Art is Freedom
The 2024, Rosehip and the White Rose art project — seeds of Vitamin C, seeds of Love. On July 9th, 2024, in the 13th hour, I invited two guest painters to join me in adding fresh paint to my 2014 mountain abstract. We worked beside the reflection pool, sharing stories as the water held our voices and the sky held our colours. When the painting was finished, it found its path. I offered it as a gift to an Islamic spiritual leader — an Imam from Lebanon visiting with friends as guests of the Honourable Justice Minister Mickey Amery.
He accepted the painting with grace, embraced me, and said, “I love you.” I answered the same. In that moment, art, faith, and humanity braided together without hesitation. Like many of my works, Mary Simon and the Orange Flower — honouring Canada’s first Indigenous Governor General — was created beside Herman Poulin’s Service Through Christ statue. My paintings often stand in conversation with the symbols around them, letting place and spirit shape the story.
Fire, Rain, Circle, Square (2016)
Acrylic on canvas — From the Fire & Rain Social Art Project (25 outdoor paintings created during the year of the Fort McMurray wildfire) Art is Freedom
Fire & Rain Project
In 2016, Alberta was split between burning and flooding — wildfire smoke one week, torrential rain the next. I painted Fire, Rain, Circle, Square along the North Saskatchewan River during that volatile season, working outdoors as part of my Fire & Rain Social Art Project. That year I completed 160 street shows across Edmonton’s “public” squares, only to learn later that most of those spaces — City Hall, the Legislature grounds, and many plazas — were not truly public at all. That tension between public life and government‑controlled space became part of the work, and still shapes my practice today. (Below) The Four Flags of🍁US.
July, 2016: While painting along the rising North Saskatchewan River, an Indigenous vagabond named Chief No Tribe joined me. He watched as I worked the textured square — a skull submerged in oil sands. He spoke about circles: the woman’s womb, the stars, the sun, the moon, the atom, the planet. He reminded me that land and water follow circular laws, not the straight lines and squares we impose on maps. His teaching stayed with me for a decade and later inspired my More Circles Than Squares Social Art Project. The painting carries those teachings: Circle — natural cycles, Indigenous knowledge, the shape of life. Square — human boundaries, ownership lines, the illusion of control. Fire — the force that reshapes land. Rain — the force that heals, floods, and erases. The textured square at the centre holds the storm: tangled roots, scorched earth, the memory of smoke. The skull inside isn’t about death — it’s about witness, perhaps even a warning of irreversible extinction. It’s a reminder that everything living leaves a trace of its moment in time. Around that square, the field shifts from heat‑orange to cool‑turquoise, echoing the wild swings in Alberta’s weather that year — the atmosphere we all breathe whether we choose to or not. This painting marks the moment where my Citizen Free Press practice and my painting practice fused: documenting the world as it was then, and as it feels now. Citizen Doug, Free News: Continued
Birds of a Feather Art Project
Strong Female‑Shaped Italian Coffee Pots
The Feminine Strengths in Faith, Democracy, and Nature
Two Trams Meet on the 109th Street Bridge — Backside narrative: Palestine and the female red Italian coffee pot emerged in the thirteenth hour on the Alberta Legislature grounds, just east of Herman Poulin’s Service Through Christ statue and north of Premier Danielle Smith’s office. Ruth, age three, painted first. With both her grandmothers standing witness, she placed a girl overtop of the river that once led to the sea. I followed her gesture, extending it into the feminine silhouette of an Italian coffee pot. Over time, I’ve lost count of how many hands have contributed to this surreal, quantum‑drifting community painting, Two Trams Meet on the 109th Street Bridge. Built through intuition, interruption, and the participation of passersby, the work stands as a living record of shared authorship and public creativity. Continued
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Nine Afghan Boys Gathering Firewood — Oils, Acrylic (2000–2001, 2013, 2015, 2025)
Nine Afghan Boys Gathering Firewood is one of my multi‑year social‑art works, created across four periods. It began in 2000–2001 as a painting of Bruce Cockburn playing a uke beside Alberta’s Lake Louise. In 2013, during a protest outside the gates of the Edmonton Folk Festival, the uke was replaced with a rocket launcher, shifting the work into a direct response to war and civilian suffering. The painting was revisited again in 2015, transforming fully into an abstract. In 2025, outside the same festival grounds, I completed the work by painting the backside of the canvas, titled The Roots of War and Retribution. The piece is created in memory of the nine Afghan boys killed on March 1, 2011, when a U.S. military helicopter mistakenly targeted children gathering firewood. This tragedy is well‑documented and remains one of the most painful civilian‑casualty incidents of the Afghanistan War. The painting is rooted in the global aftermath of September 11, 2001, the U.S.‑led war that followed, and Canada’s involvement in that conflict. It also carries the emotional force of Bruce Cockburn’s protest song If I Had a Rocket Launcher, written in response to violence against civilians. Cockburn — a Juno Award winner and member of the Order of Canada — continues to write and perform; he currently lives in the United States with his family. Across its 25‑year evolution, Nine Afghan Boys Gathering Firewood gathers themes of war, innocence, retribution, and witness. It stands as a tribute to the boys and a reminder of the human cost carried by nations, civilians, and soldiers alike.
"When I first looked at it, it reminded me of Notre Dame Cathedral burning. It also reminds me of some of Van Gogh’s paintings. If we are burning now, like Notre Dame, we will rise better and stronger." - Marg McCuaig-Boyd, Twitter, 2020.
