Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

"Musselscape" (oil on birch panel 12 x 24 in.) 29 January 2020 finds me finally putting my signature on this oil painting of a scattering of native mussel shells on the shore of the St Lawrence River near Montreal. This commission has been dragging on through various events and illnesses since I painted most of it in October at my parents' place in Westbank, British Columbia. My client tells me that he has always been impressed with how brightly coloured the mussels are at this location. Fred and I have often found the same kinds of variants expressed (in shape, thickness, or colour) within the mussel community at a site. The extreme expressed in this community is the intensity of colour in the 'nacre', or pearly inner shell. It was useful to be able to refer to the shells that he sent to me, but the scene was painted mainly from his photos. The water was still in the photo, but the more I worked on it, the more it moved under my brush - so here you the...

"Winter Birches by the Rideau River" (oil on birch panel 5x7 in.) On the morning of 26 December 2019 , the old snow covering the softening ice on the Rideau twinkles brightly between the young Maples along the river edge, while the older Paper Birches show all their different tones and colours of white, and I'm fascinated by this contrast. Our earlier explorations of these woods along the river revealed a diversity of the 'spring ephemeral' wildflower species which are so missing in so many of eastern Ontario's plantation or second-growth woods. beginnings I was inspired to paint something foresty for my birthday, by our friend Bev Wigney, who, as part of the struggle to preserve mature forests in Nova Scotia from clear cutting, had called Boxing Day 'Take Back the Forest Day.' - encouraging everyone to document some aspect of a local forest. Bev's group had gone out to the little peninsula between Corbett and Dalhousie lakes, about 10 ...

"Little Fall at High Falls" (oil on Birch panel 8 x 8 inches) 22 September 2019 finds me at High Falls on the South Nation River near Casselman, Ontario, with Fred and painting companion Charlotte King . Charlotte and I don't know what to expect at a place named "High Falls", here in the apparently flat landscape of far-eastern Ontario. Certainly as we arrive, there is no high waterfall to be seen! But as Fred explains, the South Nation River flows over a series of sills on its way to the Ottawa River, and this is a long, gradual one. The water is low since our summer drought, pooling above the hydro dam by the Conservation Area parking lot, and trickling over a spillway into a quiet shallow catchment, thence into a network of cracks and channels in the flat bedrock of the dry riverbed. Each crack is lined with tall grass that screens naturally stone-paved "rooms" from each other. The rock then subsides into a wide water mirror, reflecting ever...

"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...