Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

Yesterday evening our Bishops Mills neighbour Lou Jerolli stopped his truck out front. Marigold, who was down in the lab, barked so insistently that I got up from supper and rushed down to see what was the matter. There was Lou, outside the front door. When I unlocked and opened, he invited me out to see the "present" he'd brought. There was a fresh road-killed Coyote in the back of his truck, and I thought, "Oh, no - I have no time to do anything with it!" Lou was sure I'd do a nice painting of it, as he was the proud owner of a print of my watercolour Fisher portrait. I explained that we were rushing to prepare for a meeting in Roebuck about Limerick Forest Advisory Committee, so he asked where he could leave it. I gave in, and said the back porch. I went back up to finish eating supper while Fred was down attending to the printing-out of documents to take. I didn't think about the Coyote again until we left for the meeting. There was the Coy...

I took photos of all this, so I really should post the followup. On 4 January we had more snow, drifted again from the back of the main roof to the garage roof, obscuring my studio light again.... but even if we pushed a hole in the drift from the window again, the weather forecast worried us. The weather was warming, and by 5 January, we were sure the morrow would bring rain, and temperatures over 10C - that's ten degrees above freezing! I imagined all that snow on the garage roof filling with rain like a gigantic, soppy, heavy, sponge. Even if the garage roof did not cave under that weight, I didn't like the thought of all that waterlogged snow freezing into a giant block of ice, and stay that way until it one day slips off onto the hood of the car. I was really feeling gloomy about this when Judy came to work on the 5th. When I explained my foreboding to her, she offered to go out the window and shovel off the roof, with the enthusiasm of a rock climber with cabin feve...

On 18 December 2007 I found my "north light" almost entirely blocked by a wall of snow. All night long it had snowed, drifting off the main roof onto the garage roof just below the north-facing Gallery windows. The Gallery was in gloom, as if curtains were drawn. Before I resumed my Sparrow watercolours, which I'd set up on the glass counter just under the best north light window in the building, I had to remove some snow. After poking at it with a sponge mop until about half the window's view was cleared, I noticed that the remaining snow bank reflected more light into my "studio" than I was getting from the heavily overcast sky, so I left it like that and resumed painting. Purple Finch compared with House Finch, for the online bird identification quiz on The Green Bird Network Note the study skins on the left of the tray - borrowed from the research collection of the Canadian Museum of Nature. I prefer to paint from a fresh bird, but such cannot be fo...