Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

26 February finds me captivated by the soft snow "toques" on the Wild Cucumber pods. This one is hanging down low from the vine draping over the barnyard fence.  Its translucent membrane almost seems to glow from within like a little lampshade. Last night's fresh snow is tracked by Hares and Cottontails where I walked with the dog "out back" in the morning. Grouse tracks lace across the path from a low-branched Cedar, and my boots slipped sideways over the hard irregularities of the old crust below the soft fluffy stuff. Suddenly a Ruffed Grouse flushes, exploding from a curtain of Cedar boughs close beside us, and Marigold dashes off in the direction of the whirring wings.  Sometimes fleeing Grouse hit the sides of light-coloured buildings, perhaps taking them for openings in the trees.

20 February finds me at the kitchen table with a live Mudpuppy in a shallow basin for reference as I press and smooth with my fingers a handful of flesh-coloured modelling compound. Pictured here is my first finished sculpture, painted yesterday and posed on black velvet for a photo shoot. The live Mudpuppy becomes restless and starts to splash with its tail, so I return it to the ice-lined bucket with its fellows. Zero degrees is "room temperature" for winter Mudpuppies, and it is at this season that they are most active, feeding and wandering about on the bottom at night. In Oxford Mills they are easily seen by headlamp and searchlight. We have been studying this population every Friday night for 12 years and have not found another site where they are so visible and conducive to long term monitoring and public education. See  Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills

26 January 2011 finds me stopping again to admire Wild Turkeys in a snowy field. Today is not as cold, so their shapes are not as round. The corn stubble no longer shows above the snow, and they must dig deeper to find stray kernels and old fallen cobs. Wild Turkeys are native to Canada, but disappeared in the early 1900's due to over-hunting and deforestation.

I have just finished this commissioned painting of the Gray Tree Frog, Hyla versicolor , resting in a Manitoba Maple stump behind our house in Bishops Mills. Oil on canvas, 8 x 10 inches, this one has been very complex to paint - as Fred said this evening, "like a spilled jig-saw puzzle". I wanted the frog to blend with the lichened bark as well as showing distinctly against the rich rusty coloured soft rotted wood of the stump, so the conflict is there, accented by the stems of vines and a spiral tendril that actively gestures to the motionless frog.

Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches, Commissioned re-mastering of the 5 x 7 inch miniature, "Waves Before the Hurricane" My client requested two figures in the surf, rather than the single figure in the miniature, painted when Hurricane Earl was headed toward Nova Scotia. The two figures in the larger painting are a couple who were engaged to be married while watching the same waves I painted, on the evening before the hurricane. A very romantic subject and a very energetic one - I enjoyed painting this one, tremendously!

26 December finds me on my 59th birthday, at Ottawa's Hogsback Falls, to do my "birthday painting." I sit on my paint box behind a wrought iron fence and below me the water, leaping and churning like blended toffee and whipped cream, rushes through a channel between vertical limestone cliff and a massive rock that crouches like a "hogs back" in the middle of the river.  The wider view upstream is a fantasy of raging falls, leaping spray and river sculpted ice, but I have only half an hour before sunset and I choose a simpler composition, closer at hand. My camera battery is dead, so I can't begin by taking a reference photo to aid in finishing the painting indoors, so I just "wing it", even though the icy-fingered bush on the rock face before me must be indicated only perfunctorily in hopes that I can return some day soon to do it justice. So this is what I have, on a windy day at -12C just before dusk.

18 December finds me at the easel indoors, getting caught up on my commissions - "remastering" some of my Biodiversity Painting miniatures for people who want them larger. It's sunny outside today with the temperature rising, almost persuading me to paint outdoors, which I haven't done for weeks (having been busy with trying to sell our building) - but plein air painting's no way to fulfil my commissions! There is news of inclement weather all over the world - cold and heavy snow in Europe and the United Kingdom and various kinds of inclement weather elsewhere, disrupting transportation.