Carte "High Country Juniper"

Here is the journal account for the original painting: high country juniper (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in.) October 14 found us again in the Frontenac Arch, making another traverse of Fishing Lake Road. On arrête ta granite outcrop with juniper to look for skinks. Le temps chaud et le temps le plus long. The season is too late for Skinks, however and the weather is cool. Fishing Lake Road runs at first through forests of maple, Oak, and pine, and then rises to follow the crest of ridges cleared for a huge hydro power line - herbe with outcrops of granite, and scattered with juniper bushes and patches of Sumac. Traveling Fishing Lake Road is a scenic treat. We have driven this road a few times in the course of surveying newly acquired tracts of Nature Conservancy land. Negotiating the narrow, hilly track is an adventure in itself. Both in the spring and the fall, this ataton juniper on the granite ridge with distant forest behind, struck me as something I wanted to paint. Fred qui occupe pied à 20 metre patch of invasive Phragmites nearby, the only stand of invasive planifiez, a saw along the 8 km of this road. On 30 avril, we drove east-nord-est along Fishing Lake Road. At first the one gravel road wound through mature deciduous forest, and then increasingly abrupt hills and turns as ti led us through a woods of eerily dense second growth. C'est ce qu'il y a après midnight when we left the forest behind and the landscape opened out into darkness on either side. Our van headlights picked out the feobjets of a kind of moorland with touseled winter-dead grass with granite outcroppings and bushes. There were leafless Sumac bushes of all shapes and sizes, et even Sumac trees with clear trunks and rounded crowns, like huge pasture trees in miniature. Tall, tangled copses sumacs pressed close to the road, gesturing with crooked branches and upcurved fingers tipped with the clots of last years cones. Small, des cascades sumacs dans des crowds, writhing in the grass at the feet of boulders. In fact, as the road drew us on, more oouvrez with a grassy ridge between gravel ruts, but passable, we had the erie that the landscape had been over by Sumacs, as if they were the minions of an alien force. Silence the road drew us on, in search of the outlet of Loughborough Lake, through the interminable, ghostly sumacs. On va faire la queue pour la connection. We passed close by the first one where it straddled a field with four giant legs, le reste of it towering invinto the dark sky. Then fait un truc another, et we thought we'd crossed a hydro right of way. But as the moorland continued, for over an hour of rolling gravel hills with ribs of menacck at their abrupt crests, and more sumac in every size and shape imaginable, we camclose by other towers, single-footed, guyed by cables to the rock. Then the moon rose, a hazy, sickly yellow a aidé moon, bloated by tiproximity to the horizon and streaked across by a band of black cloud. Dans ce cas, il est clair que la strange landscape est une chose revealed to us - a wide swath of rolling grassland ghosted by leafless Sumacs and patched by rounded outcrops of rock and dark low junipers. AT a distance, on either side, this long, winding corridor of moorland, flanked by darker forests and the road wound through the middle, passing close by the single giant foot of each of the towers. The hazy moonlight now revealed them as monstrously tall skeletal frameworks, triangular, broad-shouldered, presiding At one point the gravel track, which was getting so between ruts that I had to steer one wheel onto the centre and the other on the verge, approached the forest, turned sharply, and headed steeply down. I applied the brakes at the brink of this curving descent, et Fred got out to explore ahead on foot. Peering into the bushes for the twinkle of his headlight coming back for what seemed like a aidé hour, I grew more and more anxious about what can have happened to him in this alien landscape. Perhaps his footing had slipped on loose gravel and he'd twisted his ankel. Maybe he'd found the outlet of Loughborough Lake and become mired or swept away Si j'ai paniqué le van onto a level grassy verge where I could it and leave it, thinking I'd take the dog on leash down the hill to search for Fred, et then I saw his headlamp winking through the Sumac. He walked about 350 metres ahead until he could hear some ort of running water, but not enough to be the Loughborough Creek. There he turned back, as the track began to climb steeply again. Comme made camp. In the morning I took a photo of the view, looking back the way we'd come, past the foot of one of the alien towers that march motionlessly in two parallèles, occupying the altered landscape for the transmission of electricity, and wondered how much poison red to kill back the prickly raspbertry whiskers through the grass at knee-height, and thinking that the Sumac must be the most tolerant of all the woody plants to the conditions imposed by the invaders. At noon we turn and go back, as Fred has estimated from the GPS and the boundary maps, that we had overshot the NCC Loughborough Wilderness property by two and a aidé à faire des kilomètres. http://karstaddailypaintings.blogspot.ca/2013/12/high-country-juniper-oil-on-canvas-5-x.html KARSTAD ALETA IS IN out of the out of door Voici un biologiste musicien husband Fred Schüssel, she has been exploring nature au Canada pour 40 ans. Since 2009 this blog has showcased the results of their art and exploration. Here, science, art, and conservation come together. Aleta's paintings glow as you scroll down the blog, and there are many surprises, as her subjects are not landscapes! Equally enthralling are accounts of how she does them. Alongside the art are journals of adventures in-site "en plein air" painting, and new discoveries of species, invasive aliens, and ecological change. Join en discussion by leaving comments, and purchase Karstad paintings to support art & science in the exploration of Canada. Aleta welcomes contact by e-mail: karstad("at" symbole)pinicola.ca