Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

My paintings from New Brunswick's Musquash Estuary are now complete. Fred and I are happy to present this series of 10 oil paintings for auction by e-mail, to support our Landscape Art and Science expeditions in partnership with the Nature Conservancy of Canada. The NCC have full use of the images of these paintings. View the paintings throughout the 10 posts below. The starting price for each painting is indicated at the bottom of the journal text in its blog post. Simply  E-mail me with your bid and I'll keep you privately informed of counter bids. The auction closes on Wednesday, 21 August, 2013. Aleta

  8 July found me finding Cloudberries with a woman who grew up picking them in this bog by the Gooseberry Road, near Musquash, New Brunswick. I find the internal yellow glow and the external rosy blush of these berries fascinating - and yes, the druplets are shaped like little valentines. I wasn't making it up! As the bog opens out from the forest, it looks the same as most other bogs, hummocky and bushy, with scattered stunted Tamaracks and Spruces - rather bowl-shaped, with the shortest trees towards a the centre, and with islands of taller vegetation. Cotton Grass bobs and

7 July found me photographing shaggy Birches along the Five Fathom Hole Trail near Prince of Wales, New Brunswick, returning from the spot where I'd painted "High Lookout From the Trail", and before my view of the tributary to Butler's Creek. It was the evening of a very hot day. Mosquitoes were rising as the light was mellowing, with splashes of sunlight here and there through the forest. The air was calm. The lilting fronds of ferns were motionless, and so were the sheets of bright needles flung out into the

7 July found me lagging behind on the trail, with my camera, trying again to find a paintable view of one of the little brownwater brooks crossed by footbridges on the Five Fathom Hole Trail near Prince of Wales, New Brunswick. We were returning from where I'd been painting "High Lookout From the Trail," tired after a hot day which started with having Fred briefly in hospital for diabetic shock, and then my teaching the plein air painting workshop on the wharf. With only a few days more before we had to head home to Ontario I knew I must take reference photos for finishing this series of paintings. This lovely brook collects rain water that has been steeped in the forest - dripped from leaves, trickled down bark, soaked through

5 July finds me in a grove of old White Cedar, discovering what must be Mabel Fitzrandolph's favorite pond, in land she had donated to the Nature Conservancy of Canada. We had driven in on Gooseberry Road, east of Musquash, New Brunswick, in search of this pond earlier in the day, but first we found a soggy spot with Sundews and tadpoles, screened from the road by a tangle of young Fir and Birches.  Real ponds are rare in places with rugged topography and few Beavers. Then we went farther along the road to hike down to the Hepburn Basin at low tide. On our return along Gooseberry Road late in the afternoon, carefully straddling the van's wheels over rocks and avoiding ruts, creeping down slopes and scrambling up them, we stopped at the Cedars which I'd noticed on our way in. There is not much White Cedar hereabouts, and this grove of mature wet-loving trees may indicate the  pond we'd hoped to find. We weren't out of the van and into the woods for very long befo...

      6 July finds me, after our Open House in the Musquash Recreation Centre, holding up my skirt to wade into the marsh of the Musquash Estuary. Crossing the dry thatch of the Broadleaf Cattails with Owen after me, I feel for firmer footing through the wetter bed of grass, sedges and rushes, and head for the bank of the red  clay channel for a view toward the landmark Norway Spruces in the forest that stretches

7 July finds me painting from a lookout on the Five Fathom Hole Trail, south of Prince of Wales, New Brunswick. Coming down from the forest trail through a solid patch of Bunchberry with tiny green fruit, i pushed through a tangle of Blueberry and Sheep Laurel, with little Balsam Fir trying themselves out as replacements for their relations that were cut a few years ago to open this high view of the estuary. Now I'm perched on a slope of prickly dry lichens and roots beside a hoary-twigged spruce stump at the brink of the cliff, looking across a forested granite headland toward a distant island in the