Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

"Musselscape" (oil on birch panel 12 x 24 in.) 29 January 2020 finds me finally putting my signature on this oil painting of a scattering of native mussel shells on the shore of the St Lawrence River near Montreal. This commission has been dragging on through various events and illnesses since I painted most of it in October at my parents' place in Westbank, British Columbia. My client tells me that he has always been impressed with how brightly coloured the mussels are at this location. Fred and I have often found the same kinds of variants expressed (in shape, thickness, or colour) within the mussel community at a site. The extreme expressed in this community is the intensity of colour in the 'nacre', or pearly inner shell. It was useful to be able to refer to the shells that he sent to me, but the scene was painted mainly from his photos. The water was still in the photo, but the more I worked on it, the more it moved under my brush - so here you the...

"Artist on the Dumoine" (oil on birch panel 6 x 12 in) 3 August 2019 finds me on the river bank a few minutes' walk from this year's DRAW (Dumoine River Artists for Wilderness) camp. Bonnie McQuillan is sitting near a magnificent Red Pine, painting the a downstream scene on a small canvas. On her easel is a larger painting, which she'd been working on in the morning - and I am painting her. The water is clear but rich with tannins from being fed through leaf litter and peat over a vast forested watershed of 1,776 square kilometres drained by tributaries into the Dumoine. Its channel is so deep here that it soon descends from bright golden over cobbles to black. A bright sand bar and another of cobbles make brilliant streaks along the far bank, where an eddy makes the river flow back against itself. Mark and Phil are playing in the current, letting the strong flow in the centre convey them quickly past us to the right, about 200 metres down till their head...

La Grande Chute Gorge (oil on birch panel, 4x4 in.) 4 August 2018 finds me looking down into the gorge, part way down La Grande Chute on the Dumoine Rive in Quebec. I have hiked the east side trail downriver with Jennifer, one of the DRAW retreat artists, until it ends at a lookout, just at the narrowest part of the gorge.  Here all of the leaping churning water of the Dumoine, frothing white and twisting golden like pulled taffy, plunges deep and black into the gorge. The cliffs on either side are swallowing the river - and far to my left, I see were it emerges, broad, blue, and gleaming in the sun.  I’m sitting on the springy trunk of a recently broken young Pine, the rest of which extends out over the chasm. The view I've chosen, straight down into the gorge, noisy with the Chute’s millions of watery voices, includes a gnarly dwarf cedar, perched on the brink just beyond a puffy mat of Cladonia lichen bristly with Pine needles.  Clinging to the ro...

I bought a "Moleskine" blank-paged journal book just before leaving for our family reunion in Alberta and British Columbia, having decided to travel light and not take my oil paints, but work in ink and watercolour instead. It has been so long since I wrote one of my looseleaf journal pages that I thought I'd try something new... I mean old - returning to working in sewn-bound hard cover volumes, because the Moleskine is so charming, and of archival quality.

oil on canvas 6 x 12 in.                                                                                                                  $450 30 October 2014  found us at the Sturgeon River, 16.3 km E Jellicoe,   Thunder Bay District, Ontario.   This is half a kilometre north of where the Energy East route crosses this rocky brownwater river. We'd turned off the Transcanada Hwy 11 along Camp 51 Road, and walked down to here, on the east bank just below an island. 

Oil on canvas 7 x 9 in.              $425 11 October 2014 found us 9.5 km east of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, approaching the north bank of the Moose Jaw River on foot. We forced a path through waist-high vegetation, downhill toward the riverbank. It seemed that everything was growing there, not mixed together, but in patches. Clumps of wild Asparagus, a band of American Licorice, Wolf Willow, and more. I wanted to pause and write descriptions of each change in vegetation

oil on canvas 8 x 8 in.     $400 11 August 2015  found me admiring the great Cottonwoods at the Bleriot Ferry Campground, northwest of Drumheller, Alberta. The campsite is over-bowered by Eckenwalder Cottonwoods mixed with some Populus balsamifera , (our familiar Boreal Balsam Cottonwoods), both of them growing to more than a metre in diameter.  A distant view of the sunlit banks of the Red Deer River peeks through the downswept Cottonwood boughs, and the deeply furrowed, corky gray bark of the trunk beside me communicates somehow, like a living wall.

oil on canvas 6 x 12 in.                             Sold                                      26 December 2015  finds me perched on my painting caddy, precariously balanced with my easel on a little island of sticks and grass which is the front porch of a large Beaver lodge, on the east side of Brassils Creek, north of Burritts Rapids, Ontario. The sinking sun burns through a loose fleece above the heavier cloud bank, reflecting itself just peeking past the darkly reflected Cedars - an interesting challenge to paint quickly. Daylight succumbs to dusk early these days. A high flying flock of Canada Geese honk unseen as I finish my burnt sienna underpainting. The only other sound is the persistent trickling of the creek as it flows beneath or around something upstream - perhaps partly submerged branches from B...

Oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in.     Sold Since 1999 Fred Schueler and I have been running "Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills" in order to give these magnificent creatures the public attention they deserve, since they don't have any official status. These weekly outings also get us out to do winter fieldwork on a regular basis - because nobody knows what's out there unless somebody goes! This fall we got a phonecall from Ontario Nature as part of their research for an article about Mudpuppies. This provided the impetus for me to do the painting I've always wanted to do. Some day I would paint these giant aquatic salamanders as they appear on the creek bottom through shallow water by spotlight. So as soon as we got home from New Brunswick in late September, I set aside a week, and from my field experience and photos taken while wading about with

16 October 2014  found me astonished at the broad swath of cattail marsh that is Pipestone Creek, hemmed in by its forested valley wall, southwest of Broadview, Saskatchewan. The high sharp line of the flat prairie outside of this valley world is visible on the horizon though a gap in the trees. We are a little over a kilometre upstream of where the Transcanada pipeline crosses the Pipestone. We are past the places where we have the pipeline route mapped - so today we navigated by dead reckoning and were pleased to find signs for six parallel pipelines as they descend into the wide Pipestone valley, 17 kilometres southwest of

20 October 2014  found me painting in late afternoon sunshine on the north bank of the Assiniboine River at Long Plain First Nations Reserve, southwest of Edwin, Manitoba. I sit on a rock amidst short grassy  Carex , about 2 metres above the current water level, my feet making prints in the damp mud growing with scrambling Knotweed, at the edge of a small stand of reed-like Sandbar Willow.

18 October 2014  found me painting a bend in the Assiniboine River 5 km south of Miniota, Manitoba, 7.5km downstream of the planned Energy East pipeline crossing.  A Bald Eagle flies across the river and I paint it into the scene where it lands to sit briefly, high in one of the tall Ash trees that reach their split, scarred trunks through the tangle of the riverine forest on the far bank.

24 October 2014  finds me clambering down the steep embankment from Highway 17 beside the bridge over the Eagle River, a little over two kilometres north of the town of Eagle River, Ontario.  This is a broad, clay-bed river with boulders scattered along its edges and also emerging from the flat yellow-grassed clay and gravel shores.  A tall crest of Pines and Spruces reflects darkly from the far shore. I am searching for a scene.   The soft wet sandy shore looks like a highway for wildlife. Deer tracks predominate, large and small cloven hoof prints - added to them are fox mink and Racoon, duck and Heron. The water is not quite clear, and olive brown.  An overcast day with a light breeze that one would call quiet if it weren't for highway noise.  As I study the water to determine which way

26 December 2014  found me out painting on my birthday, on the east shore of the Rideau River at  Gideon Adams Park, 3.3 kilometres south of Osgoode, Ontario. This spot is a little over 1.5 kilometres downstream from where the Energy East pipeline route crosses the Rideau River. Having chosen my scene from the vantage point of a small boulder beside the boat launch ramp, I sat with my canvas on my knees and my boots in the sun-melted black muck. Its surface was covered with a felt of bleached and drifted Star Duckweed sprinkled with tiny white snail shells. To my right rose a winter-bleached screen of Narrow-leaved Cattails, and to my right bulged a shape rather like my boulder, but Fred identified it as a hump of old foam rubber with grass growing through it.  Fred moved along the shore as I scrubbed on the burnt sienna underpainting, collecting a "recycling bag" of the kind of litter humans leave, as well as carefully gathering handfuls of the most shell-rich d...

31 October 2014  found me watching rhythms in the rushing water of Aidie Creek at Highway 11, 9.5 km north north-west of Englehart. The air was calm and new snow clung to branches, whitening the leaf litter and melting on the rocks. In May of 2002 Fred and I stopped briefly here, taking note of the lovely rapids, but since we were hurrying up to cover our Cochrane area study site for the James Bay Expedition it was a short visit, with a shelly drift sample and photos of the low stepped falls. This time again our stop was brief, as we were headed south along Highway 11 to a meeting of the Ontario Rivers Alliance in North Bay. We pulled into the entrance to the picnic area just upstream of the Highway 11 bridge, and toured the extensive network of laneways among the rocks and trees, to find a spot to park near the river. We passed a lovely natural arrangement of Virgin's Bower ( Clematis virginiana ) sporting its ivory puff-balls among the

23 October 2014  finds me at a boat launch on the Winnipeg River, at the end of the Miller Rapids Road, north of Kenora, Ontario, looking upstream toward "Tunnel Island" and admiring the contrasting colour bands of the late afternoon sky to the west. Fred and Teika Newton are inspecting the shore of the bay on my left, picking up handsfulls of rich snail drift and observing Deer, Beaver, Raccoon, and  Canada Goose tracks in the mud.  A pair of  Bald Eagles whimper-chirp to each other

8 October 2014  finds me gazing at the castellate bluffs of eroded loess along the South Saskatchewan River upstream of Alberta Hwy 41, west of Burstall Saskatchewan. We could see that there were interesting bluffs as we gradually descended along the highway toward the bridge, but here at river level, they are much more impressive - and the river itself is clear and green, ruffled by the wind into wavelets that weave green and blue into a new intensity of colour that even in a narrow strip, balances the strange bold shapes and stark contrasts of the wind-carved bluffs. We drove from the bridge to a kilometre-long area of campsites to a broad rutted area at the river that serves as a boat-launch. The Transcanada Pipeline crosses the South Saskatchewan River 8.2 km upstream of here. I settle on a view of castle-like formations directly across the river and perch my folding chair on a low grassy bank just back from the cobbly shore, near a seepage that leaves the pebbles crusty wi...

7 October 2014  finds me sitting behind the guardrail in a camp chair, at the bridge over the Red Deer River, 3 kilometres northwest of Bindloss, Alberta. We came here past that village, a compact island of treed buildings in an oceanic expanse of prairie. There at the top of the bluffs, the prairie appears vast and slightly rolling, hiding its creeks and rivers in the creases of the landscape. Coming to the bridge we find the Red Deer River again, and I'm taken by the way the evening sun guilds the edges of the distant bluffs that wall this valley.

4 October 2014  finds me on a long, wood-plank bridge over the Red Deer River, 16.3 kilometres upstream of the Transcanada Pipeline crossing. The bridge is just north of a tiny place named Buffalo, near a smallish oil drilling operation, a couple of hours north of Medicine Hat, Alberta.  I am, again, enjoying sandbars, looking downriver with the prairie wind and the afternoon sun both at my back. I'm

20 September 2014  finds me looking over the Athabasca River from the "highload bypass" of the Thickwood exit from Highway 63 in Fort McMurray, Alberta.  We checked this site out yesterday evening at dusk, our first day in Fort McMurray, and found a good parking spot for me to paint from against the guardrail on the broad plateau of the ramp that curves high above the Sandbar Willows which line the river.