Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

"Making it Across, Spednic Snapping Turtle" (oil on canvas 10 x 10 in.) It's a hard life, being a turtle! I painted this portrait of a Snapping Turtle, from a photo taken by Don McAlpine of the New Brunswick Museum, in June last year at the BiotaNB survey of Spednic Protected Natural Area, near McAdam, NB. It was crossing the road at the bridge over Diggity Stream. I've shown a thin strip of riverbank beneath the truck, and a reflection of part of the bridge in the chrome bumper, but most of the painting is devoted to the task at hand - Making it Across. The truck, in the original photo, was parked on the far side of the road, but in planning the painting, I took a reference photo of a truck wheel from a more ominous perspective - that of a crossing turtle. I wanted it to look as if the driver has rolled up close to watch it cross and to hurry it along. Or maybe the truck is threatening the plodding reptile - defending the road as Truck Territory. Snappers r...

White Perch Emerging (watercolour, 8 x 5 in.) Here are three more "progress images" from the freshwater fish I painted this spring for the New Brunswick Museum, to be published by the Department of Fisheries & Oceans in their identification cards series. The finished paintings are "biological illustrations", but the stage in which each painting emerges from the paper, is Art. Golden Shiner Emerging (watercolour, 8 x 5 in.) I have no "formula" for painting fish scales across different species. Some have regular rows of scales, with well-defined scale margins, but even then, the rows curve, and increase and decrease like rows of knitting - behind the head, toward the tail, and sometimes in the middle. Then there are those species in which scale row irregularities vary between individuals, and those whose scales, although arranged in rows, are so thin and transparent that the edges are not visible - just the impressions the rows make in the skin....

Smallmouth Bass Emerging (watercolour, 8x4 in.) In June 2019 I finished the last of 20 fish watercolours to be published as identification cards by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. I remember feeling daunted by the task when the New Brunswick Museum asked me if I would do it, especially since I would be responsible for finding my own photographic reference for all of them. I began in January, and with each painting, I learned more about googling up a useful selection of reference photos, what it feels like to be a fish of each species, and with each painting, further developed techniques for counting and painting scales, drawing and painting fins, and showing different kinds of iridescence. Largemouth Bass Emerging (watercolour, 8 x 4 in.) I like to keep track of my progress on a painting, by photographing each stage. First I make a complete drawing in pencil, and then I start to paint at the head, working toward the tail. There is usually a stage in the process, whe...

"Artist on the Dumoine" (oil on birch panel 6 x 12 in) 3 August 2019 finds me on the river bank a few minutes' walk from this year's DRAW (Dumoine River Artists for Wilderness) camp. Bonnie McQuillan is sitting near a magnificent Red Pine, painting the a downstream scene on a small canvas. On her easel is a larger painting, which she'd been working on in the morning - and I am painting her. The water is clear but rich with tannins from being fed through leaf litter and peat over a vast forested watershed of 1,776 square kilometres drained by tributaries into the Dumoine. Its channel is so deep here that it soon descends from bright golden over cobbles to black. A bright sand bar and another of cobbles make brilliant streaks along the far bank, where an eddy makes the river flow back against itself. Mark and Phil are playing in the current, letting the strong flow in the centre convey them quickly past us to the right, about 200 metres down till their head...

"New Brunswick Pseudoscorpion" (oil on birch panel 12 x 16 in.) On 28 June 2019 , two days into this year’s BiotaNB survey as “Resident Artist” in the Kennedy Lakes Protected Natural Area, I found myself sliding down through the ocular tubes of a microscope, into the worlds of Rotifers and Water Bears.  As the botanists, returning to the lab trailer from their field excursions, identified their collections of fungi, mosses, and Liverworts, one of them called my attention to a Pseudoscorpion he’d found wandering among tiny mosses as if they were trees and bushes.  Pseudoscorpions are tiny predators, catching and eating anything smaller than themselves - mites, nematodes, and tiny larvae of this and that. The Pseudoscorpion we see most often is a little larger than the one I’ve painted here - the indoors species, Chelifer cancroides , is a welcome symbiont in pantry and closets. This one is as yet unidentified - the shape and proportions of claws to cephaloth...

Winter Creek With Cedars (oil on birch panel 6 x 6 in.) 26 December 2018 finds me doing my "Birthday painting" on the ice of the creek that Cooks' lane runs along, while Fred helps Joyce to cut our firewood from standing dead Elms and Ashes. We are at the southeastern corner of Wolford Township, 4 km southwest of our home in Bishops Mills. About 100 metres upstream of Land of Nod Road, the creek is narrow, its current maintaining a stretch of open water.  As I sit quietly painting, I can hear the water make a deep swallowing noice from beneath the ice just across from me. The slowly rising water must have pushed some air from an under-ice pocket as it creeps infinitesimally up over the softening edges. As I paint, the 'coastline' subtly changes. The weather has been warming, and the snow that is falling now will turn to rain this evening. In a pause between bouts of sawing I hear scritchy, grating sounds from somewhere behind me as the sharp teeth o...

La Grande Chute From the Bridge (oil on birch panel, 5 x 7 in.) 5 August 2018 found me painting from the bridge, looking at the west bank of the Dumoine River as it rushes down La Grande Chute, on the last painting day of the DRAW artists retreat. The day began in fog, and I was out early to see the river in a different light. I investigated the shore upstream of the bridge on the west side, where the rising sun was burning through the mist above the glassy surface of a slower part of the river as it passes a small treed island. No painting, just photos for a potential painting... Then I took some photos looking upstream from the bridge on the east side, where a majestic Cedar sweeps its branches over whitewater beginning its rush to the Chute... then turned to look downstream as the pearly light of early morning tinted the river and the sky in subtle pinks and blues - a subject more suited to a larger painting, and I had only a few small panels to choose from. Phil Chadwick ...