Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

18 October finds me painting from the canoe, as whirligig beetles cavort on the mirror-dark water of the south end of Elbow Lake, 5.5 km northwest of Battersea, Ontario.  The canoe is tied to a repeatedly-sprouting Beaver-felled Red Maple in a lee from the wind. The wind is still flexing the regrown brush-like tops of the White Pine across the water. The bay is covered with patches of Nuphar  - Yellow Waterlily, with all the flowerheads nipped off and their stems protruding from the water. I am barely able to

5 November finds me painting on the south shore of the Ottawa River, at the end of a path from Francois du Pont Park, just west of Petrie Island. The thin curved leaves of Burr Reed draw calligraphic reflections on the water in a language unknown to me, but obvious to the river edge. As I sit painting, the meaning soaks in, elegant and clear. If the invasive European Reed, Phragmites australis were growing here, not only would it crowd out the native Burr reed, but the river would be entirely hidden from view except from higher up and farther back.  As Fred and Owen have been surveying these Ottawa River marshes for Unionids, they've been impressed by the dominance of Burreed ( Sparganium ). The haven't seen any Phragmites , invasive or native, and only a few patches of Cattails, usually the probably-alien Typha angustifolia . Nothing could be more superficially different than a Burreed's spherical fruit-head of protruding spikes, and a Cattail's stalk of compac...

17 October  finds me painting just below the high granite crest of of Hawkridge, north of Morton, Ontario. The trees are part of the sky here, and I am part of the leaves and the mossy, lichen rocks. The pastoral landscape below, seen through the thin tray tree trunks and what's left of their autumn leaves, is soft and blurry like a smudged pastel drawing. Blue Jays echo their voices back and forth across the crest of this high granite ridge, and a White Breasted Nuthatch honks a few times.  I am painting the wall of the top of the ridge, where stands the straight trunk of a Maple that is all gnarled and twisted from eight to twelve feet above the cliff edge. When Fred and I stood at the edge of the cliff, just above where I sit now, I photographed the mid section of the tree, considering it as the subject of a painting - a rather macabre portrait of a tree twisted and tortured by some mysterious influence, some effect of growing up past the edge of the cliff, and expos...

14 October finds me painting a lichened rock face in the woods along the Fishing Lake Road in the Frontenac Axis north of Battersea, Ontario. "Don't say That's a nice view to paint," I tell myself. "Say, This is compelling! Should it be 11 x 14 horizontal to show the ferns and rock tripe below the forest - or portrait shape? The mosses and lichens are flowing down the face of the rock, following the  crevice like a waterfall, so it must be a narrow vertical. THAT is compelling!" The touselled patch of Rock Tripe curls like hand-size scraps of wet canvas painted dull olive green, showing their black velvet undersides where the edges turn up. Some kind of woodsy Goldenrod leans toward the left from a patch of Polypody near the centre of the scene, and I decide to include it for its energy - though it is just a thread of stem with narrow leaves, punctuated toward its tip by a strung out constellation of fluffy spent flowers. Compared with the st...

29 September finds me painting a scene of rapid, man-made transition north of Kemptville, Ontario. This is a shallowly ditched sand flat, bulldozed from the previous habitat within the past calendar year, near a remnant patch of Red Maple/White Birch woods. Underfoot is flat sand, missing its layer of topsoil and forest. Beyond a shallow ditch looms a pile of tree roots from last year's clearing, and beyond that, the straight edge of natural vegetation and the tall trunks of old, flood-killed trees that marks a large wetland complex that is being transitioned to a major housing development. There's a whispy stand of the Native Reed, Phragmites australis ( americanus subspecies), its lower stem nodes red & smooth, on a ridge of clayey sand at intersection of grid of bulldozed roadways. The sand is whiskered with little early-disturbance annuals, and a pronounced grey-horizon podzol soil profile is exposed at the edge of the bulldozed area. A Great Blue Heron

16 August found me exploring the series of waterfalls below Sylvester Lake, Temagami District. I paddled here today with another artist from the pARTners For Wolf Lake art camp. A portage trail runs along a ridge above the falls, and the people labouring up the hot sunny trail with packs and canoes could not see much of the falls themselves as I flitted among the trees and rocks below them, finding my footing along the lower bank from fall to fall as excited as a dog on a fresh scent.

17 August found me rousing at dawn on my last day at the art camp on Wolf Lake, to grab my watercolours and sit on the rocks to capture the calm lake with the morning mist retreating. My view was south toward the white granite cliffs and the gap between headlands that marks the narrow passage that Caryn Colman and I paddled into Sylvester Lake yesterday. Perched cross-legged atop one of the angular chunks of granite that jumbled from the