Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

19 March 2014  finds me on County Road 14, 2.3 km NNW Ingleside, Ontario, looking across a snowy field where Hoople Creek winds toward the bridge on Highway 401. An intermittent stream of long trucks flows from east to west and from west to east, while the  creek itself appears motionless, its stream running beneath ice and snow - but I can see its path where water has melted and re-frozen, pale sea-green and amber.  We are 700 metres east-south-east of where the Transcanada and Enbridge cross Hoople Creek. This is the first of our visits to stream crossings along the route of the pipelines that are proposed to carry the Energy East bitumen to New Brunswick.

23 February found me trampling over a snowbank to photograph a roadside Rock Elm, Ulmus thomasii  at Glen Buell at the corner of Temperance Road and Highway 29, north of Brockville, Ontario. I carried a twig and a portion of vine home to use as reference for the painting. An interesting thing about the corky thickening of bark is how it begins rather abruptly after a twig is two or three years old. Older, slow-growing twigs have corky coats nearly