Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

27 August finds me still amazed by the tide at the mouth of the Walton River at Walton, Nova Scotia.  We decided to spend the night here, to try again to find clams during the morning low tide today, as Adam came back last night without any.  He had walked all the way out to open water without being sure of what to look for in terms of evidence of clams.  It was a darkly cloudy afternoon, lightened a little toward evening, and then got dark so quickly just as the tide turned, that he would not have been able to find the shoes he'd left beneath the cliff if they hadn't been white.  Without shoes, his return would have been painfully slow, and it would have been a race between a search party and the tide, which comes right up on the cliff, leaving no place to walk when it's high. My artist's eye is so excited by the sweeping bands of red and blue in this scene, that I'm grinning all the while I'm painting it. This is the other side of the river mouth from l...

26 August finds us in Walton, Nova Scotia, at the mouth of the Walton River, on the Minas Basin, the place of the world's highest recorded tides. The tide is going out now and will soon be at its lowest, and it's threatening rain.  I've set Fred up to skin the Gannets that he found at Cap Lumiere for the New Brunswick Museum, and Adam has gone to explore the tide flats for clams. At low tide the sea goes out for more than a kilometre here, leaving a vast and fascinating landscape of channels in shining clay, and wandering bars of mixed clay, sand, and gravel - all the way out to a thin line of open water at the horizon. I am sitting on a flat rock at the edge of a shale bluff, and directly across the river, at the top of a sloping gravel shore and against the forest, a family is camping with a cluster of bright nylon tents.  This afternoon they were fishing from the tip of the headland and exploring the receding tide line. We are parked on the town side of the rive...

25 August finds me on the Richibucto Dune, northwest of Cap Lumiere, sitting at the edge of the dune grass on a knee-high bluff that crests the soft dry sand of the beach, gazing across at 'another world'   All along the beach this afternoon, ever since the krumholtz forest dwindled to a few outlying birches, the dune, crested with waving beach grass has been our horizon. I was trying to decide on which view of the beach I should paint, when Adam came down from the crest of the dune with news of a wide panorama of different habitats visible from up there - beyond our horizon. It was a surprise to the eyes after days of revelling in beach and sea, to suddenly see beyond our horizon.....  salt marsh! The very marsh that I thought was unattainable in the short time we have for hiking before breaking camp this afternoon, is suddenly revealed to us - a vast flat variegated salt marsh vista, blending gradually from bogs in the south and east to the channels of the estuary in the ...

24 August finds me sketching one of three Gannets that Fred found dead on the beach north west of where we are camped.  I have photographed it for an oil painting, but the evening light will not last long enough to even get the painting started, so I will replace this sketch with the painting when it is complete (completed on 29 August and replacing the sketch, which remains in my journal). The death of three Gannets, spaced out along 3.5 kilometres of sandy beach is a mystery to us.  Their feathers are a gleaming white, highly reflective as if they were clothed with light.  The stripes on their black feet are pale blue, as are their beaks, and the longer feathers on their heads are golden-yellow. The eyes are positioned so that they can see directly below them - the better to see fish while flying. Gannets dive from 30 metres above the water, reaching speeds of up to 100 kilometres per hour, penetrating the ocean to greater depths than other diving birds can reach. ...

23 August finds us at Cap Lumiere, New Brunswick.  Our trailer is parked at the end of the road, but a grassy track continues along a ridge of old dunes parallel to the beach, at least a kilometre along the sandy spit, toward the mouth of the salt marsh which is three kilometres further on. We camped were here in 1976 and '77, and are pleased to find it much the same as it was then.  I haven't been out to the salt marsh yet, but I've gone into the wind-sculpted "krumholtz" forest that shows darkly on the left of my view this evening, and glimpsed the bog behind it.  All four habitats, beach, salt marsh, forest, and bog, grade into one another in classic simplicity, and I described and drew the beautiful pattern of it in my first book Canadian Nature Notebook (Wild Habitats in the US) published in 1979. The salty air is soft and sweet, smelling like home to me and I hear the rhythmic 'breathing' of the sea along the beach.  Frank Ross painted a stormy w...

18 August finds me painting in the lab.  This morning I stayed to finish my watercolour of the red Grasshopper while everyone else went out for the last day of fieldwork for the two-week Bio-blitz. Karen, the student who researches bats, collected a Dwarf Rattlenake Plantain to paint, so I'm starting right in on it.  She brought three - one plant of the full-sized species, with unpatterned rich green leaves and a tall flower stalk, and two plants of the dwarf species - one in dry twiggy litter and this one in my favorite moss of damp places, Mnium.  They were all found in a Cedar forest near Doyle's Meadow. The single plant of the large species has fresh white flowers, but its stem is too tall to fit into the kind of close-up, whole-plant portrait I would like to paint.  Both plants of the dwarf species are "past flowering", but little brown scraps of what were delicate white orchid flowers still cling to the tips of the developing seed capsules.  I chose the...

17 August  finds us holding "science at work day" Open House for the BioBlitz in the lab set up in the building beside the house where our trailer is parked and tent pitched. My recent paintings are displayed beside those of the other Bio-blitz artist, Kathleen Gallant, near the front door. I have retreated to one of the tables at the back where the floor is more stable and there is less coming-and-going, to demonstrate the painting of a red grasshopper from the bog that we visited yesterday.