Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

30 March was windy, so I did my painting indoors, looking out.  The Red Maple in the side front yard is just about to burst its buds into scarlet tree flowers.  I painted them in my journal many years ago.  But now I want to paint a portrait of the tree itself, as I see it through the kitchen window.  Different from the Red Maples that live in our eastern Ontario swamps, the trunk of this one is short and gnarlly, the twigs are sparse and stout, and the branching style is more like that of an Oak than a swamp Maple.  It has an interesting burl near its base that resembles the head of a baby squirrel.  The leaves of our tree are coarser and thicker tan those of most Red Maples, and one was chosen as the logo for the 30-yrs-later expedition. In years when we tap our yard trees, this one always produces lots of sweet sap.

29 March in the garden by Pipers House in Bishops Mills, Ontario - the Rhubarb is exploding from the ground!  In slow motion, I know, but the miracle of its bursting energy amazes me each spring, and each spring I sit out there and paint it. It rained all morning, about 6C with light breeze, and I gathered up a tiny pop-up screen dome tent and a big sheet of clear plastic, to make painting in the rain possible.  I dragged a sleeping bag out too, along with my easel and paint box.  But by three o'clock the sky was no longer falling, in fact it was lightening a bit, so I set up minimally with a low folding seat.  Some of the shoots already had tightly puckered leaves beside them, but I thought that if I  paint more than one Rhubarb this spring, it would be good to start here, with the simple energy of the buds starting up out of the earth. The composition directs the eye upward, to the largest bursting bud, rather than centering the gaze which a more stable arrangement would do.

26 March 2010 This is Libby's favorite view.  She lives on the third floor of a house on the highest point of Hull, Quebec, and enjoys views to the south, west, and north from her porch and bedroom window.  Across the river from Hull is Ottawa, and through this triangular space between roofs, the lights of the nation's capital come in as the last blush of sunset  leaves the windows of the office towers just to the west of the Parliament buildings.  At first I thought that I wouldn't include the wires, but then I realized that they added a strong structural element to the composition.  I did finish this painting in Libby's bedroom, after downloading my camera to my laptop - as it quickly became too dark to paint on the porch..

25 March 2010 Yes, bright blue shopping carts - festooned with drifted grass and marooned in tangles of driftwood.  We thought there might be access to the ravine from the back of this Highway 7 shopping centre on the west side of Markham, and there is!  My artistic eye was entranced by the colour and composition - the gesture of dry branches and the contrast between muddy browns and the bright plastic blue - but my naturalists eye was caught by deer tracks in the muddy bank, and paw prints of Raccoon and Mink.

The late afternoon of 24 March finds me standing in a cold puddle of soggy lawn by the parking lot at the foot of Brimley Road where it comes down into Bluffers Park.  A large Maple tree screens the bluff that flanks the road.  Its reaching branches, purpled by the shadow of the bluff behind me except for its sunlit, bud-swelling branch tips embrace the cerulean sky.  The park is busy today, a sunny 15C, though cooling toward the evening.  Four-wheelers buzz about, children scamper along the paths, and cars creep down the astonishingly sloped entrance road and position themselves here and there among the ample parking lots.  Fred checked that the stands of Phragmites reed are spreading nicely, advancing in their self appointed task of stabilizing the sandy clay bluffs, and after I lost my painting light, we drove to the parkinglot at the east end of the park to sample the beach drift.

On 23 March, from a hotel room just north of Highway 401 at Markham Rd in Toronto, I was working at my laptop by the window, happily working alone while Fred and Cheryl were away at a turtle conservation meeting.  Suddenly, the bleak paved-over landscape became animated by huge snowflakes floating down like handkerchiefs - shallowly cone-shaped like Queen Annes Lace.  I drew the snowflakes first!  As I painted, the snow stopped, leaving nary a trace on the above-freezing roof below me, and the scene became still again except for the vague flapping of the tangled wet flags, and the intermittent movement of vehicles, the scene became still again.

On 20 March Fred and I joined a hike out to the site of the planned Terry Fox Drive extension.  This willow swamp nestled among granite outcrops beside the railway tracks looked to me like prime Blandings Turtle habitat, and I settled down by the tracks, at the 4 kilometre railroad marker, where the water flows slowly through a channel in the slushy ice.  The area is said to support a major population of the endangered Blandings Turtle, as well as over 100 Butternut trees and also Wild Ginseng.  Behind us, on the other side of the tracks, a granite ridge rises up, treed with Maple and Ash, Spruce and Cedar, and decorated with ferns and moss. Fred sat beside me on a pile of Beaver dam material that has been dredged away from the culvert by a railway maintenance crew.  The wind was brisk and cold, and I had to stop at a pencil sketch, taking photos as reference for the painting.  If I'd painted the bluff, which would be blasted away in preparation for the 4-lane highway, I'd h