16 September 2009
Waltham Bridge Boat Launch
17:01 This is the site of great Unionid diversity that Fred and Isabelle and JF discovered in 2001, when the river was much lower than it is now.
Just across the river from Pembroke, there is a nice picnic area that comes down by the Ottawa River. The river is 300m wide here. Where I sit there is a picturesque overhanging Maple. We followed a path through poison Ivy to a point, and then doubled back a little way along the sandy, rocky shore. Fred showed me a sandy alcove where the roots of an Alder are exposed. There is a drift of shells partially embedded in the sand – more Unionids than I have seen in one place in a long time! Read the rest of this entry »
16 September 2009
Canada: Ontario: Nipissing District: Ottawa River, 1.0 km SSE Thorne. 31L/11, 46.69137N 79.09649W TIME: 1910-1955. HABITAT: boulder-shore brown-water impounded Ottawa River at old log-float structures. OBSERVER: Aleta Karstad Schueler, Frederick W. Schueler. 2009/243/i, visit painting of scene looking downstream. Aleta thinks in pictures, so it’s very hard to put words down while she’s painting: “Scene looking south across calm river to hills that were sun-topped until just before she started painting. Beaver cruising offshore from lodge on bank just upstream. . . waft of pulp mill odor. . . ” Read the rest of this entry »
14 September 2009
Canada: Quebec: Parc d’la Verandrye: Lac de la Vieille at parking area. 31K/16, 46.78417N 76.21377W TIME: 1806-1935. AIR TEMP: ca 15 C, clear, calm. HABITAT: beach of sandy lake with patches of offshore Pontederia cordata. OBSERVER: Aleta Karstad Schueler, Adam Zieleman. 2009/234/g, visit Aleta’s painting site. A serene lake with a small sandy beach, provided by the park with a parking lot and picnic tables. The air is calm and the water is smooth, and the sun is just dipping behind the forest, but turning the crowns of distant hills russet. The water level has recently dropped 40 cm or so. I decide to paint my miniature in watercolour this time because of the hair-fine lines of the lake’s silver sheen against far shores, and the delicacy of tree silouettes. Read the rest of this entry »
13 September 2009
Canada: Quebec: Outaouais Region: W shore Gatineau River below Barrage Mercier. 31J/12, 46.71641N 75.98508W TIME: 1900-1945. AIR TEMP: 12 C, sunny, sunset, calm. HABITAT: campsite in Aspen>Picea glauca woods with Cornus understorey along barerock riverbank. OBSERVER: Aleta Karstad Schueler, Frederick W. Schueler, Adam Zieleman. 2009/231/-, visit first session of painting that was finished in the morning. 19:00 Arrived at a dam run by Hydro Quebec, on the Gatineau River, 11.5 km NNW of Grand-Remous. We were hunting for the site where a collection of Orconectes immunis (Calico Crayfish) was made in 2004. Read the rest of this entry »
12 September 2009
Canada: Quebec: Outaouais Region: Doran’s dock, Lac St-Joseph, 2.1 km NNW Aumond. 31J/5, UTM 18TVG 304.3 480.4 46.48430N 75.90597W. TIME: 1515-1800. AIR TEMP: 22 ca, sunny, calm. HABITAT: steep forested shore of small, indirectly impounded lake. OBSERVER: Aleta Karstad Schueler, Adam Zieleman. 2008/227/-, visit paintings of the scene across the lake. Adam is joining me to paint, down the rickety steps from the yard to a deck at the base of the floating dock. We sit facing different directions — me looking westward to the Maples glowing red against a green hillside across the water, and Adam interested in the looming ghost of the paper mill rising up a forested hillside like a cumulus cloud from another world — this scene, bracketed by sky and its reflection and screened by the stark silhouette of branches.
I began my painting with a medium-dark dull purple underpainting to support the forest and provide a good contrast for glowing yellow-green shoreline and blushing Maples. A white canoe paddled into my scene, poising like a swan as it turned its bow this way. Cheryl’s eldest daughter Julie joins us, to paint very tiny miniatures on wooden stretcher wedges.
At 18:15 Fred comes down and points out that there’s no Purple Loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) visible here, where we collected 2008/176/b last year, from a “nearly submerged plant with Decodon-like corky rooting stems. ” Springs of water flow out from the shore here, in diverse & elegant swirls of rusty algae. There’s just a few fish, and the minnow trap left at the dock caught only a couple of small Lepomis macrochirus (Bluegill) through the day. We complete our paintings. One Gavia immer (Common Loon) and 1 female Mergus (Merganser) on the quiet flat lake.
At 19h00, Cheryl brings me back down here and teaches me paddling technique and sends me out in the Kayak. Ondatra zibethicus (Muskrat) swimming in the dusk around tree branches fallen against the shore. At 19h30 I’m back at the dock.
11 September 2009
Canada: Ontario: Ottawa-Carleton Region: Ottawa: Carlingwood parkinglot. 31G/5, UTM 18T 439703 5024464 45.37106N 75.77040W. TIME: 1828-1945. AIR TEMP: 18 ca, clear, calm, sunset. HABITAT: urban mall parkinglot. OBSERVER: Aleta Karstad Schueler, Frederick W. Schueler, Adam Zieleman. 2009/227/l, visit tinted ink drawing of scene looking E. 18:30 We have parked the “rig” (2001 Mercedes ML, hauling Boler trailer) here while Fred and Adam take Adam’s car to deliver the hatchling Painted Turtles from Algonquin Park to the Storeys for a filming project. After the rush of packing from home, it is nice to have a “breather” in which to look around me with the eyes of an artist.
At first I thought I’d be searching for a scrap of something wild. The young Maple trees that have been planted for future shade didn’t look terribly interesting at a distance, but before I got around to investigating one of them, a movement caught my eye. A woman in a pink coat was waiting, rather restlessly, for a bus, standing here and there in and out of the long glass bus shelter, reading the sign that lists the busses and times, so I thought that if I began a sketch of the scene, with a grocery store and apartment buildings in the background, that perhaps I could capture the lines of her as she paused again at the sign.
As I laid out the lines of cars and buildings, a gaggle of girls appeared at the bus stop, talking and gesturing, leaning on the newspaper boxes, so I sketched them into the scene in ink, before turning to the cars.
19:45 I was just about finished with the white car when it drove away, my eyes running after its tail lights. Just as Fred and Adam returned, with chinese food, the sky suddenly became suffused with pink streaks and a hazy purplish blush, so I got out my watercolours, and the sketch became a painting. . . partially. I stopped short of trying to capture the three or four minutes of glory for the apartment building as its windows glowed orange at the quickly sinking sun, as it would have distracted from the colours of what is happening at the bus stop.
10 September 2009
Canada: Ontario: Grenville County: Oxford-on-Rideau: Bishops Mills, Middle Creek bridge. 31B/13, UTM 18TVE46 442.7 690 44.87423N 75.70516W. TIME: 1830-1945. AIR TEMP: 22 ca, clear, calm. HABITAT: riffles of slow creek at bridge in rural village. OBSERVER: Aleta Karstad Schueler. AKS09Sep101830/a, visit first daily oil painting of the 30 Years Later Project. 18:30 Arriving at the bridge, the sun low in the northwest, my scene, chosen in advance of seeing, it, does not offer any strong contrasts that would help with composition, so I choose a tall thin Poplar, arching high over the creek, to brace against the otherwise gentle, traditional scene. I choose yellow ochre for underpainting.
The creek is lower now than it’s been all summer, though only a few stones are exposed. It used to dry down to isolated pools every summer, with Orconectes virilis (Northern Crayfish) huddling in the moist, air-filled “rooms” they’d made under the large flat stones. This has been the third wet summer in a row, and the wettest of them all, with spring freshet levels in mid-summer. The riffles upstream reflect the evening sky, and a thin lazy trail of bubbles winds its way toward the bridge.
There must be a barbeque at the Robinsons’ new house. A blend of laughter and happy chatter floats down the street to me – the sane music of voices young and old that filled summer evenings of my childhood. As I paint, the Lousleys walk their old Border Collie across the bridge heading southward. A woman who looks familiar greets me as she walks home from the barbeque. A Ceryle alceon (Belted Kingfisher) rattles and swoops low over the creek, rising steeply to my arching Poplar. . . a few moments later its call and dive is reflected by a second Kingfisher and the two fly off together. No sound or sign of other birds, and no frog voices either.
19:45 My light has gotten dusky. The sun has left the tree tops, and I’m painting fast, putting the dark values in the creek, and noting the sky-reflecting lily pads nearby. As I wrap up my wet brushes, the Lousleys return, sympathizing with my loss of daylight for painting. I will have to put a few finishing touches on it at home.
Tinkle like gold coins
Through the Canada Plums.
The raspy castanet of the Wren clears them all away,
And then the August Sun rises to flicker
Dappling gold coins
on the tent fly.
A Mourning dove’s low wood wind begins,
A soft slow pendulum for the day.
31 August, 07:30 Bishops Mills, Ontario
Sitting on my paint box in front of the tent, looking into the tangle of Buckthorn and Canada Plum that thicket about the twin trunks of a tall Manitoba Maple this morning, at about the time that we heard the Goldfinches swarm through yesterday morning and I wrote my poem.
No Goldfinches this morning. A brown and white striped bird chips once or twice and peers at me from within the shady tangle, muted against the sharply contrasted background of bright green-gold backlit foliage and the crisp dark filigree of the twigs and shaded leaves among dark sinuous branches.
Pondering the colour of the underpainting for a while, I decide on a misty, shady blue-green. So the cool dawn shadows will be a base for early morning illumination among the leaves. When the trunks and stems are all discovered and drawn in sepia I stop to take a photo to record this early stage. Then I lay in the brightest, clearest backlit yellows and yellow-greens – some as areas, some as individual points of light.
Fred comes up the path, bringing my morning tea, stands beside me for a while, and points at a Redstart on a dead branch to the left of my scene. I have never seen a live Redstart! Mine have always been hypothetical and potential Redstarts, improbably black and red on the pages of field guides. Looking up at it, the undertail coverts are a bright buffy yellow and the rest of the pattern of red-orange and black is too complex for my mind’s eye to capture.
Later, as I toil away, deciding how leaves may be allowed to obscure certain branches, the Redstart appears in the “livingroom” of my thicket, flips its wings, cocks its sharp black head and is gone. I almost never include birds or mammals in my plein air paintings – unless they become a living part of the scene as I paint it. This bird did, but the painting remains a view of the thicket and I hope it’s obvious to the viewer that the Redstart was there for only a moment.
24 August 2009, Bishops Mills, Ontario
I don’t often get a chance to hold a bat! This one came to us on the bumper of our car, driven home late last evening by our son. He says he didn’t notice a bat clinging to the bumper, but we saw it there this morning. The right wing was broken but the eye was still bright, which leads us to surmise the sad story that it spent the night clinging to the bumper after it had collided with the car, and finally succumbed to shock and exposure shortly before we found it.
Fred said “Look at its eyes” – which I thought was a strange thing to say, as a bat’s eyes are so small that one seldom sees them. But held at the right angle under good light, they were tiny, but lifelike and bright.
All my plans for the day were set aside, and I devoted the next five hours to a watercolour, about twice life size, celebrating its particular beauty of fine detail as the least I can do to save something of its “bat-ness”, to faithfully render as much as I can of the vitality that this Little Brown Bat will have no more. To capture the delicate straightness of the thin, tapered tragus projecting from the ear, and to try to show the dense black whiskers that screen the lips, and the interesting pointed black eyebrow – and the texture of the leathery soft tissue of the ear.
It seems that “White Nose Disease”, spreading north into New York State, has not yet been found among the bats of eastern Ontario – but how long will their colonies be healthy?
http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/campaigns/bat_crisis_the_white-nose_syndrome/
These flying mice are so precious – it would be so sad to lose them all!
There’s no two ways about it – I just have not done a journal page recently enough to post. But I have been sketching in nature – an oil sketch, on a 4 x 6 inch canvas. On Thursday, August 13, my husband Fred and I returned to the “Schoolhouse Bridge” over the Tay River, about 20 kilometres west of Perth in eastern Ontario, so that I could do a quick oil sketch, looking upstream beneath the bridge. This is one of the 27 spots along the Tay River that we surveyed last week for crayfish and fresh water mussels – and hope as I might, I didn’t find any time for painting or sketching except this hour and a half in the early evening of the second-last day.
The pink flowers in my painting are the blossoms of Decadon, our favorite river-edge bush, that sends arching branches into the water to root their tips and spring up again – watery branches swollen and spongy and fringed with roots. During the course of my painting, a Muskrat made several trips from behind the far corner of the bridge, across the scene, carrying large bunches of bright green vegetation to the Decadon bush, and backed in beneath it.
