Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

23 September finds me painting on the east shore of the Ivanhoe River below The Chutes, 16 km north of Foleyet, Ontario. Here the Ivanhoe spills, foaming, across a gneiss ledge above its clay riverbed. Behind me, runs around an island in Cedar/Poplar woods. This is a complex painting. The composition is made of many little parts that need to fit together just right! I'm glad that I set up the shelter so I could keep painting through

On 19 September , as I sat finishing my painting on the bank of the Frederickhouse River, Fred noticed the moss along the sides of the Wanatango Falls, especially a bright green species that made a conspicuous patch on the west side, and he set out across the angular rocks to gather a sample of the species represented. He tried to point out to Marigold the Dog that the rocks and water were too irregular for her convenience, but she followed

19 September finds me painting Wanatango Falls on the Frederickhouse River, 23 km south of Cochrane, at the site of a proposed hydroelectric dam. I am sitting on a Spruce root that loops out of the mossy riverbank, in the shade of Spruce and Cedar. The river runs toward me through at least three slots in a massive outcrop of angular metamorphic rock, and I have chosen to paint the main falls, which is near the north side.  An Aspen towers majestically above the Cedars and Spruces on the high rocky bank, an important part of the character of the scene. I ask myself "How would I recognize a picture of this waterfall?" and the answer is "Paint its towering Aspen tree". The sides of the rocks are felted with golden and green mosses and their tops are spotted with dark frilly lichens, perhaps little Rock Tripes, which also freckle the jumble of smaller stones at the river edge downstream.  While I paint, Fred and Marigold forage upstream and downstream finding...

12 September finds me painting at our "Long Lake campsite" south of Cochrane, Ontario. This is the old highway between the spots where I painted the lake and the new forest.  Fred and Jim Rising happened to camp here in 1972 while looking for birds and frogs. Fred and I visited the site coming back from out west in 1977, and began to camp here on a regular basis, looking for Wood Frogs, in 1983. In 1992 Fred's father died of a heart attack where this road meets the highway - right at the spot where the road disappears against distant trees in this painting. He had so looked forward to returning since he'd camped here with Fred and our first daughter Elsa in the spring of 1983, and he collapsed within minutes of arrival.  Looking back up the road toward the highway, my eyes rest on the spot to the left of the road where his little truck stood until it was towed away for scrap. The gentle sunset has closed so many days since then, at the end of this loop of the...

11 September finds us 1 km south of Thorne, Ontario, just across the Ottawa River from the mill at Temiskaming. Fred, warming up with his bowl of macaroni lunch in bed in the trailer, says "One of the nice things about the nomadic lifestyle is that you have so many favorite places 'in the whole world.'" This has been a favourite place since 6 September 2001 when he was fortunate to find this place in the dark - a roadside fishing spot along Highway 63.  The river is 20 cm higher than it was when we arrived last night, held back by the Otto Holden dam downstream, just upstream of Mattawa, so Fred found no clam shells this morning, but there were small Orconectes propinquus crawling on the bottom and on the submerged boulders near shore.  He went out to look for Salamanders, and brought back a Boletus mushroom which he'd found under a White Pine, near Red Maple

28 August finds me visiting friends in Sherbrooke Quebec, and finishing a watercolour of the Felt (or Dog) Lichen, Peltigera neopolydactylon , the last of my paintings for the two-week bio-blitz at Caledonia Gorge PNA in New Brunswick.  This forest lichen is a favourite of mine. I've always thought it was called "Finger Lichen" because of how its margins, when mature, curve into uplifted 'fingers'. It even has reddish-brown 'fingernails', the apothecia for its spores.