Alberta Wildfires, Floods, and Freedoms.
...and my stuborn lifelong practice of Free Press
2017, Jodie smiles after all that...
Doug's Birds of a Feather, 13th, Social Art Project
Painted beside Herman Poulin’s Service Through Christ beginning April 15, 2019 — the day Notre‑Dame de Paris burned — this acrylic work (completed in 2021) carries the imprint of moments. The Alberta Legislature appears without its dome, a gesture toward unity and shared responsibility. It became a communal painting painted by many, including a Catholic woman approached, prayed for Canada’s leaders to be blessed, and then added flowers. Her words remain part of the piece: “When we love ourselves, it is incumbent upon us to love everyone around us and to do good. I pray for Canada, I pray for peace, I pray for unity, and I pray for leaders with compassion with the drive to bring unity today and forever.” Her prayer, her flowers, and the shared act of painting together transformed the artwork into a testament to service, and the idea that unity can sometimes be accomplished with art.
2026‑07‑17 — Painting Friday, early morning, inside Constable Ezio Faraone Park, Art Show & Share, Listen and Learn, Taste of Edmonton. A loose crowd had gathered for cookies, coffee, and lively political chatter, dozens of bikes resting in the shadows like patient animals. Most people recognized me but didn’t say hello; they simply let me paint off to the side while the main conversation circled around the fate of Edmonton’s bike lanes. Anne Marie — not part of the coffee club — stopped by, and we drifted into a conversation of our own: nature, women, their strengths, and the stubborn persistence of inequality in a man’s world. I carried the painting with me as I wandered and eventually found myself inside Taste of Edmonton, where volunteers at various tables were promoting social causes with the kind of earnest energy that keeps a city’s heart beating. A young Indian woman, overwhelmed by the painting, asked if she could contribute to this communal work — front and back — by adding something that spoke to illumination and magic: stars, fireflies in the trees, small sparks of wonder rising from trunks still marked by wildfire burn and char, now overtaken by harmonious new growth in layered greens along the North Saskatchewan riverbank where this untitled acrylic painting began on a summer's day in 2014.
Doug Brinkman's Rare White Bird Gallery
In Memory of Virgil Abloh and Dennis Edney.
Birds of a Feather Inspired in part by
Jackie, Shadow, Gizmo, Sunny
Sandy and Luna.
Left Stage, Exit
Right!
