Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

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

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...

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...

  8 July found me finding Cloudberries with a woman who grew up picking them in this bog by the Gooseberry Road, near Musquash, New Brunswick. I find the internal yellow glow and the external rosy blush of these berries fascinating - and yes, the druplets are shaped like little valentines. I wasn't making it up! As the bog opens out from the forest, it looks the same as most other bogs, hummocky and bushy, with scattered stunted Tamaracks and Spruces - rather bowl-shaped, with the shortest trees towards a the centre, and with islands of taller vegetation. Cotton Grass bobs and

7 July found me lagging behind on the trail, with my camera, trying again to find a paintable view of one of the little brownwater brooks crossed by footbridges on the Five Fathom Hole Trail near Prince of Wales, New Brunswick. We were returning from where I'd been painting "High Lookout From the Trail," tired after a hot day which started with having Fred briefly in hospital for diabetic shock, and then my teaching the plein air painting workshop on the wharf. With only a few days more before we had to head home to Ontario I knew I must take reference photos for finishing this series of paintings. This lovely brook collects rain water that has been steeped in the forest - dripped from leaves, trickled down bark, soaked through

5 July finds me in a grove of old White Cedar, discovering what must be Mabel Fitzrandolph's favorite pond, in land she had donated to the Nature Conservancy of Canada. We had driven in on Gooseberry Road, east of Musquash, New Brunswick, in search of this pond earlier in the day, but first we found a soggy spot with Sundews and tadpoles, screened from the road by a tangle of young Fir and Birches.  Real ponds are rare in places with rugged topography and few Beavers. Then we went farther along the road to hike down to the Hepburn Basin at low tide. On our return along Gooseberry Road late in the afternoon, carefully straddling the van's wheels over rocks and avoiding ruts, creeping down slopes and scrambling up them, we stopped at the Cedars which I'd noticed on our way in. There is not much White Cedar hereabouts, and this grove of mature wet-loving trees may indicate the  pond we'd hoped to find. We weren't out of the van and into the woods for very long befo...

7 July finds me painting from a lookout on the Five Fathom Hole Trail, south of Prince of Wales, New Brunswick. Coming down from the forest trail through a solid patch of Bunchberry with tiny green fruit, i pushed through a tangle of Blueberry and Sheep Laurel, with little Balsam Fir trying themselves out as replacements for their relations that were cut a few years ago to open this high view of the estuary. Now I'm perched on a slope of prickly dry lichens and roots beside a hoary-twigged spruce stump at the brink of the cliff, looking across a forested granite headland toward a distant island in the 

3 July finds me standing at a bridge northeast of Musquash, New Brunswick, painting a falls beyond which the tide does not reach.  The Fundy tides are such a huge part of the estuary that when I saw the river plunging vertically into the tidal zone, I knew that I just had to paint this falls. Local folk tell me that after the heavy rainfall a couple of weeks ago it was much more spectacular - churning white water literally exploding out of the slot between the rock shoulders. But I like the way it looks now, foamy tresses braided over its boulders, and demurely showing golden hints of the clear tea coloured water filtered from the forests and bogs above the estuary. I can see the white spots of Dobsonfly egg cases on the flanks of rock above the high tide line. As I paint here, balancing my palette on the cement wall beneath the steel railing of the bridge, Fred ranges about collecting drift and stealing small snails from the tops of ant hills.

19 June  finds me at the Bio-blitz open house, finishing a second painting of the bog near Albright in the Grand Lake Meadows PNA from one of my photos - the bog "Where Elfin Skimmers Live". I had nearly finished it yesterday morning, so it is not difficult filling in the dancing strokes of the forest,  and the blue and white sky above the tops of the Black Spruces - between conversations with people who stop to watch me work and ask about my paintings. All around me swirl conversations - about meadows, forests, beetles, mice, plants, roads and maps, where people have been and what they have seen. Then the chatter was silenced as the president of the New Brunswick Museum introduced this year's Bio-blitz as the first of two to be held in this Protected Natural Area, and she introduced other speakers - Don McAlpine, the organizer of the Bio-blitzes, and someone from the New Brunswick Nature Trust, and a very gracious

14 June finds me standing by the broad St John River west of Jemseg, painting a Silver Maple with its evening reflection as the flood levels of a rainy week begin to recede. Fred is searching the skim of filtered drift over packed grass for the places where there are the most snail shells. Robert Forsyth is searching the ground above the flood line for living snails, and Owen is botanizing, taking special note of Winterberry Holly, invasive Angelica sylvestris , and a

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...