Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

7 April 2 014   found me taking photos for a commissioned portrait of a grand old American Elm that has been growing for over two centuries in the heart of Aylmer, Quebec. Its roots push under the pavement of Rue Broad, across from Parc Commemoratif, less than a block from Rue Principale. Rising like a monument to Nature's splendour, it sweeps the sky with the curve of its crown. Giant living relicts from the past; towering, fountain-shaped American Elms are becoming a rarity, which less than half a century ago were an abundantly common sight. Three-quarters surrounded by asphalt from road and an automobile-garage parking lot, the magnificent tree dwarfs a house on this side, and has for its constant companion a red-painted industrial-sized dumpster against its base on the other side. It measures 88 feet tall with a 5 foot diameter.

7 April 2014 found me visiting a large Slippery Elm in a front yard about 8 km northwest of Aylmer, Quebec. As I stood back to photograph it with my back to the house it seemed to dance with the sky.  The icy Ottawa River twinkled through a row of trees just beyond the snowy field across the highway. In my painting I didn't include that screen of near trees, because I wanted you to have a clear view of the river and across it, the hills north of Shirley's Bay on the Ontario side. I was rather disoriented here as I have always related to the Ottawa River running from west to east through Ottawa - but here it runs southeast to its big bend at Aylmer before flowing east to Ottawa.

20 October 2014  found me painting in late afternoon sunshine on the north bank of the Assiniboine River at Long Plain First Nations Reserve, southwest of Edwin, Manitoba. I sit on a rock amidst short grassy  Carex , about 2 metres above the current water level, my feet making prints in the damp mud growing with scrambling Knotweed, at the edge of a small stand of reed-like Sandbar Willow.

18 October 2014  found me painting a bend in the Assiniboine River 5 km south of Miniota, Manitoba, 7.5km downstream of the planned Energy East pipeline crossing.  A Bald Eagle flies across the river and I paint it into the scene where it lands to sit briefly, high in one of the tall Ash trees that reach their split, scarred trunks through the tangle of the riverine forest on the far bank.

19 July 2014   found me standing in the back of a pickup truck on the causeway through the Grand Lake Meadows near Gagetown, New Brunswick, snapping pictures of my favourite scene at my favourite time of day. I'd been craning my neck at this spot, every time we've driven the causeway - several times during last year's Bio-blitz, and even more this year, as this is the second and last year of the all-taxon survey of the Gagetown area.

24 October 2014  finds me clambering down the steep embankment from Highway 17 beside the bridge over the Eagle River, a little over two kilometres north of the town of Eagle River, Ontario.  This is a broad, clay-bed river with boulders scattered along its edges and also emerging from the flat yellow-grassed clay and gravel shores.  A tall crest of Pines and Spruces reflects darkly from the far shore. I am searching for a scene.   The soft wet sandy shore looks like a highway for wildlife. Deer tracks predominate, large and small cloven hoof prints - added to them are fox mink and Racoon, duck and Heron. The water is not quite clear, and olive brown.  An overcast day with a light breeze that one would call quiet if it weren't for highway noise.  As I study the water to determine which way

26 December 2014  found me out painting on my birthday, on the east shore of the Rideau River at  Gideon Adams Park, 3.3 kilometres south of Osgoode, Ontario. This spot is a little over 1.5 kilometres downstream from where the Energy East pipeline route crosses the Rideau River. Having chosen my scene from the vantage point of a small boulder beside the boat launch ramp, I sat with my canvas on my knees and my boots in the sun-melted black muck. Its surface was covered with a felt of bleached and drifted Star Duckweed sprinkled with tiny white snail shells. To my right rose a winter-bleached screen of Narrow-leaved Cattails, and to my right bulged a shape rather like my boulder, but Fred identified it as a hump of old foam rubber with grass growing through it.  Fred moved along the shore as I scrubbed on the burnt sienna underpainting, collecting a "recycling bag" of the kind of litter humans leave, as well as carefully gathering handfuls of the most shell-rich d...