Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

August 23 finds me in a 50 metre long, tear-drop-shaped bog on the plateau between McKinley Creek and Oliver Gulch in the Caledonia Gorge Protected Natural Area. It's a warm, sunny day so I'm in the shade of the forest on the south side, looking out to three snaggly tall spruces in the centre. These trees may be 200 years old or more, though they're only a foot in diameter. They are attended by young Spruces, one of which is being gestured to by the long arm of a tall gaunt one. Most of the Bio-blitz participants have come here today,  because when Aaron was out with the mammal collectors a few days ago he glimpsed an ant of a species not previously known from the PNA, and everyone is out to help look for it. They all disappeared to the west as I was setting up to paint, and left me alone in the bog. I am standing at my easel. A Red Squirrel churrs in the forest behind me, and a blue Dragonfly courses past in the sunshine, darting around the low, Moose-browsed Spruce...

20 August finds me painting this magnificent polypore fungus at the Open House of our Caledonia Gorge PNA Bio-blitz. Specialists, students, and volunteers are all at our tables in the "Lab" (the barn-like hunting headquarters of the Shepody Pheasant Preserve) and visitors watch Science (and art) being done. This fungus, 30 cm across, was found on August 14 beside the Canada Creek trail beneath a Spruce beside the rocky creek, near where I

18 August finds me in the Lab, painting a Jumping Mouse ( Napaeozapus insignis ) brought in by the Bio-blitz mammal collectors from one of their traplines in the south part of the Caledonia Gorge Protected Natural Area. This is a very fast mouse, capable of jumping as much as 3 metres in a single bound. It is  active during daylight, with eyes smaller than those of the nocturnal Deer Mouse. Its hind feet are very long, like a miniature Kangaroo, and its hind legs and tail are stiff and muscular.

17 August finds me sitting in the woods beside the Canada Creek Trail in the Caledonia Gorge Protected Natural Area, New Brunswick, painting a natural totem pole. A dead Fir tree, knobby with burls, some larger than a person's head, tells the story of its life-long struggle to overcome… something. We don't know what causes these woody swellings in the trunks of trees - fungus, virus, insect, or some other parasite - but the living cambium beneath the bark becomes overactive at certain points and grows more woody tissue there, swelling the trunk out into a ball.  The burly tree and its healthy neighbours are standing beside a seepage that is tributary to Canada Creek, marked by the bright green balls of mossy stones, and beyond that, the forest floor rises like a wall of leaf litter under Sugar Maples and Yellow Birches.  I pitched my little painting shelter today for the first time, and it protected my painting from

On 15 August , on the north bank of Crooked Creek in the Caledonia Gorge PNA, I sat on a rock to look for a composition among the rocks in the Creek and an orange butterfly with scalloped, hook-tipped wings, frosted on the edges, sat down beside me, holding its wings open and pressed to the rock. I thought that this would make a nice painting - the dark red freckles in the smooth greenish-grey rock and the dark freckles on the orange wings. The white dot beside

14 August finds me on the west bank of Crooked Creek, in the Caledonia Gorge Protected Natural Area (PNA) north of Riverside Albert, New Brunswick. I am fascinated by the flat-sided water-smoothed gray-green rock cutting the water like a dorsal fin, and in contrast, the rusty-coloured rock lying beside it like the head of a mastiff. The colours, shapes, and textures of the rocks in Crooked Creek are so diverse that it merits another painting!

31 July finds me admiring the active "s"-curve in the spine of a very inactive fish - the carcass of a Drum (Aplodinotus grunniens) which Fred found washed up on a narrow shale beach of the Ottawa River in Rockland, Ontario. It is a hot day, and I've moved the dry, partially skeletonized fish to into the shade of a willow bush and set up to paint.  The wind