Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

"Evening Fencerow" (oil on birch panel 8 x 10 in.) 26 December 2025 finds me stopped on the road alongside a tangled fencerow, a few kilometres northeast of our home in Bishops Mills. Evening light on a snowy field glows warmly through an energetic screen of Buckthorn bushes where horizontal stems of Virginia Creeper follow the pagewire. This is where an old fencepost marks the end of the old rail fence, here mostly fallen down and snow-covered. The snow in the ditch beside me is rumpled up and poked through with spiky winter stems and tufts of dead grass.  I was late getting out to do my traditional "birthday painting" this year, as we'd had an afternoon visitor. Prowling the country roads near home, desperate to find a suitable scene, I found it difficult  to decide between this one and a simpler vies of snowy fields angled across by more distant hedgerows.  I decided to risk the more exciting challenge of the near fencerow.  I took a few reference photos and...

  "Young Cedar in Snow" oil on birch panel 6x6 in. 26 December 2024  found me at our place in Bishops Mills on my 74th birthday, and my goal for the day was to accomplish another in the series of annual "birthday paintings." Last year this time, it was raining on the snow, and I was sheltering in a friend's car to paint a wetland scene with heavy sunset clouds. This year I was happy to be free to trudge out in the snow along the path "out back" at -7C with no precipitation, pulling a sled loaded with my painting gear and blankets, and reminiscing of the years when I boasted to Fred that any temperature above -20C was not cold enough for winter outdoor painting.   I have learned over many years of painting "en plein air," that I lose much less body heat when wrapped in a blanket to sit on the snow, than I would, standing at an easel - no matter how many clothes I have on. This is the first time I've used our sturdy high-sided "Pelican...

...featuring illustrations and text from our as yet unpublished book " Fragile Inheritance, a painter's ecology of glaciated North America."   We are really pleased with the quality, printed by CoBa Studios in our neighbouring town of Merrickville. The calendar is standard size, spiral-bound, and printed on high quality smooth paper which splendidly presents the glowing colour and crisp detail of my watercolours. The spacious calendar squares are marked with Canadian holidays and notes from our seasonal observations across several decades, to which you can compare your own sightings of the first dandelion or the last frog call - as well as quirky anniversaries of interest to nature lovers, like Rock-flipping Day, and Darwin's Birthday. The 13th month, January 2026, tells the story of the making of the book - our cross-Canada travels, how I painted in the field, and why the book, started in 1984, is even more important now, in the face of increasing climate change. He...

Outfall at Nuclear Beach (oil on birch panel 11x14 in.) 24 January 2024 finds me starting a plein air painting on the icy shore of Lake Ontario, near Pulaski, New York, looking east across Mexico Bay toward the cooling stack of the Nine Mile Point nuclear power station.  I have set myself up to paint on a low ice shelf close to the water, near a bank of amazing ice cobbles tumbled smooth in the waves of a recent storm. At my feet a creek is running free from beneath its silent sheets of ice, along a high barrier of storm-piled frozen wave-spray mixed with ice cobbles. The gentle swells moving in from Lake Ontario splash against ice covered boulders where it finally meets the lake. After I took my initial reference photos, cousin Delos who had guided me here to his favourite spot for photographing sunsets, departed to prepare supper.  By the time I had decided on a painting spot and arranged my plein air studio, the dark clouds on the horizon had lightened, spreading across Me...

"Little Marsh in Limerick" (Oil on birch panel, 6 x 6 in.) 26 December 2023 finds me capturing sunset colours through a tear in the clouds over a small Cattail marsh on Forsythe Rd, 2.3 km E of McRoberts Corner, in Limerick Forest, Grenville County, Ontario. It is 7C after rain, and the road is muddy. We’ve had a rainy Christmas with temperatures well above seasonal average. Cheryl is in the driver’s seat, watching me paint my annual birthday plein air in oils on a   6 x 6 inch cradled birch panel, trying to get it covered with paint before we lose the light and go home for supper.   This little marsh, only a few minutes from home, is a familiar scene. There are observations in Fred’s database over the course of 40 years from this spot, of Muskrat, Beaver, Snapping Turtle, Painted Turtle,  Green Frog, Great Blue Heron, and Red Squirrel. This is a few hundred metres from “Site F” where we listen each spring to monitor Wood Frogs, Gray Tree Frogs, and Spring Peepers....

  Cooper Marsh in Late August (oil on birch panel 8 x 10 in.) 28 August 2023 found me painting on the back deck of the Visitors Centre at the Cooper Marsh Conservation Area. It's a hot day, and I'm demonstrating plein air painting as part of a workshop hosted by the Raisin Region Conservation Authority and inspired by our mussels project with the River Institute.  It's a hot day, so we stayed in the building's shade rather than venturing out into the sunny marsh. Also, the deck offers a higher view across the marsh to the thin line of the pale blue St Lawrence and the deeper hazy blue of the north shore of New York State, visible between the Poplars and Willows. An Osprey calls loudly and insistently overhead. A Red Squirrel scolds chirrs every once in a while, in irritation that we are still here, and once a Bull Frog thrums unseen, from open water somewhere out there among the yellow-green Carex or the dark green Scirpus, this side of the strip of tall, pale-plumed...