Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

28 April finds me checking the Canada Plums behind Pipers House in Bishops Mills, the day after our snow storm.  The petals that had looked like damp tissue paper, peeking out from under big pillows of heavy wet snow are all dry and intact now, every flower accounted for, and light green leaves edged with burnt sienna are opening at the tips of the twigs.  The grass below their overhanging boughs is embroidered lavishly with purple-flowered Gill-over-the-ground, and Dandelions complement the purple with bright yellow pompoms. Spring has certainly bounced back from the surprise snow day.  The Violets are in full blossom, having untangled their long flower stems and rearranged their leaves since yesterday. These are a European violet, with large white and purple blossoms, and the patch grows larger every year.  The Honesty which was bowed down by snow are all up straight now, most with deep magenta 4-petalled flowers, and some with white.  Black flies hover in ...

27 April  finds us waking to large flakes of snow falling thickly all over our green spring landscape.  By 09:00 there are 4 or 5 centimetres of heavy snow on the ground and large clumps of it clinging to twigs and branches.  Along the path beneath the Manitoba Maples behind our house, I find blobs of wet snow bowing the newly opened magenta blossoms of the Honesty right to the ground, and the large patch of white and purple Violets are all touselled and untidy, having been pelted from above by lumps of wet snow falling from the trees.  Flowers in chaos with incursions of white - a great subject for watercolour! It continues to snow all day, so I take my subject indoors via digital photograph, and keep a fire going in the cookstove as I paint my watercolour by the kitchen window.

26 April finds me checking out the patch of Ostrich Fern fiddleheads at the bridge on Actons Corners Road, east of Burritts Rapids, Ontario.  I made my way down the wooded bank, through the muck left from the spring flooding, and onto the creekside flats, skirting the prickly arching canes of Raspberry and watching for last year's Ostrich Fern fertile fronds, tall, narrow blackish clubs that always flag a  fiddlehead patch.  At first I thought that I was too early, that I would find no green knobs curling up from their shaggy nests in the crowns of the raised cones that are their old accumulation of each year's leaf bases.  I stepped on a few of these firm lumps, hidden under dry frond stems and sprouting Nettles, lurched to regain my footing, winced, and apologized to the ferns in case I'd damaged their embryonic fiddleheads. Nothing showing fern green until I finally spot one.  I squat down to examine it to see if I can find a good composition, and once I...

23 April finds us on a seldom-used but well-paved stretch of Breezy Heights Road, by the big quarry south of Antrim Ontario.  A thriving population of the introduced snail Xerolenta leaves its empty shells littered so abundantly in the roadside ditch and on the dry lichened and mosssy ground between sprawling Juniper bushes, that the shells appear to be a part of the gravel substrate. From a slow moving vehicle we can see constellations of shells on the grey crushed limestone of the road shoulders, and where the off-road habitat was similar among spreading Junipers. We walk slowly back and forth on both sides of the road, scanning the  littered shells for an hour and a quarter, finding each cluster somehow defective in composition, or with not enough fresh, shells which show the brown stripe.  I was amazed that Fred's patience matched my own in this endeavour, as the afternoon sun dropped toward the horizon and my painting time became seriously shortened.  We fina...

22 April finds me admiring the four "crones" in an old pasture north of Brockville on North Augusta Road. In winter their gestures appear stark and grotesque, but as each spring coaxes the little leaves from their twigs they look to be dancing.  This one, with a gaping hole near the top of the broken main trunk seems to me to be singing. I've been contemplating these Sugar Maples for thirty years as subjects for painting, and I'm happy to be  finally getting around to it. The trees are more ancient, and perhaps more nutrient-stressed, than they were, and it seems Cattle aren't pastured in this field any more. The one spreading tree, the northern neighbour of the one that I am painting, looks like it once may have been attractive for Cattle to rest under. It is more flourishing than the others, but there's such a dense growth of invasive Cathartic Buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica) growing up among its lower branches, that Cattle couldn't rest there now. We ...

For sale at Burlington Art Centre $425 framed 21 April finds me in the village of Mountain, Ontario, driving back from the organic grain mill on Pepperville Road.  It's about 16:00.  All afternoon I've been admiring the soft spring colours of new foliage on the trees, and the vivid green of the new grass.  The landscape is so soft and bright!  On the west side of County Road #1 in Mountain I slowed to soak up this pastoral scene with cows and their calves grazing at the back of a pasture, and distant forest hazed by tree flowers and new leaf. Several large black birds forage in the watery, grassy ditch beside my van - Common Grackles with brilliant blue and green iridescence around their upper breasts.  One flies to the paige-wire fence, balancing for a moment and casting a startling white eye at me as it twiddles the long whisp of dry yellow grass in its sharp black beak.  I can tell it feels special, that it is on an important errand.  Before I...

20 April finds me in the Cooks' sugarbush, west of Bishops Mills Ontario, trying to decide which of the hundreds of blooming Trout Lilies to paint.  The potential compositions are thick on the ground here, among fallen Maple leaves, fallen branches, wrinkle-barked trunks, and mossy patches.  I followed a Honey Bee from flower to flower with my camera, resulting in one blurry photo that had focused past the subject. I'm settled down to paint this Trout Lily at 17:30, and it's a good thing I began with the blossom - because by 18:00 it is closing early for the night, along with all of the other Trout Lilies as far as I can see across the forest floor.  A great tall old snag rears its ghost-like profile vaguely above the delicate green mist of opening leaves, and looking higher I notice the moon curving pale in the baby blue sky. A Gray Tree Frog calls a few times at 18:10, and a Barred Owl hoots "Who cooks for you-all" from the swampy Cedar woods to the west at ...