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Abstracts of Light & Shadows
APPLAUSE
The Lord’s Day — Hope in the City. Every renewal begins with an idea. For me, that idea became a painting titled 2025, Homme Made — Dundee Law. My first conversation with the Pastor inside Hope City Church in February 2025, I told him what I tell anyone. I’m not a Christian, Muslim, or a Jew. I’m a painter trying to see the good that comes from all religions shaping this city. My 2025 project, Birds of a Feather, became the compass. It pointed my paintbrush, and news camera, toward the feminine foundations of Faith, Democracy, and Nature. I carried my paintings like travelling companions. I delivered stories by word‑of‑mouth — a citizen‑journalist with a paintbox — moving through art shows, farmers markets, universities, and Government House, and points in between on a bus, a train or a hike in the river valley. I listened to Sikhs, Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and anyone willing to share the good they practice. In those conversations, I felt the same grounding I felt with Homme Made — Dundee Law, a painting born inside Hope City Church as a tribute to Chicago's Fashion Designer Virgil Abloh and Edmonton's Freedom Fighter Dennis Edney. Hope City Church became one of many waystations. Inside its vast Grande Stage of Faith in Believing — a megachurch built to distribute hope like weekly bread — I made friends, traded stories, and sketched the quiet rituals of a community trying its best. Preparing for this year's paint season — beginning March 20, 2026 on International Happiness Day, because irony is alive and well — I filled notebooks with sketches from the church cafeteria, the Art Gallery of Alberta, the Old Strathcona Farmers’ Market, and Edmonton City Hall.




One drawing confronted the old, ugly question of systemic racism and hate in the marketplace. That sketch, tucked into my manifesto, stirred concern — and bans — from both the Farmers’ Market and Hope City Church. That’s fine. I wear my bans like a boy scout's badge. Art is a mirror. Sometimes it reflects beauty. Sometimes it reflects the bruise. And sometimes it reflects the thing everyone swears isn’t there, but when you take a closer look, it's there. Before stepping into my new season — my 13th social art project, Left Stage Exit Right: Free from Artifice — I placed my rejected Hope City Church manifesto into the the safekeeping hands of my Islamic teacher. To everyone at Hope City Church: thank you for the welcome, the warmth, and the conversations. Mill Woods’ Christian Hope City Church. You showed me you don’t know what love is. So I came to show you. From February 2025 to March 15, 2026, I brought a quiet show‑and‑tell of paintings and stories every Sunday — in peace, with a brush, and by way of word‑of‑mouth. No stage, no microphone, no spectacle. Just art, presence, and goodwill. On the final day of Ramadan each year, it's a reminder that reflection, renewal, and community belong to all of humanity, not just the chosen few. 

Birds of a Feather, Faith, Democracy and Nature, TGIF. Jumu‘ah, Shabbat, and The Lord’s Day. Three days, three faiths, one planet. Friday calls us to gather, Saturday teaches us to rest, Sunday reminds us to rise again. Different languages, same humanity — a yearly reset that steadies the city and softens the noise. Edmonton pauses with all three, overlapping like brushstrokes on a canvas.


In 2018, my Abstracts of Light and Shadows social art project focused my paintbrush, news camera, and canvases into the shadows cast by the light following my 2017 art project, Not a Bystander to Anger, Violence and Bullying, and later the legacies left over by our humanity. This untitled painting began as I carried my easel, a backpack full of paint, and a blank canvas down Jasper Avenue on my way to the Alberta Legislature grounds. At 104th Street and Jasper Avenue, I stepped into an argument already in motion—a Black man leaving the 7‑Eleven, a Red man demanding loose change, and tension rising fast. When the Black man refused, the Red man shouted, and the Black man responded with a raised middle finger. The situation escalated instantly. Across the intersection, it was just me and one other White man watching the scene unfold in the early summer light. 
​LISTEN
XYZ...
​Art is Freedom
I moved forward, ready to help calm things down, but before I reached them the Red man chased the Black man down the street, yelling, “Get off my land!” I caught up with the Black man inside the Red Arrow bus station, where he’d taken shelter while waiting for his bus. That’s where I learned what sparked the confrontation. I reassured him they are not always angry, and wished him well, after I learned he was on his way to Fort McMurray to work in the oil patch. Later, I painted this story beside Premier Rachel Notley’s office window, in the Legislature gardens where passersby often stop to talk. Several added their own strokes of acrylic paint to the canvas, including a young Indigenous man who shared his experience of homelessness and the grief of losing so many friends and family members to addictions and suicide. I listened while he painted. This painting eventually became the image for my Listen label—printed on T‑shirts worn inside the Alberta Legislature during its 30th and 31st sessions.