Art is Freedom
Abstracts of Light and Shadows
2026-03-22, Sunday, this morning at 1 a.m., from a fall, my wife was left bruised black and blue after an ETS bus driver accelerated abruptly from a stop. Safety on the LRT has improved somewhat since more peace and police officers were assigned, but concerns remain on the buses. Drivers sit protected behind barriers, yet people displaying violent or aggressive behaviour are still able to board without paying.
2026-03-22, Painter's Notes: Two community paintings were created inside Edmonton City Hall, and somewhere in the winter months of 2026, I figured I’d lost my last canvas — Pizza versus Exploding Cheddar Broccoli Soup. A showdown of good versus evil inside the Old Strathcona's farmers market, or maybe evil versus brunch and lattes inside the Hope City Church. Either way, the villain walked off with the prize. Added grief, my heavy paint box, stuffed with years of acrylic memory. Gone. Poof. A civic‑pop heist with no witnesses. That disappearance felt like the universe tapping me on the shoulder at the start of my thirteenth season, whispering in my monkey brain, of equal parts of sadness, and jubilation on an Edmonton riverboat named serendipity — my outdoor painting chapter is complete. Curtain down. Exit stage left.  But then, in true Edmonton Listen Label Wear Fashion, the plot twisted. The lost box of paints came back. Just like that. A resurrection worthy of a bus‑stop legend. Proof that nothing in a creative life ever really disappears; it just hides behind the next lamppost until it’s ready to rejoin the story. Even with the box of acrylic paints are back, the direction is set. The work continues — just in a leaner, more portable form. I’ll keep sketching and posting political cartoons on X, the raw, pocket‑sized free press that’s been running through my veins since my Baby Boomer high‑school days. I’ll keep listening, observing, and documenting the civic heartbeat of this city. The outdoor painting chapter may all but over, but the democratic‑storytelling roadshow rolls on — on disorderly buses, on smooth riding trains, in public squares, balanced on my dilapidated easel of show‑and‑tell. Civic‑pop never retires; it just changes shoes. Thank you to everyone who picked up a brush with me, paused to talk, shared a story, or added a stroke to a canvas over the past thirteen years. You made the art what it is — intuitive, communal, alive, and free. And now, with the old paint box back in my hands, the drama doesn’t restart, it only deepens.

XLife
Thank You, Virgil Abloh, 2019, Chicago,
Figures of Speech. 
Listen
Faith , Democracy and Nature
Doug Brinkman
Left Stage, Exit Right, Free from ARTifICE
XYZ
Hope City Church Cafe, 2026-03-15
The Last of Us, Rice Howard Way Film Set" Quick-drawn various locations Edmonton, during COVID19
Since early retirement from my job as a graphic‑arts craftsman in the newspaper industry after 42 years, back in 2013, I’ve painted more than 200 works, completed 10 social art projects, and staged hundreds of outdoor and indoor art shows in the public and private squares of Alberta— from the hiking trails surrounding the banks of Maligne Lake in Jasper National Park to the unwelcoming confines of Edmonton City Hall, where I also practice free press, and shared my stories as a citizen with a brush in hand. Left Stage, Exit Right: Free from ARTifICE, 2026 marks the beginning of a shift in my seventies — a return to the basics of creativity where I began as a child. A return to drawing and sketching the world of wonder around me, the way I did during my pre teen years, long before my first abstract painting in high school, in commercial art class in Toronto. The same school where I learned typesetting, printing on a Heidelberg letter press and volunteered as editor of our school newspaper. Reality aches. My body can no longer carry the heavy weight of paints, canvases, and an easel through the River Valley where I began, nor onto the Alberta Legislature grounds where I ended my outdoor painting adventures beside the ice rink on January 1st of this year.