Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

  Cooper Marsh in Late August (oil on birch panel 8 x 10 in.) 28 August 2023 found me painting on the back deck of the Visitors Centre at the Cooper Marsh Conservation Area. It's a hot day, and I'm demonstrating plein air painting as part of a workshop hosted by the Raisin Region Conservation Authority and inspired by our mussels project with the River Institute.  It's a hot day, so we stayed in the building's shade rather than venturing out into the sunny marsh. Also, the deck offers a higher view across the marsh to the thin line of the pale blue St Lawrence and the deeper hazy blue of the north shore of New York State, visible between the Poplars and Willows. An Osprey calls loudly and insistently overhead. A Red Squirrel scolds chirrs every once in a while, in irritation that we are still here, and once a Bull Frog thrums unseen, from open water somewhere out there among the yellow-green Carex or the dark green Scirpus, this side of the strip of tall, pale-plumed...

"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...

  "Dumoine Evening" (6 x 6 in. oil on birch panel)  4 August, 2021 finds me standing on the path just in front of my "meditation log", with my toes in the black, loamy saturated soil at the edge of the water, looking down the Dumoine River toward towering pink clouds of a humid-hazy early evening.  I love my private stretch of the Dumoine and all its lovely scenes, up-river to the east, especially in the mornings - down-river to the west in the evenings, and any time of day across to the bright grassy islands and the forested far shore.  There are three other tents pitched under the trees here along the river, but we all come and go as quietly as deer and I never see the others this side of the road to the cabin.  My tent is pitched in the shade of tall pines and spruces, and although it is cooler here than in the sunny yard of the cabin where most of the artists of the DRAW art camp have pitched their tents, the weather has been so humid that the damp cuffs of...

"Dumoine Serenity" (8 x 8 in. oil on canvas) 5 August 2021 started out foggy just as yesterday. I stepped carefully barefoot down my little trail to the river edge just before 08:00 to see if I could see a misty morning scene to paint. Everything was blurry except foreground Sweet Gale and Alder bushes, and the bright flecks of foam floating lazily down from the mouth of a creek, or the churning canyon of La Grande Chute. I took a few photos and went up to breakfast, during which the sun burned through, heralding another hot day. Now at 09:30 all the mist is gone, leaving a blue haze on the forested hills and a white haze in the sky, with a faintest tint of blue overhead and a brassy glare to the east… and that’s my morning scene, to the east. My focal point will be the glossy black river where it snakes past the far end of a narrow island, between a leaning White Pine and a golden-tipped stand of grasses, backed by the blue forest and it’s downswept skyline against the brig...

"Resident Chipmunk" (oil on birch panel 6 x 6 in.) On 14 March 2020 our resident Chipmunk was out - sitting pertly on the mossy hump of carpet that marks our dry well just outside the kitchen window. He didn't stay long, but scampered up past the Red Currant bushes and popped into a small round hole just below our Asparagus patch. This was probably its home burrow for the winter, and had me wondering whether Chipmunks eat the roots of Asparagus! 19 March finds me painting the scene, sitting against the house wall, all wrapped up and settled on cushions, my first plein air of the year. As soon as I have the underpainting done, a rough sketch scratched into it with the tail end of my brush, and the mossy green hump of carpet laid in with its halo of red sporophytes, I refer to the photo of the Chipmunk on my phone, and paint in the Chipmunk. A flock of 40 Canada Geese just flew over the village, clamouring - their V much longer on the west side than the east. A...

"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 ...

"Little Fall at High Falls" (oil on Birch panel 8 x 8 inches) 22 September 2019 finds me at High Falls on the South Nation River near Casselman, Ontario, with Fred and painting companion Charlotte King . Charlotte and I don't know what to expect at a place named "High Falls", here in the apparently flat landscape of far-eastern Ontario. Certainly as we arrive, there is no high waterfall to be seen! But as Fred explains, the South Nation River flows over a series of sills on its way to the Ottawa River, and this is a long, gradual one. The water is low since our summer drought, pooling above the hydro dam by the Conservation Area parking lot, and trickling over a spillway into a quiet shallow catchment, thence into a network of cracks and channels in the flat bedrock of the dry riverbed. Each crack is lined with tall grass that screens naturally stone-paved "rooms" from each other. The rock then subsides into a wide water mirror, reflecting ever...

"Artist on the Dumoine" (oil on birch panel 6 x 12 in) 3 August 2019 finds me on the river bank a few minutes' walk from this year's DRAW (Dumoine River Artists for Wilderness) camp. Bonnie McQuillan is sitting near a magnificent Red Pine, painting the a downstream scene on a small canvas. On her easel is a larger painting, which she'd been working on in the morning - and I am painting her. The water is clear but rich with tannins from being fed through leaf litter and peat over a vast forested watershed of 1,776 square kilometres drained by tributaries into the Dumoine. Its channel is so deep here that it soon descends from bright golden over cobbles to black. A bright sand bar and another of cobbles make brilliant streaks along the far bank, where an eddy makes the river flow back against itself. Mark and Phil are playing in the current, letting the strong flow in the centre convey them quickly past us to the right, about 200 metres down till their head...

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 From the Bridge (oil on birch panel, 5 x 7 in.) 5 August 2018 found me painting from the bridge, looking at the west bank of the Dumoine River as it rushes down La Grande Chute, on the last painting day of the DRAW artists retreat. The day began in fog, and I was out early to see the river in a different light. I investigated the shore upstream of the bridge on the west side, where the rising sun was burning through the mist above the glassy surface of a slower part of the river as it passes a small treed island. No painting, just photos for a potential painting... Then I took some photos looking upstream from the bridge on the east side, where a majestic Cedar sweeps its branches over whitewater beginning its rush to the Chute... then turned to look downstream as the pearly light of early morning tinted the river and the sky in subtle pinks and blues - a subject more suited to a larger painting, and I had only a few small panels to choose from. Phil Chadwick ...

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...

"Spednic Lake Boulder" (oil on birch panel 6 x 12 in. collection of New Brunswick Museum) On 19 June, 2018 Fred and I drove to Spednic Lake Provincial Park in one of the BiotaNB trucks, to explore and paint on the bouldery shore of Spednic Lake, the long lake that borders the Spednic Protected Natural Area near McAdam, New Brunswick. A brisk breeze was pushing low waves in long curving lines to slosh gently against the row of distinctive boulders of all sizes that countless winters of ice had pushed up against the shore. You can see the path through the lake edge grass, made by the gradual movement shorewards of the boulder on the far left of my painting. Poet in Residence Harry Thurston and I explored a few hundred metres of the shore, careful not to twist our ankles while stepping from rock to rock, and admiring green Dragonflies just emerging from the skins of their final aquatic nymphal stage that were still clinging where they'd crawled out of the water to ...

Dumoine Partners (9 x 12 in. oil on birch panel) $750  3 August 2017 found me on the rocky riverbank of the Dumoine below the bridge at La Grande Chute, beside thundering whitewater in the company of three other painters, on the first full day of the art camp.  DRAW2017 (Dumoine River Art for Wilderness) was the first annual artists' retreat of the Ottawa Valley Chapter of Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society,  and I looked forward to four more days, relating to the spectacular Dumoine River, and enjoying the company of fellow artists. The others were up on the higher rocks just behind me, inspired by the tremendous energy of the spectacular first falls of the long, straight, natural chute, which I had painted last year . To reach my ledge, one has to step carefully on smooth, snakelike roots, through a kind of doorway between trees. Just to the right as you pass through, and facing the river, there is a small inuk of stacked rocks, and a carved wooden sign, sayin...

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.

"Musquash Bog" oil on canvas 36 x 24 in. 8 July 2013 found me wandering about, entranced, in the most beautiful bog I've ever seen - near Gooseberry Road, Musquash, New Brunswick. From the photos that I took that day, I painted the botanical detail,  "Cloudberry Kiss" , a portrait of a ripe "Bakeapple" berry, traditionally harvested here by local residents.

"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.