Galleries

Court Painter in front of his latest tailings pond masterwork.

(Alberta) More than 1.2 trillion litres of toxic sludge containing cyanide, acids, arsenic, and lead is currently sitting in enormous open water bodies. Based on the sum of all the plans, tailings volumes will continue to grow to 1.5 trillion litres. They are not projected to begin to decline until 2037.

Should Teck Frontier go ahead it is expected the project would see an additional 240 million cubic metres (about 100,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools) of fluid fine tailings accumulate on the landscape by 2037.

Premier Kenney’s photo op of the first of many tax dollar deliveries that will eventually be required to clean up the  pollution that continues to expand under current regulations.

A 2018 joint investigation by 3 major news organizations and four university Journalism Schools revealed that the estimated liability for the clean up cost for Alberta “oilsands mining operations facilities” was about $130 billion.

Changing governments through weak or non existent regulations continue to back the business model of  privatization of profit and the socialization of pollution costs….see where this is going…

‘By the end of January, the 2020 Conservative leadership selection process was two weeks old and the field was settling into three strata: the front-runners, the nobodies and the ones who got away.

Almost all the big names were in the third group.’

 Source: Paul Wells, Feb 7, Macleans

Court Painter is very disappointed about the ones who got away because it means potential portrait commission fees also got away. To say he was annoyed at the Conservative Party of Canada scaring away what little celebrity candy they  possess, is an understatement!

Spitting mad and distracted by the lost sales potential, Court Painter in high pique reached way back to the fire in the belly days of  Dief the Chief  now known to millennials as the political celebrity recluse who lived in a Diefenbunker on the banks of the South Saskatchewan River. Seems the Right Honourable John George Diefenbaker once served as the Great Dominion’s Progressive Conservative prime minister and is rumoured to have sired two Diefenbabys in the olden days, way before the Antarctic temperature hit 17 .78c .

Editor’s Note: Because this is a long winded flabby factual story that few people with any smarts would be interested in starting let alone finish, we have decided to intersperse the text with random Court Painter images to delight the eye!

Court Painter has always faced several obstacles in defining himself to the art world. For one, he’s a thinly figured presence all too easily overshadowed by his arch nemesis  CC (name available upon request), a hugely powerful art celebrity with economic clout, political friends in high places, an enormous industry scale PR thrust and high-quality picture making technology in the studio that he controls with his iphone from his hammock at home .

Then there is Court Painter’s history, which lacks the grand mythical arc of most other portraitists. And, more esoterically, there is the conundrum of his eccentric mid western Iowa drawl which to most people outside of Calgary, is almost impossible to distinguish from the typical mid western Prince Edward Island accent – to the point that so many foreign art enthusiasts confuse the two when attending local studio tours.

But despite some people’s skepticism there is, in fact, a unique Court Painter way of speaking and despite its subtlety, it remains remarkably resilient. Over the last several decades, the increasing interconnectivity of the world has threatened a number of local artist dialects across the world, and according to an associate professor of linguistics at an unnamed university and the author of The Studio Artist’s Local Language in Alberta , the Court Painter’s accent is stubbornly persistent: “Court Painter’s linguistic identity is here to stay in the long term.”

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The primary reason for Court Painter’s’ hard-to-identify accent is, of course, historical. Court Painter’s drawl was partly shaped by the early immigrants of Iowa, but it was affected much more by the arrival of about 45,000 coyotes that roamed the corn fields of Iowa.  The result, especially in the Waterloo slums, was a drawl lightly shaped by Shakespearian English, but much more so by 18th Century colonial American English. Since Court Painter’s relatives were largely responsible for settling the mid Western US in the following decades, their Americanized drawl spread into Iowa and eventually became the de facto accent for the Court Painter who by the way has yet to provide his immigration papers to Canadian arts granting agencies.

For most non-native English speakers, distinguishing more generally between pig Latin and Court Painter’s accent is extremely difficult – many  compare it to telling the difference between two minor areas in southern Alberta – but linguists have isolated some distinctive qualities that are helpful. A feature of Court Painter’s speech called ‘the Court Painter shift’ involves something called a ‘low-back merger,’ which describes Court Painter’s tendency to erase the difference between certain vowels that come from the lower part of the mouth – ‘lot’ and ‘thought,’ for example. Court Painter pronounces the word ‘moolah’ in the same way that most Americans pronounce the word ‘money’ in the neighbouring state of Montana.

According to someone else, people casually trying to identify Court Painter’s accent, should focus two sounds. He does something called ‘Court Painter Raising,’ meaning that he pronounces some two-part vowels (known as diphthongs) with a higher part of his mouth than people from other English-speaking regions of Alberta– this is what causes the ‘ou’ sounds in words like ‘out’ and ‘about’ to be pronounced something like ‘o-oot’ and ‘a-butt’.

The most telltale sound, according to a casual passerby, is Court Painter’s tendency to use the ‘æ’ sound in words like ‘mantra’ and ‘pasta,’ unlike the lower (more ‘oh’-sounding) pronunciation favoured by his former corn belt neighbours . If someone says that, a busy body explained, it is almost impossible that they come from anywhere except out of the mouth and gold capped grill of Court Painter. The sound, we are told, “makes the people of the corn belt and Tim Horton servers, skin crawl”.

This is all we know at this time!

The United States Senate in its anticipated wisdom to acquit The Donald of impeachment is offering this:

 Abandon reason in favour of sudden enlightenment.

So I guess that is the upside!

One hand clapping Koan anybody?

Within the United States, the Senate is referred to as the “world’s greatest deliberative body“.

Within the United States,the country is referred to as the “world’s greatest democracy”.

Then there is this:

Editors note: Court Painter has no idea whether the Democracy Index is accurate however make of it what you will!

Democracy Index by country 2019

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) is a British business within the Economist Group providing forecasting and advisory services through research and analysis.

Coming in at #25  The United States of America under Regime Type is listed as Flawed Democracy.