From Hate, to Hope City: Hey there, fellow citizens and curious onlookers. Picture my Woody‑Allen‑style nervous chuckle colliding with a hint of Jello Biafra’s sharper tongue — that’s the energy behind this little update. I’ve run into a problem with Hope City Church, and instead of standing on the sidewalk with a sign, I’m choosing diplomacy this time. So I’m trading the protest line for a keyboard, hoping a few well‑aimed sentences can open a door that was slammed shut last week. Love can Trump Hate, and maybe, just maybe — a carefully written letter can help nudge things in that direction. I’ll keep you posted, my Action. The Painter
Two final paintings emerged inside Edmonton City Hall, and somewhere in the winter months of 2026, I lost my last canvas — Pizza versus Exploding Cheddar Broccoli Soup. Good versus evil, or maybe the other way around. Evil won that round, along with the heavy paint box that held years of acrylic paint memories. Gone. Vanished without a trace. That was the moment at the start of my 13th season of painting I knew, serendipity, with both sadness, and serenity my painting years were over. But the work isn’t. For the remainder of my life, I’ll keep sketching and posting political cartoons on X — the raw, portable free press of printers ink that flows within my veins and the commitment to tell a story since my Baby Boomer years in high school. I’ll keep listening, observing, and documenting the civic life of this city. The outdoor painting chapter may be closed, but the art show of democratic storytelling continues on my delapitated easel of show and tell on a bus, a train or in the public square of the city. Thank you to everyone who has picked up a brush with me, stopped to talk, shared a story, or added a stroke to a canvas over the past thirteen years. You helped make the art what it is — intuitively, communal, alive and free.

XLife
Thank You, Virgil Abloh, 2019, Chicago,
Figures of Speech. 
Listen
Faith , Democracy and Nature
Art is Freedom
Left Stage, Exit Right, Free from ARTifICE
XYZ
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 practiced 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 press and volunteer as editor of our high‑school newspaper. Reality aches in 2026. 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.