Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.                                 $275 27 September finds me on the bank of a brook near Ellershouse, Nova Scotia, gazing across a dark pool formed as the brook turns at a massive wrinkled and water carved bedrock wall. The rock is a greenish grey metamorphic, stained rusty-pink in places, with four little "caves" along a bedding fault, which reflect ripples on their ceilings.  From the water to its forested crest, the nearly vertical wall is 15-20 metres high. I look straight up to Pines of half a century or more waving long arms of sunlit needles against the cobalt sky. The forest has crept half way down the rock face. Spruces, Maples and Pines perch on ledges and find roothold in crevices. To my right a large Maple with lichen-whitened bark leans over the pool to reflect its 'fluorescent' leaves from lime at the bottom to crimson at the top.  It is matched by a Red Maple whose leaves haven't started to turn yet. A row of Hemlocks

26 September finds us parked along Highway 102 so that I can paint the blooming willowherb that Fred picked about 15 minutes ago where we'd stopped at the Highway 101 interchange to check a patch of tall Spartina grass which might have been  Phragmites.  We are now parked on the shoulder of Highway 102, just southeast of the Sackville River, at a real Phragmites stand that looks to be of the invasive kind. I decide that I must paint the willowherb right away, rather than waiting until we arrive at our next camp, because it may wilt. The flowers are larger and showier than those of Fireweed, to which it is closely related, and i remember that i'd had a difficult time painting Fireweed in 1984 because it wilted so easily.   Choosing the tip that gives me flowers in all stages, and popping it directly into the hole in an electronics bubble pack with a dribble of water, I'm very pleased to see the flowers which had begun to droop perking up noticeably, and so I begin to pa

25 September finds me in the Halifax Public Gardens with three participants of my plein air painting workshop. Shaded by a Robur Oak tree planted by King George and Queen Elizabeth in 1939, a statue of Ceres, goddess of grain stands poised with hand out as if she were once holding a sheaf of grain, and attracts my attention as her slight form is an understatement in all the diversity of shapes and colours in the garden. Diana and Flora complete the set of three statues which were bequeathed by Chief Justice Sir William young in 1887. It is a mild misty grey day with a few drops of rain that had us packing our paintings away temporarily in an attempt to shelter in the large Victorian bandstand, but its gate was locked. The afternoon is lightening somewhat and the sun comes out for a while, pleasing the wedding parties that have come here to have photos taken. Every time I notice a group of people it is a different wedding party, with brides maids in a different colour than the gr

23 September finds us having new tires installed on both van and trailer at Miller Tirecraft in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. While we wait I sit on a pile of cement curbing at the back of the lot to paint the bridge to Halifax past a pile of big old tractor tires at the brink of a steep slope above more industrial park and the harbour. I can see vehicles crossing the bridge with their windsheilds twinkling in the sun. My eyes are shaded by a hat and everything is brightly backlit. The surface of the harbour glares brightly to the right of my view.

21 September finds us looking up into the crown of a 400 year old Hemlock tree in Kejimkujik National Park, Nova Scotia.  Lying on my back with my head propped against the railing of the boardwalk, this is the first time I've painted up into a tree. The top of the trunk fades into a blur of grey branches in the halo of soft sunlit needles against a blue sky. I am guessing that the tree may be 40-50m tall. Its branches are stout, curved and twisted more like an Oak than a Hemlock, Higher twigs are whispy with Usnea  lichen, moving with the breeze like downy feathers. Lower on the trunk the bark is 'painted' in patches and splashes with softly weathered grey-green crustose lichen. There is none of the frilly Lobaria lichen that festoons the trunks of some of the other trees. Most of the lower branches are broken, and a section of broken branch as thick as my leg hangs in crotch of another branch and sways in the breeze. A Blue Jay flies soundlessly overhead to one of the u

oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.                          $275 19 September finds us enjoying the panoramic view from the viewpoint on Nova Scotia Highway 358 that is locally named the "Blomidon Look-off".  The road climbs fairly steeply and without switchbacks, along the south east side of the backward-hooked Blomidon Penninsula jutting into the Minas Channel, and now we look over a flat patchwork of woods, fields, roads and buildings as evening darkens the landscape and the  moon rises, nearly full.  The nearest fields and farms are almost directly below us, then the patchwork of woods, fields, roads and buildings stretches out, all in miniature to the arm of the Bay, and in the distance the main Bay. On the near shore to the north, a Fundy-red low-tide meanders down to the Bay through a patch of marsh at the mouth of Pereaux Creek, which I can see by leaning over to see past the Alders growing up beside the guard rail.

15 September finds me admiring a lush meadow of autumn wildflowers and a Hawthorn bush that overhangs the east side of the brook  downstream from Bev's place near Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. This is a Bailey bridge of steel girder-style railings, and the thin asphalt paving is cracking over the diagonal boards of the roadbed. The brook is wide here, slow flowing as the high tide in the Annapolis River pushes back against it. It's as still as a mirror - only under the bridge can we see the water move. The forest on the west bank is mostly deciduous, the Ash,  Maple, Cherries, and Birch crowding down the bank as if to view their reflections.

oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.   $275 10 September finds us in the quaint town of Annapolis Royal, in a parking lot overlooking the Annapolis River beside the historical Fort Anne. The tide is going down, revealing red mud flats and turning the river pink under dramatic evening clouds. Buildings are visible across the river in the town of Granville Ferry which serves a military base, under the long silhouette of the richly forested hills. I am having fun with this painting, as the river is making long smooth strokes of dull purplish pink with hints of  pale greenish-blue. I must work quickly though, as every time I look up from my painting its appearance is changed. When we arrived the river was strikingly striped by mud-pink, foam, and strips of slick upwelling, its appearance changing every few minutes and I have had to paint fast, but as the Sun sets and overcast moves in, the water becomes more unicolor. My photos will help me to finish it.

9 September finds us at Round Hill, Nova Scotia, appreciating Bev Wigney's old Locust trees. Bev reports that three or four Pileated Woodpeckers have been coming every day in the late afternoon to search for beetle larvae in the crevices of the deeply grooved bark, bright red heads glowing in the evening sun high among the branches as they propping their stiff tails against the bark. I haven't been very successful at photographing them today, as they are constantly on the move. Now they are gone again and I'm sitting on a stool between the van and the trailer to paint the eldest of the Black Locusts that surround the yard. Its hard corky bark flares like the edges of fabric, and criss-crosses in places as if braided. In mid-trunk it looks as if the tree has pulled both sides of a shawl around itself.  We have two Black Locusts at home in Bishops Mills, but none large as this one. Around the base of its trunk the ground cover is Goutweed, or Bishopweed, which also grows be

7 September finds me perched atop a white granite boulder, near Crawford Bridge, Nova Scotia, my knees and paint box crowding a Chokeberry bush, to paint a little Spruce tree in the lee of another boulder. It has a mop-like crown of little branches each competing to be the new leader, and at its feet are several younger Spruces doing their best to grow straight and true with lots of light but very little nutrient. I had at first thought that the clearcut was pretty recent, but the wood is very weathered, suggesting that it's a least a decade old. The exposed soil, barren wood, and trampled ground have not been re-covered by moss. In a rich soil the birch and Maple sprouts would be only a couple of years old, but here, with so much rock and so little soil, the forest was its own nutrient bank, and between the removal of nutrients in wood, and the massive effux of dissolution and erosion that accompanies logging (there is no original organic soil present) those nutrients are gon

oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.                            $275 6 September finds me gazing up into a steep forest of mossy boulders, stout Yellow Birch, Red Maple, Spruce, and Hemlock.  Some of the larger boulders are the size of a small house, and all of the smaller ones are entirely carpeted with moss. Exposed tree roots are also mossy, as are the huge trunks of fallen trees and the mounds of nurse logs. Dark green, leathery fronds of Polypody feather the sides of mossy boulders, and yellow-green Dryopteris ferns grow knee-high where they can find a bit of well-rotted wood between mossy rocks. This scene continues all the way up the slope. We pulled into a short loop of old highway that parallels Nova Scotia #357 yesterday at dusk, and when I stepped out of the trailer this morning I walked along the edge of the woods to identify a trickling sound, and found water flowing from a dark space beneath a large rock which is hand lettered in weathered red paint, BRANDY SPRING.

3 September finds us on Martinique Beach, at the mouth of Pepetswick Inlet, to see if the waves are beginning to grow larger ahead of Hurricane Earl which is forecast to reach the coast of Nova Scotia before noon tomorrow. The beach is long and curved, it's barrier dune backed by a large salt marsh, and there are several vehicles parked along the beach access road. Two groups of people are wading in the surf and a flock of Gulls rest on the long rock that juts into the crashing sea. The waves indeed are large, rising near shore from a ruffled gray sea under an inscrutable grey sky. The wind isn't strong yet, and although the sky is brooding, it doesn't appear threatening - there are just these waves rising out of it as if propagated by a force yet unseen.  Waves are coming fast in threes and fours.  Some rise high enough for light to shine green through them like glass and some crest together from two different directions, meeting in a heart-shape before curling and br

2 September finds us in the village of Prospect Bay, having been graciously allowed to camp beside Our Lady of Mount Carmel church. My artist's eye is totally delighted by the striking contrast of blue water, yellow rockweed, and white granite. We step onto the alga-stained pavement of granite bedrock among swirling mops of rockweeds - rich tawny, float-bladdered Fucus, and more elongate, thin golden Ascophylum exposed by the low tide - and in the pools, brighter yellow Ascophylum of a finer texture. Looking closely at the edges of the saltmarsh turfs, we find their grasses growing up through mats of fine, mossy Ascophylum, rubbery textured and upright, rather than sprawling like its larger relatives, and amazingly in miniature - a salt water "moss"! There is a sprinkling of white barnacles on the flanks of the tide-stained boulders, and here and there on the flat pavement, and in the pools, Periwinkle snails creep and graze.

1 September finds us on the road to the lighthouse at Peggy's Cove, undulating through a magical landscape of dish-shaped bogs, stunted spruces, and granite boulders, reminding me of taiga.  Heaths of all colours and textures carpet the spaces between rocks, and the trees either hug the ground or flag sparse, weather tortured branches with tenacious knots of foliage. It's another hot day. Even at the coast, facing the open Atlantic our thermometer reads 29C. The horizon is a blur of haze and the sea is fairly calm, slight swells breaking in bright plumes on the rocky coast far below us. The coastline toward the lighthouse is dotted whitely with huge jumbled boulders like houses on a Spanish sea coast. The lighthouse itself is seated firmly on massive glacier-shaped mounds of granite that slope roundly into the sea. When we first arrived we drove to the end of the road and found there a grey building near the lighthouse surrounded by parking lots filled with cars, and a waiti

31 August finds us at White's Lake, Nova Scotia, admiring a licheny old Apple tree that is being shaded out by Spruces.  There is no way that I can get close enough for a plein air painting, as the view that I want is from right inside the tree, standing on one of the large rocks that line the side of the parking lot.  The beach is busy with bathers, but I hardly glance at the lake, as I'm entranced with the lichen-encrusted world among the branches of this tree. It is crowded by Spruces, to the side and behind, and its leaves look tired and many have bites and brown spots, but it bravely bears a small crop of bright red fruit.  These three apples are low enough for me to capture in my reference photos for a painting. Yes, this one will be painted entirely from photos because "onsite" would be standing on a rock and ducking up among the branches - technically too difficult for sitting to paint the view that I want - and no room for a standing easel. The tree must b

30 August finds me in an old residential area of downtown Halifax, waiting for Adam to come out of his meeting, and sitting in my low folding stool by the wall of a building, to paint one of the row of little "wartime" houses directly across Bayers St. from the church parking lot of St. Catherine of Siena. A little girl chatters directly above me, on an apartment balcony, and several minutes later comes down the steps with her mother and father and they drive away in a minivan.  I'm thankful to be in the shade, because it's been a very hot day.  The front of the house is in shadow but one of its windows reflects a sunlit sign on the storefront on my side of the street. The other front window of the house shows me the evening sun glowing through a curtained back window, and a bush in the front yard is just losing the sun from the tips of its branches. In the backyard, a big bush of blooming Japanese Knotweed peeks past the right hand side of the house. I have only