Trouble makers, the coming storms
The 2025 Birds of a Feather Art Project—begun during Black History Month—is my personal tribute to Virgil Abloh, Chicago’s visionary fashion designer, and Dennis Edney, Edmonton’s fearless freedom fighter. This social art project reflects on the cliques, clubs, and structures that shape both belonging and exclusion. Since 2013, I have completed 12 social art projects confronting war, anger, violence, bullying, and environmental issues. Not A Bystander (2017) challenged me to recognize my own place in cycles of harm. The 2024 Rosehip Art Project: Source of Vitamin C, Seed of Love sought solutions to my anger and the poetic resilience from the rosehip to the white rose. My work does not resist the current—it moves with the flow. I document, sketch, and paint the world as it unfolds—shaping each piece alongside my community, engaging in conversation with the forces that define our time. 
Art Is Freedom
Tubes & X Files
3 Coffee Pots, Art Show
Tell & Listen: Blogger
Together, backside of Point of Order 
The Grande Stage Democracy
Ice cream treat between art shows 
The Legislature has no dome,Unity
Jodie Smiles after all that...
2025, Birds of a Feather art project
Art is not confined to galleries or bound by rigid interpretation—it moves through streets, public squares, and conversations, finding its audience in the flow of everyday life. It does not judge or take sides but stands as a mirror, reflecting the world in ways only the observer can define.

Like nature’s quiet insistence—wind carving mountains, rivers shaping valleys—art carries its own steady force, influencing without demanding, persuading without force. It holds within it the grace of femininity, the soft power of creation, nurture, and resilience. It listens as much as it speaks, shaping perspectives not with dominance, but with the quiet certainty of presence.

Politics and religion, two currents in the vast ocean of human thought, find themselves entangled in this flow. Art gives voice to the unheard, calls attention to injustice, challenges power, and preserves faith when words alone falter. It is not bound by ideology but moves through it, questioning, affirming, and expanding understanding where certainty once reigned.

To create is not to control but to trust the current—to let the unseen unfold, to embrace the mystery of what lies just beyond the next bend, and to allow art to remain what it has always been: a bridge between what is known and what is yet to be discovered. 2025, Birds of a Feather Art Project.
Outsider, Community Art Show, Point of Order, add a little ice cream, my just reward. A young woman, lingering with a tattooed crowd in downtown Edmonton near the library, complimented my artwork. After finishing my rapidly melting ice cream in the 24°C heat, I walked over to her gang to show the backside, titled Disorder. Suddenly, a young man lunged at me. "Get the f*** away from here!" he snapped. Before I could react, the group's matriarch—Mama Tattoo—spoke up. "I like your painting," she said, her voice steady. The young man’s demeanor shifted. He looked at the artwork again, his expression softening. "That's an amazing piece of art," he admitted. "You're a super talent!"
9 Afghan Boys Gathering Firewood" is a painting that has lived many lives. It started in 2000-2001 as an image of Bruce Cockburn playing guitar in the mountains of Lake Louise, a serene and reflective moment. But over time, the meaning of the piece changed as my understanding of war and its consequences deepened. In 2013, I altered it—replacing the guitar with a rocket launcher outside the gates of the Edmonton Folk Festival, protesting Cockburn’s call for continued military intervention in Afghanistan. It was a direct response to the harsh realities of war, where women and children—like in his song—were being killed by our allied bombs and bullets.Then in 2015, the painting transformed again. It became a tribute to nine Afghan boys who lost their lives in 2011, mistaken as the enemy while simply gathering firewood. Their story needed to be told, their memory honored. This painting holds layers of history, protest, and remembrance. Each brushstroke carries the weight of conflict, loss, and resilience. It stands as a dialogue—challenging the way we think about war, who it affects, and the voices that are too often silenced.