Fern Pelt of the Frontenac

-
"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
"thalli" in pale finger-tip-like fruiting bodies that turn orange when ripe with spores. Welcome to my world. This is my natural distance from things - close enough to paint them life-size. I have been so happy and contented, stroking with my brush the surfaces of fronds and trailing the wispy moss leaves and ruffling the edges of lichens and dotting the crumbly white lichen that grows with it all.... perhaps I love painting moss and lichens as much as I love painting waterfalls!

From my reference photos I can explore the shapes and colours, the depths and the textures of the ferny pelt of the Frontenac granite in my winter studio, but I'm keenly aware of my separation from the real thing. This exploration is limited to the images I captured photographically. I cannot reach out to lift that frond, or to peel back that lichen, to look for Springtails, shiny millipedes, and tiny snails. We must just imagine them from here. I'm sure they were there.

While doing a watercolour painting of a different species of Peltigera lichen in a handful of moss, collected in New Brunswick in 2012, a Springtail hopped out and landed on my hand. The specimen is now in the collection of the New Brunswick Museum and may be a species new to science. I wonder what kind of Springtails are living in the mossy, ferny, licheny pelt on the granite of the Frontenac Arch? I must return this spring to find out!

Dear supporters and patrons of my art,

This 10 x 12 inch oil painting is available, framed, for $450. For more information, contact Aleta 

Sales of my paintings support our research and conservation work,

 Aleta



Comments

  1. bevFebruary 21, 2014 at 6:21 PM

    Wonderful! Such a familiar scene. Don and I used to encounter just such tiny scenes of ferns, mosses and lichens while hiking at Charleston Lake, Frontenac Park, Murphy's Point, and other places in the region. Miss those places, but do find similar along some of the trails in Nova Scotia.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousFebruary 21, 2014 at 11:20 PM

    Does Grace Hall have regular open hours between Feb 1- April 29?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Aleta KarstadFebruary 22, 2014 at 1:19 AM

    Call the office at 613-376-6477;205

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

What do you think of this painting, and what do you know about the subject that I have painted?

Popular posts from this blog

Sturgeon Chute, Upper Rapids (oil on canvas, 12 x 16 in.) Sold

-
Image
1 October finds me painting at the upstream rapids of Sturgeon Chute on the Wanapite River, 6.7 kilometres northwest of Hartley Bay. To get just the right angle on the rapids, screened by flaming leaves of an overhanging Red Maple, I'm standing on a narrow grassy ledge, the small of my back leaning against a cold wall of smooth granite, with the feet of my easel only a few centimetres from the edge. About two metres below, courses the fast deep water,
Read more

Outfall at Nuclear Beach

-
Image
Outfall at Nuclear Beach (oil on birch panel 11x14 in.) 24 January 2024 finds me starting a plein air painting on the icy shore of Lake Ontario, near Pulaski, New York, looking east across Mexico Bay toward the cooling stack of the Nine Mile Point nuclear power station.  I have set myself up to paint on a low ice shelf close to the water, near a bank of amazing ice cobbles tumbled smooth in the waves of a recent storm. At my feet a creek is running free from beneath its silent sheets of ice, along a high barrier of storm-piled frozen wave-spray mixed with ice cobbles. The gentle swells moving in from Lake Ontario splash against ice covered boulders where it finally meets the lake. After I took my initial reference photos, cousin Delos who had guided me here to his favourite spot for photographing sunsets, departed to prepare supper.  By the time I had decided on a painting spot and arranged my plein air studio, the dark clouds on the horizon had lightened, spreading across Me...
Read more

Little Marsh in Limerick

-
Image
"Little Marsh in Limerick" (Oil on birch panel, 6 x 6 in.) 26 December 2023 finds me capturing sunset colours through a tear in the clouds over a small Cattail marsh on Forsythe Rd, 2.3 km E of McRoberts Corner, in Limerick Forest, Grenville County, Ontario. It is 7C after rain, and the road is muddy. We’ve had a rainy Christmas with temperatures well above seasonal average. Cheryl is in the driver’s seat, watching me paint my annual birthday plein air in oils on a   6 x 6 inch cradled birch panel, trying to get it covered with paint before we lose the light and go home for supper.   This little marsh, only a few minutes from home, is a familiar scene. There are observations in Fred’s database over the course of 40 years from this spot, of Muskrat, Beaver, Snapping Turtle, Painted Turtle,  Green Frog, Great Blue Heron, and Red Squirrel. This is a few hundred metres from “Site F” where we listen each spring to monitor Wood Frogs, Gray Tree Frogs, and Spring Peepers....
Read more