Sorry about that last post

Ooops to everyone! A BIG oops.


Please forgive me, but I've been transitioning my blog over to Wordpress, and somehow the button pushed was the wrong one. Still not familiar with the software, and even though it looks like it'll be a real improvement, I'm still fumbling around learning codex and templates, and that's not so easy for a visual artist.


Out of about 1000 readers, only one gave up on me and unsubscribed.


For anyone still interested in this mess, you can see what you were supposed to see here:

www.larryeifert.com/wordpress


Hang with me. This can only get better.
Larry Eifert

Carson River Mural Beginnings

This should enlarge if you click it. If that goes nowhere, click the blog here and do the same.

Last week I sent out the sketch for this painting. A commission for a non-profit, this painting is for their new visitor center. The scene isn't exactly accurate as to the way it truly is, but hopefully will give the viewer a 'sense of place'. I have a nice little singing marsh wren painting I've also done to warm up for this, which I'll send in a few days.

In the meantime, I'll tell you how this is going. The painting isn't as large as many I do like this, maybe 3'x5'. At this size, it's large enough that I can get some details in, and small enough so it won't take a month to paint. I first put down several coats of a very dark brown (almost black) base, so when I paint this up to lighter colors, it hopefully looks like a landscape just emerging from night. Those dark areas around the bottom will soon disappear. You see the High Sierra Front (east side of Lake Tahoe area) is almost finished. It's on the west side of the Carson Valley, putting early morning light right on these high peaks. They'd shine like crazy when that morning light hits them.

I paint these things from the background to foreground, usually top to bottom, so the mountains go in first as you can see, then the area slightly closer to the viewer, and so on, but to give me a sense of the entire composition, you'll see some critters outlined or just roughed in. This helps me figure out what the final image might look like. This photo was taken yesterday, so today it's much farther along, but why waste time photographing it? Let's get back to work.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website - packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy's currently doing.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family - or just 'talk' with us.

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

Carson River Mural Sketch

Pencil sketches are always difficult to see here, so click on this image to enlarge it. If that doesn't work on your browser, go here to see it on the blog.

Carson River mural sketch. A large non-profit organization is working on a project south of Reno Nevada along the Sierra Front, and, as part of it this painting will soon be installed in their new visitor center at the ranch. It's an exciting prospect for me to paint this. Sandhill cranes, bald eagles, large populations of white-faced ibis, and one of the only colonies of tri-colored blackbirds in Nevada are here. With 250 species of birds and a backdrop of mountains that just doesn't quit, it's an exciting place to paint one of these complex habitat murals.

I've painted for this private organization before. There's been a mural and nature guide for the Kenai River in Alaska (exceptional field trip), one for the Great Salt Lake wetlands north of Salt Lake City (where we got to see a peregrine falcon's nest up close as the parent divebombed us) and another one north of this current image in the Lahanton National Wildlife Refuge. That mural included a very fun airboat trip out into the tule marshes - you know, the boats with the big propellers on the backs that go in about 2" of water. USFWS showed us some fresh water clams still living there that are hold-overs from the last Ice Age.

I'm working up a 'warmup' painting for this mural of a marsh wren singing that I'll post soon.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website - packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy's currently doing.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family - or just 'talk' with us.

Where Are The Black-tails?

Where are all the deer? I asked that yesterday, realizing I hadn't seen one in our meadow for a long while. (click the painting and it should enlarge. If it doesn't, go here to see it on the blog.)


We've created a pretty critter-friendly habitat here in our little patch of forest and meadow, and the wildlife know it. We've kept a count of our critters over the years and now have a 'yard list' of over 80 species. A salt lick for the deer, a couple of feeders, no outside pets (especially cats) and over the years we now have Douglas squirrels patiently waiting right on the feeder while we dish out the morning seeds. Two hummers are still overwintering. The Cooper's hawk juvies still fly around overhead freaking out the towhees and chickadees. But the deer? Don't know!


All summer we had two families of deer - multiple fawns in tow. We're in a no-shooting zone around here, so when Fall safely progressed, alters appeared on the bucks and lots of coy antics went on it the meadow - lots of racing around like they were all schoolyard kids. But then (with hunting season the last two weeks in October) the deer just vanished. It must just be habit. They're safe here, and they seem to know it, judging by their 'almost' taking our homegrown apples out of our hands, but, poof, they were gone anyway. Now, in a couple of months I know they'll be back, females with a new one or two in their bellies. It's a cycle of life I know I can depend on - but what's the deal? Why don't they just stay?

Black-tailed deer in a wet meadow:

No deer, so I painted one. This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9" x 12" and $140 unframed.
The gold frame makes it a total of $180 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

To read my other blog entries, check the blog here.

Thanks for reading this week. It's a window into our little artistic world here.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website - packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy's currently doing.


Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family - or just 'talk' with us.

Surprise Canyon and Palm Bowl

The blog's been silent! We've been away for a few weeks, hiking in the Southern California desert and visiting family and friends. No painting this week, but this was a hike so exceptional I wanted to share it.

East of San Diego, Anza Borrego State Park is California's largest state park, so big all the other state parks could fit in it with room left over. Most visitors see the palms near the visitor center, but there are many other backcountry native palm groves that have few visitors except mountain lions and coyotes. Driving 50 miles south of the visitor center we found a vague sandy turnoff, parked the camper and began hiking up Surprise Canyon - and what a surprise it was. First one grove, then another, and finally the canyon opened up into an entire bowl full of them - 100's of native California fan palms. We had never seen so many in one place.


It wasn't the number of palms, but the cool and ethereal silence we felt here, and at the same time, the place was alive and vibrant. You could clearly see open areas where countless generations of Indians had made their homes under the trees. Dates were hanging everywhere, and several dozen western bluebirds and finches were flying from tree to tree, munching as fast as they could and chattering away. Date seed piles were everywhere too, showing that coyotes hang out here enjoying the same fruits, and sure enough, one big alpha male studied us from the ridgetop. Then, Nancy spotted a little nest on the ground, blown out of a palm by a recent storm we were sure. Judging by the size, it could have been made by a gnatcatcher or maybe a bushtit, but if you look carefully, you'll see that every piece of the nest is actually a fishhook cactus spine. They're all intertwined and tightly fitted, and each 'hook' is stiff as a needle. You'd need pliers to cut it. We can't imagine how a tiny bird could have managed this construction feat. Just getting close enough to grab the spine is one issue, but how the bird broke off each spine, brought it here and wove the nest is beyond reality. I pictured a bloody and punctured bird when it was finished, and, of course I hoped it was a male. I thought it amazingly smart because what predator would attack an armored nest like this? Any ideas?

So why are these palms here at all? Native California fan palms are usually found where water is forced to the surface by an underground solid rock ledge. They need their feet wet but tops in the sun - and brutal sun this is. Young palms have wicked red spines along each frond stem, but older trees don't. It's thought that Pleistocene mastodons couldn't reach any higher that about 18 feet, and so young palms adapted spines to ward off the huge browsers. With Climate Change, who knows what will happen to these last few groves of our only native desert palm. They could easily go the way of the mastodon.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website - packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff.

I now have a new page with smaller paintings still available. It's fairly up to date except that the dipper just sold.

Click here to check out what Nancy's currently doing.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family - or just 'talk' with us.

Merry Christmas and Thanks

This is one of Virginia Eifert's 'famous' hand-painted Christmas cards. Inside is hand-written calligraphy:
Now let the echoes
of the songs of May
Refresh and warm your hearts
on Christmas Day - 1963

I was 17 then and just beginning to sell my stuff at art fairs and local shows. Not very well, I'll admit, but it was a passionate start.

She sent these cards each year for decades, ending with her death in 1966. I've heard from people who still have many of them, some even framed, for she painted hundreds. I did too, until my real work simply swallowed this up. Unlike me, Virginia was legendary for being able to do it all (except maybe clean the house or teach her son to do the same), which brings me around to what I really want to say here.

Merry Christmas and loving thanks to everyone reading this. We're sending a genuine thank-you to the fantastic group of friends, clients and buyers who have supported Nancy and me as artists all these years. It's now been over four decades of making a living as a working artist, beginning way back in the 1960's with a gentle but firm push from Virginia.

Thanks to all of you who have faithfully bought my work, but also thanks to all the people who sell our stuff in park stores coast to coast, in galleries and countless other places. It's a very wide web these days, and unfortunately I'll never personally meet many of you.

And thanks, also, to someone I DO know, thanks to my very most important and special person, Nancy Cherry Eifert, who not only has a photo career of her own, but also handles the licencing, royalties, commissions and shipping, including orders from that pesky website that never seems to work properly. She's an amazing partner that can multi-task with the best of them. They say that, these days especially, it takes at least two people working more than full-time to be one professional artist. We'll both tell you that's certainly true.

I know this won't last forever -I wish it would, but I won't stop or even slow down exploring nature through my art and words. Like Carl Rungius, the Canadian painter of wildlife I admire greatly, I want to drop dead at my easel a few long decades from now - and we hope you'll continue to come along for the ride until then.

Thanks again for reading this week, and have a Happy Christmas.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website - packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy's currently doing. Her new website is almost ready, but not quite yet.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our emails - or just 'talk' with us.

Wish I Was On This Trail!

As usual, you can enlarge this by clicking on it. If it doesn't work, go to the blog here.

With rotten weather and the short dark days of Winter Solstice upon us, I just felt an urge to have a summer walk in the woods - so I painted one. It's no place in particular, but it's also every place I've ever hiked on the West Coast - redwoods, Doug-fir, silver fir, maybe Sitka spruce trails. It could be the Trinity Alps, Olympic's Hoh, Mt Rainier's Carbon River or possibly the Dosewallips right near us. It's all those late afternoons I've spent lingering on a trail in the warm sunshine not wanting to head home. It's smelling ancient forest duff, filled with centuries of life that are slowly decomposing into the next generation of trees. And, for a painter, it's the way the light bounces from tree to tree, warming the colors of some, cooling others, hinting at more detail than I could ever paint.

This ORIGINAL painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9" x 12" and is offered for $140 unframed.
The gold frame makes it a total of $180 and shipping adds just tad bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

To check availability of the other small originals I've blogged about the past few weeks, check the webpage here.

Boy, I sure got a lot of mail last time with the hummingbird-thing. I heard from people all over the country who have hummers attempting to stay the winter - really cold places too, like high mountain communities and along the Canadian border. Come to think of it, WE'RE along the Canadian border. We can see it from the beach. If you wonder if Climate Change is upon us, these hummers are great local examples. I've also heard from a fair amount of doubters, saying the BECAUSE of the feeders, these birds are here, but we didn't feed them until AFTER we spotted them, months past when they should have migrated to Mexico. One writer said she had a hummer outside trying to get something out of a frozen feeder. Maybe we'll never know for sure, but it's plain obvious to me.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website - packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy's currently doing. We're working on a new website for her work that should be very interesting. Stay tuned.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our emailings - or just 'talk' with us.

Anna's Hummingbirds and the December Deep Freeze

This is an older painting of mine, and the rhododendrons certainly in bloom, but I felt compelled to write about this week's freeze and the little birds in our meadow.

From coast to coast, I know we've all had amazing weather this past week. The southern storms drove a giant blast of Canadian air down and west over the Cascades, and here we've had record lows for a week. Temps haven't gotten out of the twenties, with nights down into the lower teens, weather we just don't ever get in Puget Sound. None of us have clothes for this stuff. And while we've all been suffering, that can't be anything compared to what our two wintering-over Anna's hummingbirds must be experiencing. For all my decades around the Northwest, I've never seen hummers here in winter, but last year we had one stay all season, and we've heard we're not alone with this. We put out a feeder when we spotted him, but it wasn't because of the sugar water that he was here, because we put it out AFTER we spotted him. This year we have an adult and a juvie, and we were ready with a feeder (and a 150w flood lamp on it 24 hours a day after the freeze hit). So far it's working.

I wrote about hummers a few years ago, and learned that they have ways to cope with this cold stuff. They have normal body temps of about 105-108F, with a sitting heart rate of about 250 beats per minute. However, at night they sleep normally, or, they can go into a turbid state where they actually drop their body temp to between 30 and 65 degrees (depending on need), and drop their metabolic rate to one-fifteenth of normal. In this way, they can maybe make it through a very long night of 15 degrees.

Before nightfall, they make one extra smart move. They find and remember where breakfast is going to be. Then, in the morning it takes upwards of an hour to fully wake up before flying. This requires a huge energy drain on this thumb-sized bird, and if that feeder is frozen when it gets to it, the bird is in big trouble (like a car on empty that gets to the gas station and the pumps are locked).

Temperatures are warming up now, but we've felt a great privilege to keep tabs on these two intrepid birds this week. Snow and hummingbirds just don't go together, but if this is a sign of Climate Change, I'm happy with it.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website - packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff. We're still shipping Christmas puzzles.

Click here to check out what Nancy's currently doing with her photography.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our emailings - or just 'talk' with us.

Comments are good. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.

Welcome to Sol Duc Valley

Since this wayside panel is being printed this month, I thought I'd pass it on here. I published another one of these back on November 8th, and you can see it here. For this project, I painted 21 paintings for 3 panels at Olympic National Park's Sol Duc Valley entry kiosk. With the others last year, that makes 24 images you can see while driving the 17 miles from national park gate to road's end where a trail leads to this grand waterfall - Sol Duc Falls. At 4' x 6', these are pretty large panels.

So what? Well, I like to call these efforts "public art galleries in our parks", and I now have hundreds of these things in parks, preserves and wildlife refuges around the West. You're hiking or driving along, and suddenly there's a piece of art and a small story to tell you, or interpret, what you're seeing. It's just a great way to experience a beautiful place, and, I hope, to heighten your experience beyond what nature is providing (if that's possible). These panels don't use the original art itself, but are always fabricated out of fiberglass, stainless steel or a Formica product, so they'll probably last longer than I will. I'd like to image someone coming along decades from now and stumbling over one of these things - and having it enhance their day.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website - packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy's currently doing.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email group - or just 'talk' with us.

Red-breasted Nuthatch

If you click the image, it should enlarge. If it doesn't click here for the web blog.

SOLD. Sorry to say, I sold this before I could get it up here. Thought I'd send it out anyway. I think it's a nice little painting.

These little birds are constant neighbors here. I'll bet we have at least five families around our meadow. We watch them from our dining room windows working the feeder, daintily picking at the suet cake and carrying away one sunflower seed at a time up to the safety of the nearest branch. Their voices are so thin and sweet as to sometimes sound like fluttering leaves. These guys normally feed by circling down tree trunks as in the painting, gleaning insects from bark crevices. They then fly over to another tree and start again. We have another bird here, the brown creeper, that fills just the opposite niche. It circles up the trunk, catching bugs the nuthatches miss.

Did I ever say I take commissions? Lots of them. If you liked this one, I won't do it again, but it's always a treat for me to try a subject in a different way. This painting is varnished acrylic on linen canvas, 9" x 12" and we offered it for $140 unframed. The gold frame makes it a total of $180 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week. Nuthatches: It feels like I've just painted a family member here.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website - packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy's currently doing. She has some interesting new work from the Seattle Day of the Dead Festival on her blog.

I recently put up a web page of many of my murals. I think there's about 50 of them here. Check it out.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family - or just 'talk' with us.

Ooops. Yeah, and I KNOW I misspelled Bryce in the last entry. Sorry Paula and everyone there at the park.

Ancient Bristlecone Pines mural

Finally, I got this puppy finished up. It was quite a handful with lots of other work coming and going through the studio. If you click on the image, it should enlarge. If not, go here to the blog.

This is destined for The Crater Lake Institute, that, through the years, has commissioned me for many of these types of paintings. Next summer we'll have products like puzzles available, but there's lots of design work to do before that happens.

When I sent out the sketch for this awhile ago, I received lots of mail about where to see these trees and just how to do a painting like this. The 3' x 5' painting is on hardboard so I had a smooth surface to begin with. I primed it with dry-brush latex to rough it up slightly, making for good textural effects. These are worked up from the back forward, so the foreground flowers are the last to go in, and there's lots of hidden stuff in that foreground. I recently put up a page on the main website with a page of murals. There's currently about 50 for you to see, so check it out here.


SO: Where can you see these bristlecones (that DO have bristled cones)? Well, you're not going to this time of year, but if you're looking for a great trip next summer, check out the bristlecones east of Bishop CA in the Whites or at Great Basin National Park way out near Ely Nevada, or Brice Canyon National Park in Utah. They're high-elevation trees - at 10,000 feet or so on dry windswept ridgetops in limestone, a place where nothing else can easily grow. It's worth a trip to walk beneath the oldest trees on the planet, some dated to almost 5,000 years of age. Even the downed branches are beyond my comprehension - some have been dated back 9,000 years from the present. To put that into context, the woolly mammoth was still around then!

Here's the original pencil sketch:

And here's the half way progress report I blogged about a month ago.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website - packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy's currently doing. There's some good new stuff here on her blog about the Day of the Dead Celebration in Seattle.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family - or just 'talk' with us. If you know someone else that might enjoy this, let us know. Our list is growing.

Riverside Red Alders

I'm still whacking away on the bristlecone painting for Crater Lake Institute, but here's something I did yesterday just for the pleasure of it. If you click the image, it should enlarge. If not, just go to the blog. I have more of these, but my web server has been 'migrating', so the blog has been shut down this week. Just what 'migrating' means, I'm not sure, but I wish I was doing some of that myself. Avalanche warnings are up in the mountains already.

Streamside Red Alders

For those reading from other parts of the planet besides the Northwest, red alder is a common lowland tree found in moist Northwest stream-side forests. They often appear after logging to revitalize trashed-out land and conveniently add nitrogen to the soil by 'fixing' it from the air. Our woods are full of them, so I know the tree well. In fact, there's currently a red-alder log in the fire as I write this. It's a very beautiful tree to paint because of the gray and brown, speckled patchwork trunk patterns. There are other alders, but this one has a sure identifier. The edges of each leaf curl under slightly right along the edges - a little fact that most field guides don't tell you.

This original acrylic painting is varnished on linen canvas, 9" x 12" and $140 unframed.
The gold frame makes it a total of $180 and shipping adds just a bit more depending on your zone or if you take the frame. This is the original, NOT a print.
Email us for details.

Thanks for reading this week.
Larry Eifert

Click here to go to our main website - packed with jigsaw puzzles, prints and other stuff.

Click here to check out what Nancy's currently doing on her blog and website. Pretty interesting stuff on the blog.

Or, send us an email to opt in or out of our email family - or just 'talk' with us.

You can also leave comments on the blog here. Every little bit helps me understand how to be a better painter.