Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

14 January finds me in Ottawa, painting a First Nations stockade on Victoria Island in the Ottawa River. Anyone is welcome to go inside, but I am captivated by the story that the flags tell, so I'm sitting on a slight rise some distance from the camp so that I can see the Ottawa River, a totem pole, the stockade complete with cookhouse and the flags of First Nations all across Canada. The top of the tipi of Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat is visible above

It is with great pleasure that I post my first commissioned horse portrait. Here's hoping for many more! Teddy is a friendly horse, much beloved by his owner, and amazingly neat in his stall. He enjoys spending time outdoors even in winter and is growing a plushy warm winter coat, which doesn't show on his face yet. We decided upon a stall portrait because of the warm light that surrounds him as the winter sun comes in the back door of the barn, and the cool sky light from the front door that highlights the handsome bones of his face.

26 December finds me 61 years old, and sitting beside the first step of Lyn Falls to start this year's "birthday painting." Lyn Falls drops in several steps down the nearly vertical edge of the granite escarpment, the edge of the Lyn valley, northwest of Brockville, Ontario. Calm as a farm pond at the top, Golden Creek's black water reflects rocks and snow, approaching the falls on either side of an old Ash tree. Slipping past rocks and beneath their thin collars of ice, the freezing water sculpts wax-like mini-falls in its lacy drop over the first step and then rushes, churning below my snowy perch on the second ledge, to its next fall, and then straight like a misty scarf into the plunge pool 5 metres below. A Hemlock leans from the vertical rock wall which turns the creek to the west, threading among snow-covered boulders out of sight among the trees. Golden Creek originates about 10 km NNW of Brockville and flows southward for about 15 km through wetland ha...

13 December finds us discovering Rideau Falls, Ottawa's best kept secret! This is the mouth of the Rideau River, named in French as "curtain." I moved to Ottawa in 1971 and Fred and I have lived within an hour's drive of Ottawa ever since, without ever having seen the defining feature of this river as it joins the Ottawa River, as well as the strategic reason for the initial location of Canada's capital. We've come to attend an evening meeting in nearby Rockliffe Park, but I wanted to paint the Ottawa River before sunset. Leaving the van at a small park, the closest we can get to the mouth of the Rideau River  according to our city map, I grab my coat and camera and hurry on foot along a chain link fence which dead-ends behind a building which turns out to be the "Canada and the World Pavillion". A path leads me around the front entrance and then to a balcony-like sidewalk above the grey expanse of the Ottawa River, and there were the falls,...

26 November finds me painting the view across a snow-patched meadow that used to be the north half of Silver Lake in Port Dover, Ontario. The Misner Dam was lowered for safety reasons two years ago and since then the river has returned to its old channel along the east side of this exuberant meadow of Goldenrod, Asters, Purple Loosestrife, Nettles, and Vervain, with thickets of Willows and Honey Locust.  I can only see the river channel as a dark shadow between the tall herbs on its banks from where I stand on a picnic table to start my painting.  A Cattail marsh with patches of invasive Phragmites is beyond this scene to my left, and in the foreground you can see dishevelled, autumn-redded bunches of Nodding Smartweed (Persicaria lapathifolia).  When I turn to my right and look downstream across the paths and park benches behind me I can see the open water of the existing millpond and the bridge at its southeast end with the Misner dam below it. This river used ...

24 November finds me sheltering from the wind between a low sand dune and a cement retaining wall at Crystal Beach, Lake Erie, Ontario. The wind is blowing half a gale out along the beach. This Rose bush was glorious with yellow leaves only the day before yesterday but the wind that began last night has blown them almost all away. The rose hips are still here though, glowing like rubies in the autumn sun. The little sand coloured Toads who share this beach with the citizens of Crystal Beach are all burrowed down for the winter. No one knows exactly where they have gone, but I imagine that a number of Fowlers Toads may be sleeping in the damp sand directly below me as I sit leaning against this wall to paint the Rose bush. A wooden stairway leads up from the beach beside a vacant snack bar to a lawn, public washrooms, and a fenced parking lot. Beyond the stairway lie the sand-filled concrete ruins of the foundations of another beachside building, and that may be an even...

21 November finds me sitting on a boulder to paint the view westward, my back to Point Abino, Lake Erie, Ontario. It is a delightfully calm, sunny, sweater-temperature day and we've been brought down to the beach by one of the cottage owners of one of a resident association of Point Abino (pronounced "Ab-in-o"). The famously beautiful lighthouse is hidden around the point. Our interest is not in it but in the Fowlers Toad, a "species at risk" on the northern shore of Lake Erie. All of the toads must be burrowed down for the winter now, high on the sandy beaches. How vulnerable to digging and trampling they are, we don't know. Their eggs have been seen in the spring, in water-filled pools and dimples in places like the fossil-filled, algae-streaked limestone at my feet. In the summer, night-time visitors to the sandy beaches find the toads hopping on the wet sand at the fringes of the waves where they feed on small invertebrates. The last time we were ...