A Renewal in the Making🐧Slide...
Fire and Rain Art Project
The Selfish Pursuit of Truth, Continued... 
A New Years Day Tradition
Left Stage, Exit Right, 
Free From ARTifICE...
2025 - Birds of a Feather art project -2026
Art Is Freedom
Richard Douglas Brinkman
XLife
Faith - Democracy - Nature 
Friends of Big Bear Valley
Jackie & Shadow

The Public Observatory: How Wildlife Cams Turn Nature Into Civic Ritual. In an age when public squares have thinned and institutions feel distant, a curious new gathering place has emerged: the wildlife livestream. The Friends of Big Bear Valley eagle cam is one of the clearest examples—a digital clearing where thousands assemble not for debate or spectacle, but to watch two birds named Jackie and Shadow rearrange sticks, brace against storms, and negotiate the quiet politics of a shared nest.  What makes these streams civic isn’t just the audience size. It’s the collective posture they invite. People tune in with the same attentiveness once reserved for eclipses, parades, or the first snowfall of the year. The nest becomes a kind of public observatory, a place where strangers gather to witness something larger than themselves: the choreography of light and shadow across a living architecture. Jackie, with her bright, declarative presence, often stands in the open—an emblem of the seen world. Shadow, true to his name, shapes the scene by contrast, defining form through absence, contour, and negative space. Together they enact a natural chiaroscuro that feels almost civic in its rhythm: a reminder that public life is built not only on what we illuminate, but on what we allow to remain quiet, sheltered, or unseen. In this way, wildlife cams offer a rare kind of democratic intimacy. They ask nothing, sell nothing, demand no allegiance. They simply hold open a window where people can gather, observe, and—if only for a moment—experience the world as a shared inheritance rather than a contested territory. The nest becomes a commons. The camera becomes a civic instrument. And the watchers, scattered across continents, become a temporary public—bound not by ideology, but by attention. Microsoft, AI.

As has been tradition since 2020, paint was added to Skaters on Ice today—January 1, 2026—in the eleventh hour beside the ice rink on the quiet back lawns of the Alberta Legislature. An eagle in flight was added backside, a small gesture of lift in a heavy season. Meanwhile, our home in the New Cambridge Lofts narrowly escaped bankruptcy in 2025, weighed down by mounting debt. It leaves me wondering whether 2026 will be the year we find ourselves without a place to live.​
2017-2019, Trouble Maker The Coming Storm

On January 1st, 2026, the heat mysteriously vanished from our downtown Edmonton 18 floor New Cambridge Lofts building—as if the landlord had resolved to start the year with a bold experiment in involuntary cryotherapy. Down in the Central LRT stairwell and the basement pedway, fresh graffiti and new vandalism bloomed overnight, right beside the shuttered liquor, cannabis, and tobacco stores that now serve as an unofficial dormitory for the city’s most exhausted and chemically ambitious residents. By mid‑morning, our first fire alarm of the year—another gift from the vandalism gods—sent families shivering into the minus temperatures, a kind of urban polar‑bear plunge nobody signed up for. Meanwhile, I was performing my own annual ritual of civic optimism: adding paint, for the sixth consecutive New Year’s Day, to Skaters on Ice at the Alberta Legislature grounds. I worked inside a blissfully heated skate‑change room, a small miracle of public infrastructure that felt almost decadent compared to the chaos downtown. Outside, only one family ventured onto the snow‑laden rinks at City Hall and the Legislature—a family of 4, sliding through a winter postcard no one bothered to shovel on New Years day.