Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

22 March finds me at a boat launch in the town of Deep River, Ontario, painting the Ottawa River with its pelt of velvety gray melting ice. Ringbill Gulls cry, swooping whitely across the dark hills of the Quebec side. I don't use Paynes Gray as a pigment, but that's the colour I've recreated for my underpainting - the blackish blue-green of the darker areas of river ice, rough and translucent as it softens to a blanket of slush. Evening approaches and the sky is constantly changing. I paint quickly using only one brush, a 1/2 inch angled flat, determined to finish this one onsite. Done - and I select a tiny round brush for the signature. Fred has been walking the shore while I paint, finding Alder with open catkins, clam shells ( Elliptio complanata and Lampsilis radiata ), and returning with hands full of Watercress to plant at home. Now we must depart for our evening of listening for Chorus Frogs. It is 17C, so it should be a good night for...

21 March finds me an hour after sunrise on the shore of White Lake, near Renfrew, Ontario. Mist lies over the frozen part of the lake, sometimes receding to reveal the darkness and detail of the trees on the little point - overhanging Cedar, Pine, and Spruce - and sometimes moving in to white them out entirely. Vehicle tracks crisscross the ice, melting it in interesting patterns. Two pairs of Common Mergansers swish down for a landing on the open water, and after

11 March finds me being filmed as I paint the stand of Scots Pines in Limerick Forest. John Barclay of Triune Arts is adding another sequence to his video documentary on what we do, and this time it's plein air painting. He filmed Fred and me carrying my paint box and easel along the snowy track to the spot I'd decided upon as the best view of some of the towering pines that I painted in 19== in my journal. Since then, Buckthorn and young pines have filled the spaces among the tall trunks - invasive aliens invading the invasive aliens. I begin with a rich yellow ochre underpainting, tinted with burnt sienna, the glow of Scots Pine underbark, which the sun highlights to gold near the tops of the trees. This stand was planted early in the history of the county forest, and it was managed as a seed orchard for Scots Pine, which at that time wasn't regarded as an invasive alien to be avoided at all costs.

7 March finds me in the high country near Russell, Ontario, sitting in the snow in a forest near the spring-fed lake which fills the famous old red shale quarry. The fabric of the air under the bright blue sky is woven with calls of low flocks of Canada Geese and several Crows, through the warp of trunks and leafless branches of Maple, Black Cherry, Yellow Birch and Aspens.  Distant dogs bark, and I hear the faint, ocean-like rushing of tires on roads - sounds washing against these forested hills from far across the flat agricultural landscape. This is the highest point of land in the South Nation drainage. Its spring-fed ponds, creeks, and forests are threatened by plans for a mega-landfill which local residents point out are on a major fault line and the headwaters of several subwatersheds. We noticed "Dump the Dump NOW" signs in yards and on fences all through the area. As I scrub the red ochre underpainting into the surface of my canvas, somewhere down the road a du...

3 February finds me sitting in Pieter Trip's forest, preparing to paint a felled dead Spruce in his Hemlock grove. In the lofty, shadowy hall of Hemlocks the dark trunks stand well spaced, and strewn about their feet is all the "coarse woody debris" of the past 50 years of fallen trunks and branches. The older layers are already part of the soil, laced with living roots and suffused with a microscopic network of fungi that helps to release nutrients that feed the trees. An old mossy log has been crushed by the fall of a dead Spruce, cut by Pieter who encourages the deposition of coarse woody debris in his woods. Its radiating branches gesture every which way, speaking of the energy gathered in growth. Its long curved branches are actually poised motionless, but I can feel in the stillness of the winter woods that they are moving -  by seasons and years and decades, from life to death to life again as the forest slowly feeds itself, with a little help from its friend...

January 26 finds me hunting for a picturesque Paper Birch in Limerick Forest, Grenville County, Ontario. Just before the road dips down into crunchy ice and snow, sloping into a tight curve that may not be navigable without 4-wheel-drive,  we stop at a clump of young Birches, their rich salmon coloured underbark glowing through a thin chalky skin. I paint them looking down from the passenger window of the van. Their emergence from the snow is enlivened by a swirl of grey twigs to the front and set off by the parallel lines and arches of darker stems among and behind them. In a setting of pearlescent snow, melted and re-frozen to reflect the various colours of the early evening sky, I see a symphony of Birches. This is the swampy/brushy second growth across from one of Limerick Forest's many Red Pine plantations. The Red Pines have popmpoms rather than properly robust crowns - none of the bold strong branches of a Temagami Red Pine here, just a thin-armed bottle bru...

5 January finds me on a snowy forest road, walking toward a Sugar bush I was told about, just off Gravel Hill Road north of Monkland, Ontario.  I've stopped to paint less than a kilometre in from the red gate, because the sun will set soon. My painting gear and my cushion, blanket, and ground sheet are all piled into a plastic recycling box to pull it behind me like a sled. Deer tracks precede me, the toes punched deeply into the snow and the dew claws making two pointed marks behind each print.