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Limax maximus art critic

October 5th, 2008

The Giant Garden Slug, Limax maximus, has charmed me again. I haven’t seen one since I was four years old, in Seattle, Washington. The subtle colours, the handsome spots and stripes, the graceful reaching, tentative progress, delicate cool touch - I’ve been enthralled and delighted all over again as I turned the scrap of dampened board this way and that to orient the creature according to my painting as it crawls, like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland…. faster and faster just to stay in the same place. This individual was collected along with a young one, in a tangled copse of mixed woods in a town on Georgian Bay named Dyers Bay on the Bruce Penninsula, Ontario, in August of this year. This marvelous mollusc is about 12 centimetres fully extended, and I think it is not quite full grown!

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Slugging Away!

July 29th, 2008

Prophysaon andersonii, one of the tail-dropping slugs from British Columbia. 50mm head to tail. You can see the change in texture , diagonally, about a quarter of the way forward from the tip of the tail. I didn’t challenge it to drop its tail, for obvious reasons.

The interesting thing about the personality of this slug was its liking for doubling back on itself - turning and crawling alongside its body.

Another BC slug, Arion intermedius . 35mm head to tail. This species likes to curl into a circle to rest, head to tail-tip, which gives me the impression of a child sucking its thumb. Arion slugs seem dense and muscular, and their tails have a ribbed texture.

This massive black Arion slug is now called Arion rufus after the reddish colour phase. But I prefer the old name, Arion ater, which I believe means “black”. Totally awesome, this beast! The first one I ever saw in the wild was in a roadside bed of tall Horsetail on Vancouver Island. I shouted excitedly to Fred that I’d found a “black licorice slug”. The individual that I have painted here is an adult, 150 mm long. Actually, the meaning of Arion is “horse”. This is one hefty horse of a slug!

I feel so privileged to paint these animals from life - to get to know the personality of each individual, and enjoy discovering the differences between species. Physical differences, and differences in behaviour. They actually get used to being observed by me as I set them on a damp stick which I hold in my left hand as I draw and paint with my right. Shy at first, they spend some time hunched up with their heads tucked under the front edges of their mantles, but eventually each one decides to move.

The black Arion does a very strange thing, which reminds me more than a little of a rabbit tucking its head under to receive and re-ingest the special soft fecal pellet that is part of good rabbit nutrition. Periodically this slug attended to its hinder end - eating the clear mucous that accumulated at the opening of its tail-tip mucous gland. Then it returned to its usual business, which in this case was slowly and deliberately searching for a way off the stick. It holds its breathing hole, the pneumostome, very wide open, and I could see the ivory, cottony-textured flesh inside as it took tiny puff-breaths which made the centre of its mantle rise and fall a little about once a second.

Slugs do not defecate from their tail-ends. They extrude long green strings of gut contents from beneath the front flap of the mantle, right next to the pneumostome - which I seem to remember being held closed during the process.

Now here is the “red” phase of Arion rufus, an immature individual, about 55 mm long. Very cute, don’t you think? I like the black “siamese” face. What a challenge, to paint in transparent watercolour, the gray body beneath the golden tubercular skin!

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Phase One - the Burr Oak’s Story
June 1st, 2008

After three windy mornings of sitting with my oil paints and canvas on an old licheny tree fort platform, I feel that I’ve been given a vision of the world of this ancient Burr Oak. Older than Manotick, the rural village that is aptly called “Jewel on the Rideau”, this Oak has leafed out each spring for over two hundred years, in the wind that blows free over woods and fields south west of the village. The view that it shared with me here is planned to be filled in a very short time with the roofs of houses.

This old Burr Oak, forest-edge fort for generations of children and witness of the history of Manotick is slated for destruction along with three other ancient Oaks and groves of venerable Hickorys and Basswoods.

In respect for the history they have participated in and the biodiversity they help to maintain, these trees must continue to live, with their home intact and enough of the field to give them breathing space. A natural treasure for present and future residents of Manotick.

For more information on Manotick’s battle to save the rural character of their village, see

http://www.ourmanotick.ca/

I have finally finished up my poem, conceived in bits while painting high up on the tree fort platform in the old Burr Oak:

The Burr Oak’s Story

Is two hundred years old if you’re a tree?

Is there enough respect for the elder
To make us pause and consider
In our headlong rush to develop the younger?

Venerable Oak,
The Springtails in the soil about your roots
(and in the hedgerows that bound the field
that has been here for perhaps a hundred years)
- the Springtails
Are each short lived
But of ancient lineage.

Ancient tree,
This is our community.
They call it Biodiversity,
Praising it with words,
Pledging allegiance, then turning around
To pay their friends to pave it over
(you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours, and together
we’ll lose our heritage)

The platform of boards is lichened,
The bark of your broad limbs is scuffed by generations
Of tree climbers
Finding lofty solitude, leafy refuge,
A place to share secrets
Sandwiches
Songs
Listen to songs of birds and frogs
In the woods around,
Peek out between high branches
To watch the seasons change as the wind
Blows clean across the field… is it hay this year
Or corn?

I the Painter
Share with those generations of tree climbers a sense
Of the life beneath your rugged bark and wonder
About communities,
How long it takes to develop balance and trust.

A tree will grow where it can find roothold
In a space among its neighbours,
But if too much ground is broken
Too fast,
Without respect for stability
Of community,
Then balance is lost.
Everything changes
In ways that the bulldozer
Can’t predict or imagine.

Elder of Oaks, teach us
As we face global uncertainties
To check our balance,
Listen to the rustle of your leaves,
Feel history in your bark, and
Tread with respect over the intertwined roots
That give this community its character
Its intertwined relationships
Of historic diversity.

A. Karstad
4 June 2008

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Philomycus togatus, the Toga Mantleslug
May 18th, 2008

Another slug painting, this one I expected to be difficult, as it is deliberately indistinct in pattern - obviously trying to look like a bird dropping, decomposing fungus, or some other bit of organic muck. Philomycus is a forest slug, and there are other species, but in the east we have only togatus.

I found this one resting in the shadow of a well-rotted, mossy branch of White Birch on the forested southeast facing slope just above a newly gravelled laneway leading into a recently surveyed potential cottage lot. Fred is checking a block of four surveyed lots for the presence of Black Rat Snakes on the shore of Big Rideau Narrows, across from Murphys Point Provincial Park, and I accompanied him on his first visit to the site.

The ground was dry, as it has been unseasonably warm and sunny for early May - and I was surprised to find the slug so exposed. It was lying full length but with eye stalks retracted, and when I touched it to see whether it could be roused into activity, it curled itself into a semicircle and lay there inert, looking ever so much like a bird dropping. Its foot is pinkish and its mantle completely covers its body. I spent some time photographing it like that, waiting for it to relax and become active, but it was determinedly shy, so I collected some moss, cedar litter, and a curl of birch bark into a container, transferred the slug, and carried it home, without asking its leave.

It spent a week in the fridge, moving about on and under the moss, and nibbling on a slice of commercial mushroom. I finally got it out to paint, yesterday, and found it not as shy as I’d expected. It crawled all over the curl of birch bark as I held it in my left hand, drawing and painting with my right. When I had to leave my painting I set the bark down in a puddle of water in a glass dish, and covered it with a smaller glass dish.

I noticed that as the slug extends its body to its full 45mm length, the tip of its tail, a smooth grey nub with a midline slit, protrudes from under the posterior end of the mantle. Observed from the side, the pale pinkinsh foot is visible beneath the mantle edge, and it has tiny dots of orange, presumably pores for mucous, which is said to be orange. The eye stalks are stubby and dark blueish gray, becoming black at the tips, and the small, “taster” tentacles by its mouth point downward rather than forward. The mantle is brown, speckled with black (darker near the head), and has two lateral stripes of dark brown, streaked and flecked with black. The texture of the mantle is swirled like fingerprints at the head, and more longitudinally ridged farther back, becoming finer-textured toward the tail. When touched, all mantle texture disappears as the surface is flooded with a clear slime which makes the creature impossible to pick up.

I spent most of the day working with my live Philomycus togatus, first photographing it as it crawled on the bark, then measuring it and drawing it in pencil, then colouring the pencil drawing in watercolour. The highlights of the mantle texture were difficult to portray as distinctly as I would have liked - on such a busily but indistinctly-patterned surface.

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Lehmania valentiana
April 10th, 2008

Judy collected 15 slugs from beneath flower pots in a Richmond greenhouse on 19 February, for me to paint for the book “Identifying Introduced Land Snails and Slugs in Canada, With a Guide to Native Genera”. I’ve been keeping them in a clear plastic salad box with damp paper towel, crushed eggshell, and romaine lettuce, calling them “my little pigs” for the way they devour the lettuce, turning the heavy-veined leaves into soggy lace, and then lying packed together in clusters like miniature piglets, sleeping it off.

They have also been laying eggs, which you can see glowing like a mass of pearls through their translucent sides - most visible on the right hand side. There are paler and darker individuals. The darker ones appear to be more mottled, and the paler ones show the characteristic “watery tail”. The slime is clear and the breathing hole, or pneumostome, has a pale rim. The best character for identification of this rather nondescript looking slug is the “lyre-shaped” marking on the mantle. We have two immatures, with a pair of very striking pinstripes going down their backs from the rear margin of the mantle to the tail tip.

The individual I have painted is mature, and full of eggs. It is 45mm from head to tail. The smaller dorsal view shows the back pattern of the same animal. Lehmania valentiana used to be called Limax valentiana. It is native to south-western Europe and lives in greenhouses all over the world - a successful “little pig”, and probably highly appropriate for my first watercolour of this project.

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Cepaea shells in tunnels
April 10th, 2008

April 7, 17:30
Fred called us down the road a little way to a discovery he’d just made while checking for the big banded Cepaea land snails that hibernate at the edge of the ditch across from the Pentecostal church.

He wrote in his journal:
I decided to pull up the grass along the metre of the bank where we’d found the most last year, but I only turned up a few dead shells along most of the metre. But when I got to a little notch in the shore where I’d found some dead shells last year, there were a lot of dead shells, and as I pulled them out and felt further in, there were yet more shells. By the time I’d pretty well come to the end of two 30cm burrows, about 6cm diameter, and a big central chamber, about 10cm diameter and packed full of shells, and a central burrow about 40 cm into the bank, I had about 2 litres of shells, with a few living snails admixed. All were Cepaea nemoralis.

This certainly looks like the accumulated shells left by a predator — but which one and how does it get the snails out of the shell without breaking the shell? Blarina Shrews? Starnose Moles? Is this most of the population along here eaten up, so that there won’t be many this summer? Is the mortality somehow the result of the soil’s being unfrozen all
winter? There are certainly a lot of small mammal burrows being revealed as the winter-long heavy snow melts.

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Robins are back!
April 10th, 2008

3 April 2008

Highway 2, 1.9 km. west-southwest of Maitland, Grenville county, Ontario.

The birds are back in force, but the landscape is still in the grip of winter. the ground is locked beneath snow which is still knee-deep in places.

Nonetheless, there is motion evereywhere we look, and sound to accompany it. Robins, standing tall, patrol their boundaries, Starlings pop in and out of the eaves, performing their sliding whistle, Grackles fill treetops, screeching, Geese travel in phalanxes overhead, honking back and forth, and Kildeer fly up suddenly from the roadsides. road traffic is a mortal danger to birds distracted by spring.

This lovely female Robin had collided with a car. We had passed her but Fred ran back. Looking into her still brown eye, I knew I had to further postpone my slug watercolours to paint her portrait on a journal page.

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Icicles and Crayfish
February 23rd, 2008

Here is another view from the studio window, on February 16, interrupting me with breathtaking crystal wedding of ice and sky as I laboured with watercolour details of a crayfish. ….yes, the top photo is flipped vertically to join the horizontals.

And here is a fairy fantasy detail of the tips….

Now I’ll show you the scene of my painting. The crayfish Orconectes limosus, an immigrant to Quebec from the northeastern US, is making progress westward in the St. Lawrence River toward Ontario. This is the final watercolour of my series of 10 Ontario crayfish species, originally painted for the fishing bait identification book, “The Essential Bait Guide” and now being used in a crayfish identification guide to be published this spring by the Toronto Zoo. Fred and I have designed the layout, and will soon finish editing the penultimate draft. You can see the poster I designed a couple of years ago, propped up on the left as a comparative reference for my work.

Jean-Francois Desroches sent me a photo that he took of O. limosus alive in an aquarium. I was very pleased to get this side-view, as it is a comparable ’side view’ to my paintings of the other species.

Then we received several preserved specimens in the mail. They had been taken by Parks Canada personnel from a newly introduced population on Cape Breton Island — in a province that has no native Crayfish. Don McAlpine mailed them to us, as he said “preserved lightly in formalin”. I selected one to paint and immersed it in water, in the same little viewing tank that I used to paint living examples of all the other species.

In order to spread the tail in the right position, and lower the claw so that the diagnostic spines on the side of its head can be seen, I tied the specimen down with thread to a rectangle of hardware cloth. It looks rather like an invertebrate Gulliver, captured by the Lilliputians, doesn’t it? I have a fishhook holding the antenna at the correct angle. I would rather paint a live crayfish, but I must admit, this one stayed most wonderfully still, for looking so alive! We are amazed at how the colour was so perfectly preserved. It looks so like the photo that was sent to me of a live one in an aquarium.

So here, finally, is the watercolour - and as soon as I insert the image into its spot in the layout, I’ll turn to drawing a labelled anatomy to help explain the body parts referred to in the species descriptions, while Fred edits the text according to the helpful comments contributed by our “Project Crayfish” group.

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Coyote for a present
January 25th, 2008

Yesterday evening our Bishops Mills neighbour Lou Jerolli stopped his truck out front. Marigold, who was down in the lab, barked so insistently that I got up from supper and rushed down to see what was the matter. There was Lou, outside the front door. When I unlocked and opened, he invited me out to see the “present” he’d brought. There was a fresh road-killed Coyote in the back of his truck, and I thought, “Oh, no - I have no time to do anything with it!” Lou was sure I’d do a nice painting of it, as he was the proud owner of a print of my watercolour Fisher portrait. I explained that we were rushing to prepare for a meeting in Roebuck about Limerick Forest Advisory Committee, so he asked where he could leave it. I gave in, and said the back porch. I went back up to finish eating supper while Fred was down attending to the printing-out of documents to take. I didn’t think about the Coyote again until we left for the meeting. There was the Coyote, stretched out on the full length of the old washtub stand on the back porch, its eye still gleaming, and its ears and legs still supple - the body still warm. I ran back up for my camera - couldn’t find it. Came back down. It was in the car. I turned it on, surprised that it still worked fine entirely below freezing!

Took a few photos of the head, with details of the eye, in the porch light, and by flash, and then we left for the meeting, the Coyote still on the porch. This morning when Matt came to work, he asked where the “Coyote-sicle” came from… We were careful all day to keep Marigold from making contact with it, and in the late afternoon I went down to sketch it in pencil on a journal page, standing hunched over to look down upon its head. The ear was stiff, and the eye a tiny bit sunken, and in the pupil that had been clear and black last night, a hazy blue moon. But I sketched the eye as I’d remembered it.

Eastern Ontario Coyotes are large, possibly crossed with Canis lycaon, the “old North American” Algonquin Park Wolf, which is much closer to Coyotes than the Eurasian Timber Wolf Canis lupus of the north and west. This one measures 129 cm. from nose to tail tip, and weighs 17.7 kg. Fred and I both noticed how the nose turns up. We will put it in a freezer now - I may yet paint that portrait. In any case, we will eventually have the skeleton. Lou said it was killed in Ottawa, on Albion Road, 1 km south of the racetrack. There has recently been a furor about urban Coyotes in Greely, not far from where this one was killed. Ours looks in far better shape than the one in the article’s photo - no wonder it was eating people’s pets!

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The Garage Roof Expedition
January 25th, 2008

I took photos of all this, so I really should post the followup. On 4 January we had more snow, drifted again from the back of the main roof to the garage roof, obscuring my studio light again…. but even if we pushed a hole in the drift from the window again, the weather forecast worried us.

The weather was warming, and by 5 January, we were sure the morrow would bring rain, and temperatures over 10C - that’s ten degrees above freezing! I imagined all that snow on the garage roof filling with rain like a gigantic, soppy, heavy, sponge. Even if the garage roof did not cave under that weight, I didn’t like the thought of all that waterlogged snow freezing into a giant block of ice, and stay that way until it one day slips off onto the hood of the car. I was really feeling gloomy about this when Judy came to work on the 5th. When I explained my foreboding to her, she offered to go out the window and shovel off the roof, with the enthusiasm of a rock climber with cabin fever! So she and Fred tied a rope around her waist, with the other end wrapped around the handle of a dipnet braced inside the window, and out she went -

our garage roof hero!

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