Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

"Cardinalflower in Shade" (oil on canvas 10 x 20 in. framed) 6 August 2016 found me rejoicing over flaming spikes of Cardinalflowers in bloom on a steep creekbank thick with Buttonbush and Decadon , near its outlet into  Upper Rock Lake at Opinicon Road, 8 kilometres northwest of Battersea, Ontario. We had just come from helping staff and volunteers of Nature Conservancy Canada in a cleanup bee at the old cottage site on Fishing Lake, where we'd discovered the rare freshwater mussel Ligumia nasuta in 2015. Now, as Fred walked the shore of Upper Rock Lake for mussels and snails (finding a couple of Pyganodon grandis mussel shells, a couple of Brown Mystery snails,  Campeloma decisum , and a dozen adult Banded Mystery Snails, Viviparus georgianus - strangely "peeled" by a predator).... I photographed the Cardinalflowers for a painting. Photographing them in the direct sunlight did not work. The red was too bright for the camera, and glared out to or

                                             oil on canvas 5 x 8 in  $275 1 February 2017 finds me sitting on my painting caddy in the snow, in front of the Sports Car Factory in Hallville, Ontario, working on the first painting in what I hope will be a series - of one of my favourite anthropogenic places in eastern Ontario.  Rather like a museum, both inside and out,  there are old cars and parts of cars leaning against walls, and parked and piled by the Ashes, Elms, and Apples around the perimeter of the yard. A monstrous ancient tractor parked in a sunny corner on the south side of the building, waits like a patient draft horse until it is wanted for pushing snow or rearranging old Jaguars, Austins, Mercedes, and Landrovers collected for parts. I love wandering about with my camera, capturing images of curved metal of various antiquity, either emerging from or becoming one with the landscape. 

"Sydenham Woods" oil on canvas 12 x 24 in. 22 September 2016  found me painting the slope of a forested ridge, southeast of Alvinston, Ontario. Yesterday we drove in to a waypoint we'd been given, thinking it was a rendezvous with the Ontario Nature field team, driving in along the narrow track through mature Carolinean forest to prospect for a painting site. We drove back out again to find the field party on the opposite side of the river, and there I painted the Sydenham Sycamore . So on this day we parked outside the woods and walked in to the site we'd selected for the second commissioned painting - the trunk of a majestic Burr Oak, the great smooth trunk forking above my head, and the scene looking down through the sun-splashed woods toward the unseen Sydenham River.