🎨 Pop Pop Dazzled by Every Day and Abstracts of Light and Shadows presents a découpé visual narrative cut-up on YouTube(s). A look into the past to glimpse the future unknown. I’ve interlaced recent and archived citizen-free news stories with layered sounds and visuals. This process births a new art form, crafting fresh narratives through the cut-up technique.
🎨 2026-04-09, Painter's Notes, AI: Some folks chant, “No one is above the law,” but from where I stand, the loudest walls aren’t built by governments — they’re built by the media machines that decide who gets a microphone and who gets a muzzle. Nine years after the province tried to shut down my citizen‑free‑press reporting — and after the Sergeant‑at‑Arms told me my paintbrush was too loud — I walked back into the Legislature gallery. Not sneaking in. Not begging in. Walking in. Because the Fire and Rain project didn’t burn me out — it lit the fuse. The Charter says I have free speech, free expression, free press. Ink on paper. Rights on the books. But rights don’t mean much until institutions decide whether they’ll honour them or hide behind velvet ropes and laminated passes. Most of my freedoms came back. One stayed locked behind the glass. Because in this country, the gatekeepers aren’t elected — they’re broadcast. They’re syndicated. They’re sponsored. And they decide who counts as “press” before a single question is asked. Inside that Legislature — the so‑called people’s house — politics plays out like a theatre production. Spotlights. Scripts. And up in the gallery, the citizens who sketch, witness, document, are treated like stagehands without credentials. But I’ve been doing this for nineteen years. Nineteen years of citizen‑free‑news. Nineteen years of civic‑pop storytelling. Nineteen years of painting the moments that slip between the headlines. If democracy is a stage, then I’m not sitting in the cheap seats. I’m part of the cast — brush in hand, eyes open, telling the story the way I see it. Because every voice deserves space. Whether it comes from a newsroom or from a paint‑stained notebook in the back row of the gallery.
The Legislature Has No Dome, Unity began on an easel in a light drizzle of rain from the heavens on 15 April 2019, behind Herman Poulin’s Service Through Christ statue — right stage of the Alberta Legislature front steps, below the Lieutenant Governor’s flag and beside the reflection pool — on the same day the world watched the Notre‑Dame Cathedral burn. Dozens of passersby, young and old, on the Alberta Legislature grounds were invited to add a renewal of flowers along the base of the painting, turning the work into a small act of shared civic ritual. I completed it in 2021, during COVID‑19, carrying the story of renewal forward. The Grande Stage Democracy was painted on the backside.
The Selfish Pursuit of Artistic Truth
With gratitude to the artists who cracked my shell open
🎨 Let’s get this out of the way: “Selfishness” is a dirty word — unless you’re an artist. Then it becomes a survival strategy, a compass, a tiny act of rebellion you carry in your pocket like a stolen hotel pen. I didn’t invent this. I learned it from the greats who shook me awake for decades inside the (AGA) Art Gallery of Alberta and from afar, Chicago's (MCA) Museum of Contemporary featuring Virgil Abloh's Figures of Speech, 2019.
The Group of Seven — the polite Canadian anarchists. A.Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, and the rest of the gang weren’t saints. They were stubborn. They were obsessed. They were “selfish” enough to believe that the Canadian landscape deserved its own visual language. Harris had money, sure, but money doesn’t paint for you. They still had to fight the gravitational pull of European taste. Their selfishness wasn’t greed — it was devotion. They taught me that boundaries aren’t walls. They’re declarations: “This is what I see. This is what I paint.”
The Indian Group of Seven — the ones who refused to disappear. Norval Morrisseau, Daphne Odjig, Alex Janvier… these artists didn’t just influence me — they humbled me. They didn’t have institutional warmth or inherited platforms. They had grit, vision, and a refusal to be reduced to museum dioramas. Their “selfishness” was a shield. A way of saying: “We are contemporary. We are here. We define ourselves.” They built their own spaces when none were offered. They carved their names into a system that tried to file them under “other.” Their courage taught me that art isn’t decoration — it’s resistance.
Jack Bush — the man who escaped the corporate cage, is the patron saint of every artist who’s ever felt trapped in a job that pays the bills but starves the soul. He lived the commercial art grind until it nearly crushed him. Anxiety, depression, the whole neurotic cocktail. Then he did the most selfish thing imaginable: He chose honesty. He chose colour. He chose himself. Bush showed me that abstraction isn’t an escape — it’s a confession.
Chicago's Virgil Abloh — the remix prophet. Virgil’s mantra — “Life is so short you can’t waste even a day subscribing to what someone thinks you can do, when you already know what you can do” — hit me like a brick wrapped in velvet. He didn’t just cross boundaries; he dissolved them. Architect, DJ, designer, theorist — he treated disciplines like Lego bricks. His selfishness wasn’t ego. It was permission. Permission to remix. Permission to study everything and belong nowhere. Permission to say “We wear what we believe.” The Speakers Banned Speech & Listen Wear.
What they all taught me? Mindful selfishness — the good kind — is the artist’s oxygen. It’s the courage to defy conformity in pursuit of personal truth. Guard your mental and emotional health, and turn pain into pigment. Let your work say what your voice can’t.
Give others permission to be unapologetically themselves. These artists didn’t just influence me. They cracked open the door I didn’t know I was allowed to walk through. Their selfishness made space for my own. And in that space, I found my brush, my voice, and my .09% slice of citizen free press in a democracy.
