Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

I've been persuaded to publish a 2026 art calendar, even though it's already January. It's been fun revisiting forest and river paintings from several years, and choosing favourites for particular months.   The message of this year is simple - woods and water are home to me. I love to paint immersed in forests and wetlands, beside rivers and waterfalls,  sharing the breath  of trees, inspired by constantly shifting sunlight and  shadow, and enchanted by birdsong  and the flitting movements of insects and small mammals  whose spirits are in the paint even if you can't see them. Each of the paintings presented here is accompanied  by journal, usually  written on the spot, so you get the story of why I was there, sometimes how I got there, what I experienced there, how I saw the place as precious, and something about the process of painting as I committed to canvas or birch panel the rhythms of nature and how light describes things. See my Woods ...

"Evening Fencerow" (oil on birch panel 8 x 10 in.) 26 December 2025 finds me stopped on the road alongside a tangled fencerow, a few kilometres northeast of our home in Bishops Mills. Evening light on a snowy field glows warmly through an energetic screen of Buckthorn bushes where horizontal stems of Virginia Creeper follow the pagewire. This is where an old fencepost marks the end of the old rail fence, here mostly fallen down and snow-covered. The snow in the ditch beside me is rumpled up and poked through with spiky winter stems and tufts of dead grass.  I was late getting out to do my traditional "birthday painting" this year, as we'd had an afternoon visitor. Prowling the country roads near home, desperate to find a suitable scene, I found it difficult  to decide between this one and a simpler vies of snowy fields angled across by more distant hedgerows.  I decided to risk the more exciting challenge of the near fencerow.  I took a few reference photos and...