Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

  "Young Cedar in Snow" oil on birch panel 6x6 in. 26 December 2024  found me at our place in Bishops Mills on my 74th birthday, and my goal for the day was to accomplish another in the series of annual "birthday paintings." Last year this time, it was raining on the snow, and I was sheltering in a friend's car to paint a wetland scene with heavy sunset clouds. This year I was happy to be free to trudge out in the snow along the path "out back" at -7C with no precipitation, pulling a sled loaded with my painting gear and blankets, and reminiscing of the years when I boasted to Fred that any temperature above -20C was not cold enough for winter outdoor painting.   I have learned over many years of painting "en plein air," that I lose much less body heat when wrapped in a blanket to sit on the snow, than I would, standing at an easel - no matter how many clothes I have on. This is the first time I've used our sturdy high-sided "Pelican...

The Cedars Snow Dance (8 x 10 oil on canvas) 26 December 2022 finds me plodding through the deep new snow among the Cedars behind our house in Bishops Mills, Ontario. It being my birthday, the order of the day was painting en plein air. A lovely sunny day of -4C with deep new snow - I invited Fred out in my search for a scene “out back”.  I took photos of several - the most inspiring being a clump of Cedars with curving blue-shadowed snow-mantled branches, with the warm bright open space glowing through from behind. Knowing the light would be better in the late afternoon, I did some errands in Kemptville, and was back out to the site with a sled load of gear by 4:00.  Insulated by a cushion in the seat of my folding chair, I had my booted feet in a cardboard box stuffed with a down vest, my lap wrapped with a small duvet, my hands in fingerless gloves, and a hat beneath my hood, I painted in a race with the sunset, not taking time to open my thermos for a sip of hot tea. by 5...

"Dumoine Moose Marsh" (6 x 6 inch oil on birch panel) 7 August 2021 finds me carrying my painting supplies along a twisted well-trampled path through a stand of Firs, to a small marshy lake or large pond. A recently built viewing platform stands back a few feet from the waterline, well shaded by the forest edge. There's plenty of room for three standing easels, but I decide to paint a lower view of the left end of the lake, and sit on the floor to look between the railings with my legs dangling out the front. Catherine Orfald and Ruth Tait are painting with me on this fifth day of the week-long DRAW artists retreat - Dumoine River Artists for Conservation, hosted by CPAWS-OV, the Ottawa Valley chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. A few Pickerel Weed are blooming here, and one candy-pink spike of Spirea tomentosa (Steeplebush). Small floating Water Lily leaves pattern the surface through an opening in the rushes and bushes, and dapple the open water. A p...

"Winter Birches by the Rideau River" (oil on birch panel 5x7 in.) On the morning of 26 December 2019 , the old snow covering the softening ice on the Rideau twinkles brightly between the young Maples along the river edge, while the older Paper Birches show all their different tones and colours of white, and I'm fascinated by this contrast. Our earlier explorations of these woods along the river revealed a diversity of the 'spring ephemeral' wildflower species which are so missing in so many of eastern Ontario's plantation or second-growth woods. beginnings I was inspired to paint something foresty for my birthday, by our friend Bev Wigney, who, as part of the struggle to preserve mature forests in Nova Scotia from clear cutting, had called Boxing Day 'Take Back the Forest Day.' - encouraging everyone to document some aspect of a local forest. Bev's group had gone out to the little peninsula between Corbett and Dalhousie lakes, about 10 ...

Winter Creek With Cedars (oil on birch panel 6 x 6 in.) 26 December 2018 finds me doing my "Birthday painting" on the ice of the creek that Cooks' lane runs along, while Fred helps Joyce to cut our firewood from standing dead Elms and Ashes. We are at the southeastern corner of Wolford Township, 4 km southwest of our home in Bishops Mills. About 100 metres upstream of Land of Nod Road, the creek is narrow, its current maintaining a stretch of open water.  As I sit quietly painting, I can hear the water make a deep swallowing noice from beneath the ice just across from me. The slowly rising water must have pushed some air from an under-ice pocket as it creeps infinitesimally up over the softening edges. As I paint, the 'coastline' subtly changes. The weather has been warming, and the snow that is falling now will turn to rain this evening. In a pause between bouts of sawing I hear scritchy, grating sounds from somewhere behind me as the sharp teeth o...

La Grande Chute Gorge (oil on birch panel, 4x4 in.) 4 August 2018 finds me looking down into the gorge, part way down La Grande Chute on the Dumoine Rive in Quebec. I have hiked the east side trail downriver with Jennifer, one of the DRAW retreat artists, until it ends at a lookout, just at the narrowest part of the gorge.  Here all of the leaping churning water of the Dumoine, frothing white and twisting golden like pulled taffy, plunges deep and black into the gorge. The cliffs on either side are swallowing the river - and far to my left, I see were it emerges, broad, blue, and gleaming in the sun.  I’m sitting on the springy trunk of a recently broken young Pine, the rest of which extends out over the chasm. The view I've chosen, straight down into the gorge, noisy with the Chute’s millions of watery voices, includes a gnarly dwarf cedar, perched on the brink just beyond a puffy mat of Cladonia lichen bristly with Pine needles.  Clinging to the ro...

"Dumoine Aspen With Lichen" (9 x 12 in.) 2 August 2018 found me painting Lobaria pulmonaria , the Lung Lichen, growing on the trunk of a tall Aspen near Robinson Lake on the Dumoine River, Quebec. A bird somewhere off in the dripping woods insistently cries “tree, tree, tree” or perhaps it’s a baby Robin begging “me, me, me”. The Lobaria caught my attention, being lime green in its wetness, and veiny, reticulated brown and White - a network of brown with white in the spaces. The Trembling Aspen is black-lumpy all the way up to its crown of little heart shaped leaves and the lower two- thirds of the trunk is striped with dark splits. Some of the lower lumps are velvety with fine mosses. The woods are solemn and still, savouring the rain and expecting more.  This morning’s clouds have lifted from the crest of the forest across the lake, and the sun and light breeze are gently drying the wet foliage that I’ve been stepping over and pushing through to set up ...

"White Pine Among the Boulders" (oil on birch panel 8x8 in.) 22 June 2018 found me sitting on a mossy boulder, painting the base of an imposing White Pine in the Spednic Natural Protected Area, east of McAdam, New Brunswick. This is hilly forested terrain, full of gullies and boulder fields. The others have driven on up the road, in search of earthworms, leaving me here to clamber over moss-blanketed boulders until I decide on a subject to paint. I took many photos of Yellow Birches perched on massive fern-fringed rocks, clasping them snakelike with gleaming naked roots, but couldn’t decide which would be best for a painting.  Finally I’d wandered up over the hill and looked down to a sunlit valley of ferns and bushes. There at its edge rose up before me the tremendous trunk (about 80 cm diameter) of a lone White Pine, a mighty column sculpted in bas relief by grooved and plated bark, and towering its fine-needled crown up against the sky. I considered looking u...

Forsyth Road Sunset (oil on canvas 5 x 8 in.)   $275 Sold 26 December, 2017 found me driving through Limerick  Forest, in search of a scene for my annual "Birthday painting". I had started east on Limerick Rd from County Rd 18, just south of Bishops Mills, and turned south onto Cooper Road, and then south on Forsythe Rd, driving slowly and looking into the snowy woods on both sides of the road, through the rolled-down windows. We are in the midst of a lengthy "Polar Vortex" and are grateful for the foot of snow that came to blanket the ground before the deep freeze arrived. I found my scene after turning around and driving back north past "The Pit" where a mini-van was loading up with rosy-cheeked boys and their sleds, just before sunset. Cresting a low hill, my eyes were met by a familiar sight - the wetland between this morraine and the one where the road takes a "Y", was flooded with late afternoon sunglow. I paused to take photos, wit...

oil on canvas 12x16 in. $960 July 22, 2016 found me just getting up for breakfast at our Bio-blitz camp on the shore of Robinson Lake on the Dumoine River, ZEC Dumoine, Quebec. The sun was breaking through the clouds to illuminate the last of the lake mist, just drifting off the trees and reflecting itself in the mirror-still lake - but soon our hopes for a sunny day would be dampened entirely by heavy cloud and intermittent drizzle. I photographed the lake, with Pickerel weed leaves making angled reflections near shore, and the floating lily pads of Water Shield farther out on its glass-smooth surface. The subtle mood of the scene, although enchanting, would change in only a few minutes - too ephemeral for me to get my gear out and set up to paint it - so I decided to photograph it to paint later, and hike off to explore La Grande Chute for potential painting spots. I took my painting umbrella in case of showers - at first it served well as a walking stick, on the narrow undu...

oil on canvas 8x8 in.       $400 19 March 2017 found me discovering a scene to paint, among the branches of White Cedar, south-east of our house in Bishops Mills, Ontario. This is a line of Cedars between a brushy old field and a natural clearing that Fred calls the "nutrient depletion glade". This is a project to preserve the historic character of our agriculture-impoverished, shallow-soil parkland - at least in one place - while elsewhere our land management activities gradually add nutrients.  The shallow soil over bedrock was thoroughly stripped of nutrients by grazing livestock.

          oil on canvas 20 x 24 in.                                                                          I've just completed a commission from reference photos, taken for my Shore Birch painting, on our hike along the Butler Beach trail near Musquash, New Brunswick in 2013. It is wonderful to have a large canvas for this painting - large enough to be able to make the curls and shreds of Birch bark crisp and smooth, and to even show the little horizontal lenticel marks.

oil on canvas 8 x 8 in.     $400 11 August 2015  found me admiring the great Cottonwoods at the Bleriot Ferry Campground, northwest of Drumheller, Alberta. The campsite is over-bowered by Eckenwalder Cottonwoods mixed with some Populus balsamifera , (our familiar Boreal Balsam Cottonwoods), both of them growing to more than a metre in diameter.  A distant view of the sunlit banks of the Red Deer River peeks through the downswept Cottonwood boughs, and the deeply furrowed, corky gray bark of the trunk beside me communicates somehow, like a living wall.

Our Breath is in Their Leaves 2016 Calendar:  $18.99 This 2016 art calendar showcases my favourite paintings of trees from the past four years of working en plein air. On each page you will find an excerpt from my journal and two images. Some provide a detail of brushwork, and others give a glimpse of myself at work in the presence of the trees themselves. 

3 July 2015 finds me near the top of a mountain in the Nepisiguit Protected Natural Area near Mt. Carleton Provincial Park, New Brunswick. I'm sitting on a stump, leaning back against a fallen branch, and gazing up to paint a tall split-trunked Red Pine, waving its sunlit needles high against a cloud-tossed blue sky. Yesterday the Dendrochronologist (tree historian) of the BiotaNB team Ben Phillips, cored some big old trees up here and found that two Red Pines (both of them split identically into two equal tops) counted approximately 300 years old. This is a heretofore unmeasured age for Red Pine. These may be the oldest known individuals of this species in North America. So we mounted a second expedition, equipped with photographers (Steve and Nina Colwell) and an artist (myself) to hike back up today to further document the ancient Pines. We drove in and parked where a creek crosses the road, coming from a long thin Beaver dam, which we balanced along, with walking stick...

30 August 2015 finds me painting the portrait of a majestic old Burr Oak at the edge of a forested escarpment just east of Carp, Ontario. The sky and open spaces of the Ottawa Valley twinkle between the trunks and foliage of younger trees but here beneath the arch of its massive limbs the ancient Oak provides dark shade and preserves moisture, and to all my senses this is "forest interior". Deep leaf litter cushions the spaces between the rocks I've assigned for my temporary studio, and I lean back against a mossy fallen branch and breathe in the breath of the trees.  This is one of thirteen of the largest trees in the Carp Hills identified for a "big trees" contest, the winner to be announced on 13 September by our friend and tree expert Owen Clarkin.  Large, old trees may be considered to be “mother trees”. They beneficially affect the

7 April 2014 found me visiting a large Slippery Elm in a front yard about 8 km northwest of Aylmer, Quebec. As I stood back to photograph it with my back to the house it seemed to dance with the sky.  The icy Ottawa River twinkled through a row of trees just beyond the snowy field across the highway. In my painting I didn't include that screen of near trees, because I wanted you to have a clear view of the river and across it, the hills north of Shirley's Bay on the Ontario side. I was rather disoriented here as I have always related to the Ottawa River running from west to east through Ottawa - but here it runs southeast to its big bend at Aylmer before flowing east to Ottawa.

9 August 2014  finds me with other Bio-blitz participants on French Island, between French Lake and Indian Lake in the Saint John River, Grand Lake Protected Natural Area, New Brunswick. We came by boat across a narrow channel from Sand Point, and upon landing on the pebbly beach the ant collectors went east to a hillside of birches and cedars stepping up among slabs of sandstone, and the botanists went in the other direction. The Myxomycologist (slime mold specialist), the Mycologist

3 June 2014  found us just downstream of where the Trans Canada Pipeline crosses the Madawaska River, starting a painting of the steep north shore with its rocky outcrops and White Pines tossing their branches against the sky. The buried pipeline goes steeply down into the river from the far shore just to the left of this scene and then comes up through the meadow-like rightofway beside me. We'd come in from Stewartville Road along the south shore of the river, and upstream of the pipeline right-of-way, we came through mixed woods to a sunny grove of large Aspen trees,

1 June 2014 found me on another Cockburn Island beach, called by the locals "Connell's Dump", used until 1960 as a depot for the lumber and pulpwood industry on the island. The Connells floated the logs off the beach in booms, which were towed around to the dock at Tolsmaville, some to be loaded onto ships, and some to be made into boards at the two local sawmills. The last of the logs still remain, with White Cedars growing up among them, behind the ridge