Karstad Biodiversity Paintings: adventures in the colour of Canada

"Dumoine Moose Marsh" (6 x 6 inch oil on birch panel) 7 August 2021 finds me carrying my painting supplies along a twisted well-trampled path through a stand of Firs, to a small marshy lake or large pond. A recently built viewing platform stands back a few feet from the waterline, well shaded by the forest edge. There's plenty of room for three standing easels, but I decide to paint a lower view of the left end of the lake, and sit on the floor to look between the railings with my legs dangling out the front. Catherine Orfald and Ruth Tait are painting with me on this fifth day of the week-long DRAW artists retreat - Dumoine River Artists for Conservation, hosted by CPAWS-OV, the Ottawa Valley chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. A few Pickerel Weed are blooming here, and one candy-pink spike of Spirea tomentosa (Steeplebush). Small floating Water Lily leaves pattern the surface through an opening in the rushes and bushes, and dapple the open water. A p...

  "Dumoine Evening" (6 x 6 in. oil on birch panel)  4 August, 2021 finds me standing on the path just in front of my "meditation log", with my toes in the black, loamy saturated soil at the edge of the water, looking down the Dumoine River toward towering pink clouds of a humid-hazy early evening.  I love my private stretch of the Dumoine and all its lovely scenes, up-river to the east, especially in the mornings - down-river to the west in the evenings, and any time of day across to the bright grassy islands and the forested far shore.  There are three other tents pitched under the trees here along the river, but we all come and go as quietly as deer and I never see the others this side of the road to the cabin.  My tent is pitched in the shade of tall pines and spruces, and although it is cooler here than in the sunny yard of the cabin where most of the artists of the DRAW art camp have pitched their tents, the weather has been so humid that the damp cuffs of...

"Dumoine Serenity" (8 x 8 in. oil on canvas) 5 August 2021 started out foggy just as yesterday. I stepped carefully barefoot down my little trail to the river edge just before 08:00 to see if I could see a misty morning scene to paint. Everything was blurry except foreground Sweet Gale and Alder bushes, and the bright flecks of foam floating lazily down from the mouth of a creek, or the churning canyon of La Grande Chute. I took a few photos and went up to breakfast, during which the sun burned through, heralding another hot day. Now at 09:30 all the mist is gone, leaving a blue haze on the forested hills and a white haze in the sky, with a faintest tint of blue overhead and a brassy glare to the east… and that’s my morning scene, to the east. My focal point will be the glossy black river where it snakes past the far end of a narrow island, between a leaning White Pine and a golden-tipped stand of grasses, backed by the blue forest and it’s downswept skyline against the brig...

  25 July 2021 finds me finishing my watercolour of Helleborine Orchid. It has been a patient and robust subject, as it came up in a handful of grass as Fred weeded the garden on 17 July and I've had it in water, waiting to be painted, then being painted - in increments... Fred labelled and pressed it today. It had finished opening all of its flowers.   The first time I saw Helleborine was in a campground south of Tobermory on Ontario's Bruce Peninsula. I was amazed at all it's tiny fierce Lion-faces! I painted it - a very pale greenish individual, which was growing in the shade - and published it as the August page in my Wild Seasons Daybook.  Here is some information we've found about this interesting plant: Epipactis helleborine, the broad-leaved helleborine, is a terrestrial species of orchid with a broad distribution. It is a long lived herb which varies morphologically with ability to self-pollinate. ...widespread across much of Europe and Asia, from Portugal to...

Ponera Ants on Cladonia (8 x 8 in. watercolour) 10 August 2017 found me in Spednic Lake Protected Natural Area, near McAdam, New Brunswick, following Aaron Fairweather around as he collected ants. Traveling light that year, I had decided that all my paintings for the New Brunswick Museum's BiotaNB survey would be in watercolour - a couple of scenes, and several wildflowers... and this painting of a few of the ants we collected, shown exploring a tuft of the Gray Reindeer Lichen, Cladonia rangiferina that was growing near their nest. Ponera pennsylvanica live in small colonies of no more than 60 workers, under stones and in rotting wood, foraging out singly for mites, springtails, and small insects. They are very tiny ants, only about 2.5 mm in length, so I was able to use one of the museum's microscopes to begin the painting in the BiotaNB lab set up in the Lion's Hall in downtown McAdam. For lifelike poses I referred to YouTube videos of this species in captiv...

"Resident Chipmunk" (oil on birch panel 6 x 6 in.) On 14 March 2020 our resident Chipmunk was out - sitting pertly on the mossy hump of carpet that marks our dry well just outside the kitchen window. He didn't stay long, but scampered up past the Red Currant bushes and popped into a small round hole just below our Asparagus patch. This was probably its home burrow for the winter, and had me wondering whether Chipmunks eat the roots of Asparagus! 19 March finds me painting the scene, sitting against the house wall, all wrapped up and settled on cushions, my first plein air of the year. As soon as I have the underpainting done, a rough sketch scratched into it with the tail end of my brush, and the mossy green hump of carpet laid in with its halo of red sporophytes, I refer to the photo of the Chipmunk on my phone, and paint in the Chipmunk. A flock of 40 Canada Geese just flew over the village, clamouring - their V much longer on the west side than the east. A...

"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...