Left Stage, Exit Right
Free from Artifice.
Birds of a Feather Art Project
Female‑Shaped Italian Coffee Pots
Democracy, Nature and Faith
Citizen Doug, XLife
71, outdated, 33% off #ArtIsFreedom, coffees on!
Life is short doing what others say we can do, when we already know in our hearts what we can do. Artist Statement — Spending my days inside John Will’s Born in the UFO exhibition on the 3rd floor of the Art Gallery of Alberta, I found myself responding in the only way that feels honest: through doodle‑notes, fragments, and the restless alphabet that kept showing up in every other doodle. Birds of a Feather — the social‑art project I’m building in Book Three — is rooted in the same terrain John Will may have ventured into. Faith, democracy, nature, and the strange signals that flicker between them. My sketches often featured the alphabet, A to Z, scattered or boxed or crossed out. For me, the alphabet is the visual shape of distraction — the monkey brain, the static, the noise that fills the mind before meaning arrives. It’s also a nod to William S. Burroughs’ idea that language is a virus: something that infects, replicates, mutates, and spreads through culture. In my doodles, the alphabet becomes both the symptom and the cure — the viral code and the antidote. Working inside Will’s exhibition, I felt how his humour, his irreverence, and his UFO‑logic open a space where the ordinary becomes strange and the strange becomes ordinary. My sketchbook responded in kind to John Will's exhibition warning "Some Truth, More Lies, All Legend" followed with arrows, spirals, exits, and stages — a kind of internal theatre mapping how ideas move through me. These doodles are not illustrations; they’re field notes. They’re how I track the collisions between the world around me and the world inside me. Birds of a Feather continues in that spirit. It’s a manifesto built from moments — overheard conversations, public rituals, faith symbols, democratic tensions, and the natural world that frames it all. The doodles I made today are part of that ongoing record: a way of catching the viral language after it overtook me, and turning it into something playful, reflective, and alive. This is social art in motion — a practice of transforming the distractions into truthful meaning.
Pop pop Dazzled by Eveyday
Abstracts if Light and Shadow
Listen Label Wear
We wear what we believe.
From my Art Project Manefesto,
Book Two Completed — Painter’s Notes
(July 19, 2023)
For a full year I sat inside the Hope City Church café — sketchbook open, lattes steaming, snacks disappearing as fast as ideas arrived. What began as quiet observation grew into a social‑art study of faith, civic space, and public institutions: Hope City Church, the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton City Hall, the Legislature grounds, and the uneasy dance between democracy and nature.
When I finished my manifesto — a bundle of drawings, notes, and contradictions — I handed it to a young waitress for safekeeping. Hours later, the church returned it to me with rejection, warnings, and the threat of trespassing charges. Security escorted me out and told me not to come back.
The manifesto survived. It now rests with a friend who has shared with me the peace and joy he finds in the Islamic faith. I look forward to sharing this work with him, and with anyone who joins me during my outdoor art shows.
This year’s video project examines what I see happening across Edmonton’s civic landscape. In my view, recent and past city councils — including NDP‑aligned leadership — have made choices that reshaped policing, public safety, and the use of public resources. My perspective is that defunding initiatives, bike‑lane expansion, and social‑service funding shifts have created unintended consequences.
I also document what I witnessed: Edmonton Police Service officers being rented out for private events and corporate festivals; cyclists and scooter riders using sidewalks without enforcement; and bus drivers dealing daily with people in distress, bullies, and individuals struggling with addiction or mental health challenges.
To me, these conditions feel politically engineered — a mix of policy decisions, social pressures, and economic interests that have increased disorder while others profit. My art doesn’t claim to solve it. It simply records what I see... more soon!
