Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

14 October finds me painting a lichened rock face in the woods along the Fishing Lake Road in the Frontenac Axis north of Battersea, Ontario. "Don't say That's a nice view to paint," I tell myself. "Say, This is compelling! Should it be 11 x 14 horizontal to show the ferns and rock tripe below the forest - or portrait shape? The mosses and lichens are flowing down the face of the rock, following the  crevice like a waterfall, so it must be a narrow vertical. THAT is compelling!" The touselled patch of Rock Tripe curls like hand-size scraps of wet canvas painted dull olive green, showing their black velvet undersides where the edges turn up. Some kind of woodsy Goldenrod leans toward the left from a patch of Polypody near the centre of the scene, and I decide to include it for its energy - though it is just a thread of stem with narrow leaves, punctuated toward its tip by a strung out constellation of fluffy spent flowers. Compared with the st...

29 September finds me painting a scene of rapid, man-made transition north of Kemptville, Ontario. This is a shallowly ditched sand flat, bulldozed from the previous habitat within the past calendar year, near a remnant patch of Red Maple/White Birch woods. Underfoot is flat sand, missing its layer of topsoil and forest. Beyond a shallow ditch looms a pile of tree roots from last year's clearing, and beyond that, the straight edge of natural vegetation and the tall trunks of old, flood-killed trees that marks a large wetland complex that is being transitioned to a major housing development. There's a whispy stand of the Native Reed, Phragmites australis ( americanus subspecies), its lower stem nodes red & smooth, on a ridge of clayey sand at intersection of grid of bulldozed roadways. The sand is whiskered with little early-disturbance annuals, and a pronounced grey-horizon podzol soil profile is exposed at the edge of the bulldozed area. A Great Blue Heron