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 linen (6 x 6 in.)     $275       5 March 2016 finds me painting with Phil Chadwick on still-frozen Long Lake, near Outlet, south east of Lyndhurst, Ontario. We are facing the south west end of the lake, and facing the breeze as well, which chills our faces and fingers even though the temperature isn't much below freezing. Occasionally the sun gleams through the clouds, making golden sparkles on the distant edges of ice where the shallow end of the lake has begun to melt. Phil stands at his easel while I sit beside him on my painting caddy, holding my canvas, palette balanced on my knees.

oil on canvas 7 x 9 in.           Sold 23 May 2015 found me anchored in our canoe 'Fairhaven Bay,' at the outlet arm of Fishing Lake, northwest of Battersea, Ontario. This is the granite-walled outlet channel of a narrow, 2 kilometre long clearwater lake in mixed forest, and I'm painting the narrows looking out toward the lake.  As I sit quietly in the stern, stroking oil paint on my

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

"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

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

15 October found me standing by a little creek meandering through a vast wet meadow, 6 km north of Battersea, in eastern Ontario's Frontenac Arch.  This is part of the Nature Conservancy of Canada's tract called the "Loughborough Wilderness". The once tall grasses of the meadow are now flattened and tawny, reminding me of a salt marsh at low tide. The meadows are bounded on three sides by massive ridges of rock covered with forest. The rocks can barely be seen among the trees from this distance, and the afternoon light was fading fast. I had carried all of my painting gear out here, stepping carefully over dry lodged grasses, trying to avoid wet spots, and looking for a scene to paint, until I came to the creek and unburdened myself of paint caddy, easel, box of canvasses stool, and backpack. Then I took photos all around, and argued with myself for a long while over whether the sky, the creek, or the meadow should be most prominent in a painting, where the hori...

14 Octobe r found us driving back on Fishing Lake Road at sunset, after a day of exploration in the Nature Conservancy of Canada's Frontenac Arch Natural Area. This road runs along a height of land, a granite ridge that has been cleared for a pair of hydro lines on giant steel towers. The long pond lies far below, between us and another granite ridge that is forested. This lovely view of the pond greeted us as soon as we met the hydro right-of-way, driving up into the grassy open landscape from the woods. Fishing Lake itself is not visible from Fishing Lake Road. We had hoped to see whether any clams live in it, particularly the rare Ligumia nasuta , listed as a "Species At Risk" - but the only access to the lake by vehicle is a private laneway. The pond edge is lined with pale green duckweed, a thin line of it shows along the wetland on the far side, and a broader patch on this side, at the lower left of my painting.

October 14 found us again in the Frontenac Arch, making another traverse of Fishing Lake Road. We stopped at this granite outcrop with Juniper to look for Skinks. The sun was warm and the Juniper's shadow was long. The season is too late for Skinks, however and the weather is cool. Fishing Lake Road runs at first through forests of Maple, Oak, and pine, and then rises to follow the crest of ridges cleared for a huge hydro power line - grassland with outcrops of

18 October finds me painting from the canoe, as whirligig beetles cavort on the mirror-dark water of the south end of Elbow Lake, 5.5 km northwest of Battersea, Ontario.  The canoe is tied to a repeatedly-sprouting Beaver-felled Red Maple in a lee from the wind. The wind is still flexing the regrown brush-like tops of the White Pine across the water. The bay is covered with patches of Nuphar  - Yellow Waterlily, with all the flowerheads nipped off and their stems protruding from the water. I am barely able to

17 October  finds me painting just below the high granite crest of of Hawkridge, north of Morton, Ontario. The trees are part of the sky here, and I am part of the leaves and the mossy, lichen rocks. The pastoral landscape below, seen through the thin tray tree trunks and what's left of their autumn leaves, is soft and blurry like a smudged pastel drawing. Blue Jays echo their voices back and forth across the crest of this high granite ridge, and a White Breasted Nuthatch honks a few times.  I am painting the wall of the top of the ridge, where stands the straight trunk of a Maple that is all gnarled and twisted from eight to twelve feet above the cliff edge. When Fred and I stood at the edge of the cliff, just above where I sit now, I photographed the mid section of the tree, considering it as the subject of a painting - a rather macabre portrait of a tree twisted and tortured by some mysterious influence, some effect of growing up past the edge of the cliff, and expos...

14 October finds me painting a lichened rock face in the woods along the Fishing Lake Road in the Frontenac Axis north of Battersea, Ontario. "Don't say That's a nice view to paint," I tell myself. "Say, This is compelling! Should it be 11 x 14 horizontal to show the ferns and rock tripe below the forest - or portrait shape? The mosses and lichens are flowing down the face of the rock, following the  crevice like a waterfall, so it must be a narrow vertical. THAT is compelling!" The touselled patch of Rock Tripe curls like hand-size scraps of wet canvas painted dull olive green, showing their black velvet undersides where the edges turn up. Some kind of woodsy Goldenrod leans toward the left from a patch of Polypody near the centre of the scene, and I decide to include it for its energy - though it is just a thread of stem with narrow leaves, punctuated toward its tip by a strung out constellation of fluffy spent flowers. Compared with the st...

1 June finds me on "The Dome" at Elbow Lake Education Centre, a high outcrop of gray granite, looking down on Elbow Lake in the Frontenac Axis of eastern Ontario. Piles of lichen patterned granite are jumbled here and there on the solid bedrock, surrounded by grasses and bushes wherever they can get a roothold, and here and there the delicate, thread like Pale Corydalis nods its pink and yellow snapdragon-shaped flowers. One that I'm painting is weighed down by the attentions of a heavy Bumblebee, briskly spreading the petals and probing each flower in turn. Suddenly the air all around us is alive with a loose cloud of about 30 hunting Dragonflies, darting and swooping and hovering, their four wings a blur and their abdomens tipped up slightly. You can see three Dragonflies in my painting - one large dark one near the top, a more distant one against the lake on the left hand side, and over near the right hand edge, the glistening horizontal wings of one perched on th...

1 May finds me sitting close to the base of a huge Red Oak, painting Dutchman's Breeches as it blooms among moss and fallen branches on a low rocky bluff by the side of the one-lane track named Fishing Lake Road, north of Battersea in eastern Ontario's Frontenac Arch. It is a hot and sunny spring day, and we stopped here to investigate the "Hartrick Tract", a property recently purchased by the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

30 April finds me painting at the head of an embayment on a small lake on a Nature Conservancy property in Ontario's Frontenac Arch. The narrow bay is embraced by high granite outcrops, like a miniature Norwegian fjord - with Pines on a cliff to my left (south) and mixed forest on a high ridge to my right. I'm sitting on the ground to paint, amidst tiny pale blue violets, delicate spears of spring grass, and the nodding yellow bells of Twisted Stalk.  A pair of Turkey Vultures soar and circle, etching a thick-and-thin caligraphic ballet on robin's egg blue above the White Pines. The clouds are reaching and gesturing across the sky in unison with the sweeping branches of the Pines, and the black silouettes of dead stumps in the reflection of the sky echo the weathered stump infront of me.  I spent a long while studying the scene before I began to paint, not wanting to

14 April finds me perched on my paint box, peering into a mossy grotto in the flank of a high crest of granite that overlooks a wetland in the rugged landscape of eastern Ontario's "Frontenac Arch". This is our first visit to explore and paint a Natural Area of special interest to Nature Conservancy Canada. We plan to return several times over the course of the spring, summer, and fall, to four properties which have been donated to the NCC. This one is the "Crank Property", on Olajos Road. The crest of granite is about 50 metres long and about 5 metres high, padded on its ledges by soft green moss alternating with banks of Polypody ferns, flowing with sprays of Marginal Wood Fern, and ruffled in patches with large floppy Rock Tripe, Umbilicaria mammulata, tan on upper sides and velvety black beneath. When we first arrived we noticed the Rock Tripe on the lower shoulder at the south end, and there I took photos and searched for interesting compositions to p...