winter – and they’re the only bird that remains in the alpine throughout winter. But that’s not all: then they turn white and brown in spring and fall (like spring snow patches), and look almost brown in summer. In winter, feet are covered with feathers, as well as some of the beak – so air can be warmed as it’s breathed. Quite a bird!

The drum? Tom plays it far better than I do, and there was a point I could almost think I was in an alpine meadow. It’s 24 inches tall, 12 inch diameter head, goat hide skin. The drum weighs 9.5 pounds and the drum shell is made from five layers of laminated kiln dried Douglas-fir.

The out side surface was wrapped with fiber glass mesh and stuccoed with two coats of wood filler. The filler was sanded smooth making an ideal surface to paint on. The tuning hardware is hand-formed by Tom with mild steel and electro-plated with brass.

We’re going to display this wonder at Gallery Nine in Port  Townsend at Gallery Walk, April 7th. Come in and play 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

Sketchbook of the White Mountains

Click each image to enlarge – there are nice textures here and there.

This week I painted more art for Schulman Grove’s new visitor center in the White Mountains of California. This group is a series of seven sketchbook pages for exhibit panels below my three murals. These three need to be cleaned up a bit, so you’ll see some ragged look and blocky edges here and there from all the Photoshop layers. It’s a work in progress, but this way you can see assembly process.

I hope not, but I may need to move some of the sketches around or change the wording, so I thought it best to create EACH drawing seperately and even the color is seperately layered so it can be changed. Each text passage is put in with Photoshop too, so it can be edited if necessary. I first did the pencil sketch, then put tracing paper over it and painted the color layer. Both were scanned, pieced together and put on a photo image of one of my blank sketchbooks. I think the results look pretty good, like they’re old field sketches drawn on location a century ago. I was shooting for those old botanical illustrations on faded yellow paper, and I think I came close. Once I get approval from the Forest Service, I can clean up the rough edges. The reason I didn’t hand letter the captions is that all this has to be ADA compliant, so the characters have to be an approved font. Ah, the world of public art these days is pretty complex!

Computers can be maddening, but then again they can help produce wonderful results. On the other hand, if I didn’t have a few drawing skills in the first place, none of this would have happened at all, so don’t send me emails about computers replacing artists. They’re just tools, like paint brushes or pencils.

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 some new shots of Sequi, the new sea otter she’s been photographing.

New Painting Post

Glacier Bay National Park aquatic painting

Images should enlarge if you click on it.

Here is the second painting for Glacier Bay National Park. Two weeks ago I posted the first one showing an above the bay – below the bay painting of the same ecosystem. Both paintings will be made into outdoor panels and installed on the dock at Bartlett Cover in the Park.

Both of these have been fun and interesting for me, because there are great similarities as well as great differences between Glacier Bay’s aquatic landscape and ours right here in Port Townsend a thousand miles to the south. Some of the critters on these pilings are much bigger, some are smaller, and some are different colors and shapes. It takes some close study to figure it out, learning about one species at a time.

And here’s the preliminary sketch. I get a lot of mail about seeing the evolution of these paintings from concept to sketch to final painting. This one started out with a dock and gull, railing and all sorts of stuff hanging underneath. They even found the blueprints for the dock so I could see what it looks like underneath, but in the end all that was nixed for a cleaner design. What a difference, 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. She now has more sea otter pup images posted.

New Painting Post

Wilderness Art for a Wilderness Park

90% of the people who visit Alaska’s Glacier Bay National Park come on a cruise ship, and most never get off their boat. But those few that do come ashore get to experience a fantastic ecosystem so complex as to boggle a nature-painter’s mind. This painting and exhibit will get front-row seating in Bartlett Cove, the main staging area for people who have the mind and spirit to personally experience this pristine place – and it gives me a permanent little art gallery on the dock! How cool is that?

I just finished this painting two days ago – so it’s still out for approval. This is the first of two images I’ve been working on for Glacier Bay. They both show the critters living between one of the biggest tidal ranges on the planet. Tides here can swing as much as 25 FEET in one cycle, and all that rushing water makes for a pretty rich table, or, as the caption says: “When the tide is out, the table is set”.

I’ve always loved working with the National Park Service. Unlike many, these folks are not in it for the money – but for the good of nature and society, and I just don’t see much of that anymore. As an example of the lengths they go to so I get the best information for a painting, they sent me a little video link a couple of weeks ago. Photographed in a BLIZZARD and with the staff on skis, it showed where this installation will go! Don’t tell me these folks don’t have their hearts in the right place.

Thanks for reading this week. The second painting will be ready soon.
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. Sea Otters, oh my.

New Painting Post

A New Life for Lahonton Wetlands

My first Nature Conservancy commission was this mural of the marshes east of Reno, Nevada. The original painting hangs in their offices in Reno, along with about 2.000 posters floating around the West. Now, almost 20 years later, another image will be installed in the new BLM California Trail Interpretive Center, eight miles west of Elko, Nevada. I just sent the final scan and it’ll be 17 feet wide by 10 feet high, proving that art never dies, it just gets reprinted.

Back when this was painted, there weren’t digital scanners like we have today. I remember I had it photographed in Sacramento and found the 8″ x 10″ film postive transparency still there in our lock box on Kodak film that’s not even made today. It was a color-perfect shot and scanned up 2500% just beautifully. How big was that file for a 17′-wide image? The Photoshop layers file was 2.4 gigabits, and I admit my computer took some time to process it. Smokin’.

It was almost 20 years ago when Nancy and I were doing field research for this painting in the dry lakebeds and marshes around Fallon, Nevada. It was the only time either of us have been on an airboat – basically an airplane engine and prop on the back of a big rowboat. What a thrill it was to just glide over these bull rushes and “fly” around miles of marshes. We eventually ended up at a beach just like this one where the US Fish and Wildlife Service guides showed us fresh water clams, reminders of the ancient Paleo landscape when these dwindling lakes were giants from Ice Age runoff.

I have a new show at Gallery Nine in Port Townsend this month. Here’s press on it from the Peninsula Daily News, and here’s the Gallery Nine website with more information. Come on down if you’re here.

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 Brown Pelican – Really?

Brown pelican in the Boat Haven!

Thanks to DDT, by 1970 the California brown pelican was almost gone from the West Coast of the United States. Even today, these great fishermen with a wingspan of 6.5 feet only nest on the Channel Islands off Los Angeles. Sometimes, but not often, a few migrate northward during the late summer.

So, imagine my amazement when Nancy spotted one here in Port Townsend in the middle of January – and while it was snowing to boot. There he was, down in the marina right under the fish boat dock awaiting the next toss-out of not-so-good fish. And he probably wasn’t cold either, as the water this time of year is a full 20 degrees warmer than the air.

So, like the journalist that I am, here’s a little painting of Port Townsend’s wintering brown pelican. My hat’s off to him! And my hat’s off to Rachel Carson, an old family friend who stood up to the chemical industry over 50 years ago so this bird could eventually make its way to Port  Townsend in January, 2012.

This ORIGINAL painting is acrylic on paper, 7″ x 10″ and $85 unframed.

A nice custom frame with a double mat and glass makes it a total of $110 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.

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.

New Painting Post

Exit Glacier – Kenai Fiords National Park

Commissioned by the National Park Service and funded by Alaska Geographic for the new nature center in Kenai Fiords National Park. My task here was to show the ecosystem of this emerging landscape so recently covered by the glacier. You can see the trail winding through a young forest populating the outwash plain of the giant glacier connected to the even bigger Harding Icefield (bigger than the state of Rhode Island). Just a few miles from Seward, Alaska, this is one of the few glaciers you can actually walk up to and touch. It’s a bright summer scene, the way most people see it, but when we were here in September everything was already turning ochre and there was a rain and flood-event going on. I blogged about that on September 14, 2011 when I got the location sketch posted here. A few weeks later I posted the finished sketch here. It’s fun to see the evolution of the painting from concept to finished mural, but I know you guys don’t like to click through, so here’s the concept sketch again, but this time as it was happening (photo by Nancy Cherry Eifert over my right shoulder).

 And here’s the sketch drawn back here in the studio.

Soon there will be a high-pressure laminate panel of this painting for the center. Since it’s closed in winter, no heat, and it IS Alaska, it was decided that the original will hang downtown in the main offices. Next spring we’re hoping for puzzles and other products, so stay tuned.

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

This Guy Also Lives Here

This is the last post of the year for me, so I want to thank everyone for all your  comments, thoughts and, of course, purchases. While it’s not a-painting-a-day blog like some of my friends, I’ve still managed at least one a week for a lot of years now. It’s been a great way to stay connected.

Downy woodpeckers live here with us in our little patch of forest. They tend to prefer mixed woods with conifers and deciduous trees like our cedars and hemlocks, maples and alders. Here they’ve they set up housekeeping in some of our carefully preserved dead snags we leave standing just for this purpose. We see them on our suet feeder all year where I get up-close and personal views of how they look. This one’s a red-topped male I know well.

The downy is amazingly similar to the hairy woodpecker we have here too – almost identical except a tad larger. They’re actually not very closely related, making the two a great example of convergent evolution in which two separate species that live in the same place and do the same thing evolve, over time, to look the same. When I learn this, I immediately want to know how long this took, and what did the two birds look like originally before they migrated into these great Northwestern forests. Don’t you want to know?

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 8″ x 10″ and $120 unframed. A custom wood frame makes it a total of $150 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original painting, NOT a print.
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.

New Painting Post

Ancient Bristlecone Pines mural

(There’s a lot to see here, so these images should enlarge if you click them)
The third and center painting for the Schulman Bristlecone Pine Grove east of Bishop, California was finished this week. Put together, this wall is going to be about 17 running feet of pure high-country paintings. This final one is 5 x 8 feet on stretched canvas and I was really pushing it to fit into my little studio. Several times I almost gave up and went downtown to a larger space, but I wondered how I’d get it in the car. In the end we muddled through and now it’s great to see all three together. Since there was really no room for me to line them up to check (inside, at least), this is the first time I’ve seen them all together. I think it’s going to work.

Bristlecone forests are a beautiful but stark and colorless landscape because the trees are all bleached out by thousands of years of sun, the rocks are white dolomite – and flowers are few here at 10,000 feet. And since some of these trees are almost 5,000 years old, the oldest on the planet, they really look gnarled and sculptural, so that’s what I ended up concentrating on. Paintings of sculpture!

For those who want to know more about this project, I’ve blogged about it before here:
Here is the post for the pinyon painting on the left.
Here is the post for the alpine painting on the right.
And here are the original sketches. You’re notice some serious changes between the concepts and final paintings. That’s the fun of it – not to mention I just love this place.

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.