Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

16 August found me exploring the series of waterfalls below Sylvester Lake, Temagami District. I paddled here today with another artist from the pARTners For Wolf Lake art camp. A portage trail runs along a ridge above the falls, and the people labouring up the hot sunny trail with packs and canoes could not see much of the falls themselves as I flitted among the trees and rocks below them, finding my footing along the lower bank from fall to fall as excited as a dog on a fresh scent.

17 August found me rousing at dawn on my last day at the art camp on Wolf Lake, to grab my watercolours and sit on the rocks to capture the calm lake with the morning mist retreating. My view was south toward the white granite cliffs and the gap between headlands that marks the narrow passage that Caryn Colman and I paddled into Sylvester Lake yesterday. Perched cross-legged atop one of the angular chunks of granite that jumbled from the

15 August found me on Wolf Lake, Temagami, Ontario, in the company of eleven other artists for four days of making and taking impressions of the largest remaining tract of old growth Red Pine forest in North America. The Wolf Lake area is a designated Forest Reserve, protected from logging but not from mineral exploration or mining. Our mission as pARTners  is to transmit our wilderness experience to others through our art. I found a perch low on the rocks below camp,

30 June found me hiking into the largest remaining tract of Acadian old growth forest at Ayers Lake, southeast of Hartland, New Brunswick. This forest, surrounding Ayers Lake, is designated as a "Unique Area", and is owned by J. D. Irving, Ltd. We hope it can be preserved from logging.  Everywhere I looked there were different textures - nothing was like anything else, and the slower I walked,

27 August finds me looking into the woods from the side of Frontier Rd, southeast of Carlsbad Springs, in eastern Ontario. Each time Fred and I drove past this tree today I've admired it - must be making a statement, to the artist in me at least, and perhaps of something deeper that does not come to me in words.  The Aspen rises from waves of Frangulous Buckthorn foliage which is in the process of engulfing the native willow bushes and Red Osier Dogwood, and the shadowed trunks of other Aspens make blue-grey lines in the background as the sunset twinkles through their branches. The space that makes for distance in my painting is an opening cleared by bulldozers, perhaps last summer. It enters at an angle from the road and then turns and runs straight, deep into the property, but that's not obvious from the road. For now I'll stay by the road to paint the scarred Aspen. Today we are participating in a "Bio-blitz" - an all-taxon biological survey of a pl...