Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

"Fern Pelt of the Frontenac" (oil on canvas 10 x 12 in.) 14 October 2013 is a scene I'm returning to, for a closer look at the pelt of mosses, lichens, and ferns on the "Frontenac Rock Face With Rock Tripe" that I painted on that day along the Fishing Lake Road north of Battersea, Ontario. With a snowy scene outside my window and a fire in the wood stove, I'm revisiting through my photographs the diversity of textures and colours in which I feel most at home. There is just enough detail to draw me in. It seems that the closer I look, the more real it becomes to me, and I can almost smell the sharp, earthy wetness of the moss, and feel the soft, leathery fronds of the evergreen Polypody ferns. They will still be there now, green under ice and snow. In the title of this piece I play on the name of the purple palm-shaped lichen Peltigera, turning up the ruffled margins of its flat

Announcing a new book from the Library of One Thing And Another! LANDSCAPE, Progress Toward a Philosophy of Sustainable Occupancy is a collection of essays and other documents written by Fred Schueler and Aleta Karstad over the course of 25 years in the process of trying to understand human occupancy of a rural municipality in Eastern Ontario.   Decorated with ink sketches from Aleta's journals and graced by Fred's and Aleta's poems and songs relevant to the chapters, this black and white book of a little over 200 pages is a quiet revolution in itself - a challenge to people who long for a change in socio-ecological thinking, that paradigm shift that we've all heard about and are still waiting for, to think again from a fresh perspective about the Landscape in which they live.

4 February finds us thwarted in our intention to walk in to Lyn Falls northwest of Brockville, Ontario, to paint snow, ice, rocks and water. The path to the falls is unbroken knee-deep snow with a variable crust somewhere in the middle, and waist-high roadside banks cast up by the snowplows allow no room to park the van even if there were time to wade in to the falls before sunset.  So we stopped by the bridge over Golden Creek just upstream of its confluence with Lyn Creek, and followed Lyn Creek by foot along the road, where the stream narrows so the rocky far bank is close, shaded by overhanging Hemlocks. Suddenly the view of the creek bed opens out and I find myself looking up the valley toward the sunset. Two sets of Coyote tracks head away up the snowy creek. There's no time to go back to the van for my paints and still catch the light as it is now - so I paint the scene in my mind, and with the help of my camera for the shapes of things, return home to paint. The ph...

19 January finds me painting with Phil Chadwick through the sunroom window of his house on Singleton Lake near Lyndhurst, in eastern Ontario's Frontenac Arch. After a sunny afternoon in Phil's studio, helping to select and pack paintings for our upcoming group show in Sydenham, there's not much daylight left to gear up and go out to paint, so we go next door to the house for tea. The sunroom gives me a view on Singleton Lake that I hadn't seen yet, and I begin to frame potential compositions