The Big Six Canadian Banks just finished reporting their fourth-quarter earnings, and according to calculations by Democracy Watch, they earned $42 billion in profit collectively in fiscal 2017. That’s a 13-per-cent increase over the previous year and double the profits the banks made as recently as 2010.

Court Painter & unidentified foreign actors pose in damning tableaus to illustrate the annual outrage of this annual outrage of capitalism at work!

Governor General  appoints two new independent Senators 

Mary Coyle, 63, will sit for Nova Scotia and Mary Jane McCallum, 65, will represent Manitoba.

Mary Coyle is a long-time champion of women’s leadership, gender equality, and the rights of Indigenous people and has held a number of leadership positions at St. Francis Xavier University.                                                                        Dr Mary Jane McCallum is of Cree descent and a survivor of the Indian residential school system, and has worked with the federal First Nations and Inuit Health Branch, and helped lead the Aboriginal Dental Health Program at the University of Manitoba.

 

Court Painter in studio with portraits of Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) defended the Republican Party’s tax plan this weekend by saying that plans to reduce or eliminate the estate tax mean that people will use their money more wisely.

“I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing,” Grassley told the Des Moines Register, “as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”

Sen. Grassley also derided fellow Iowanian and former resident Court Painter for his loose and depraved life style, echoing  his comments  on ‘spending every darn penny ‘on the pursuit of booze,women and movies!

 

 

Court Painter  explains his new public art piece located in the alley behind his Inglewood studio.

There is a phenomenon that happens between people when brief glances take place as I encounter strange wanderers in my studio back alley. Sometimes a person is deep in thought, skipping, twirling, checking emails but always a nasty micro expression will be exchanged… that fleeting twitch at the corner of the mouth is something that happens unconsciously and yet it lies at the very base of my fear of most people who hang out or pass through the alley. The alley is the wanderers short cut from here to there and where I myself sometimes pass out for a nap.

Anyway my concept is to introduce artworks that echo the fleeting encounters I have with these alley walkers by situating  on easels ,large-scale portraits  based on these alley walkers who frequently pass or pass out by my studio door . These portraits will be purposefully taken out-of-focus reminding me of my issues with never getting a fricken in- focus  photo….ever!  Each face will contain the original words EGO IS MY AMMO in English that annoyingly floats on top of the portrait and should irritate the viewer. These words will be directed towards the random alley walkers as a reflection of the only thing going on in my mind, and so are unlikely to resonate within their private thoughts as they walk or stagger through the alley.

The faces in the black and white portraits will appear to change their gaze, following the alley walkers at the same pace in which they are walking through the said alley. This will create an uncomfortable flow/momentum between the portraits and the alley walkers, like a bad conversation you want to escape.

The artwork becomes a mirror without reflection of the various alley walkers who use the alley as a short cut from here to there and invites possibilities of interpretations of what they are thinking behind their scrunched faces when they look at me with scorn,derision and contempt.”

ALERT: change of plan

Since none of the alley walkers approached would pose for free I have decided to go to plan B as a backup and have used one head downloaded from the internet of an unnamed Alberta College of Art& Design  faculty member blurred real good!

The Unknown Court Painter and The Nature Of Being An Unknown Known as an Unknown in the Known Universe of Knowables

The six-episode podcast The Unknown Court Painter dropped its final episode on Monday, two days ahead of schedule. For a project nominally devoted to finding out more about what happened to celebrity portrait guru Court Painter, it wasn’t very satisfying by that standard.

Press Attache and Court Painter publicist  A Hardon MacKay concluded, in effect; that Court Painter, known to be safe and physically healthy, had knowingly withdrawn voluntarily from public life without much fanfare… which is … pretty much what was already known. That’s what Press Attache AHM had said in a hastily called press conference. That’s what the nosy art parkers had said after they checked on him reciting poetry to his muse in the studio.

The beginning of the podcast gave the back story, the ending mused about the unknown anticlimax of it all, and the middle largely traced a couple of more sensational known theories for which Press Attache AHM ultimately didn’t depend on any evidence since he made most of it up to juice Court Painter’s flagging career and sales.

But as unsatisfying as the ruse was as a mystery, it was fascinating as a study of what we ask of Calgary’s known public art figures — of what we feel entitled to ask of them….. just ask Calgary power couple A Girl Named Robin & A Boy Named Robert.

If there’s one thing that the podcast showed, and in fact if there’s one thing on which AHM rested his thesis that Court Painter’s withdrawal was worthy of further investigation, and this is known that Court Painter gave a preposterous amount of himself away to the anonymous  patrons who bought his poorly rendered erotic paintings, came to his Saturday water colour classes, went on his Bow River rafting trips, bought his Body Slam memorabilia and simply told him how much pain they were in because they thought he would understand their ignorance of known French cultural theorists. The thesis of the ruse is largely that a man who was so close to people always buying their drinks for future adoration and his love of being close to people with money, would never knowingly just stop doing it.

It’s one of his Press Attache’s apparent blind spots that Court Painter didn’t connect at this profound and personal level with all people of modest means— he connected with a certain kind of person who wanted and reached for something personal from him.

After all, plenty of people just watched his How to Paint Moody Portraits in the Dark videos. But there was a kind of Court Painter admirer  who wanted to touch him, stuff dollar bills in his shorts as he sat on a Ship & Anchor bar stool, talk to him on Skype or exchange in friendly fisticuffs.

And the way AHM tells the story, Court Painter turned himself inside out trying to give every one of them whatever it was they wanted as long as they bought him a drink now and again and listened to his off colour jokes about the largely unknown underground Calgary art scene.

What observers thought over and over while listening to the Unknown Court Painter is that Court Painter may have been the Mother Theresa who never got the counsellor. Who tried to save everyone who he spotted as a potential buyer but lacked the profound experience of himself as a buyer. As an artist…. Sell …..was the only mantra he knew!

Unidentified bystanders standing by for their moment with Court Painter,don’t really believe in the old Andy Warhol prediction that in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. What they believe of Court Painter is that his fame will indeed be served in small portions, limited not by time but by scope. That being the case, then instead of being famous for 15 minutes, he will be famous to 15 people. Or perhaps 1,500 or 15,000 people — a small enough number that he can move through most of the world unnoticed and hence unknown , but a large enough number that the circle of people who follow him with intensity necessarily includes fans who don’t know him.

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The emotionally healthiest people  who are in the public eye are the ones who are capable, figuratively speaking, of extending a silk slippered toe in front of them and scratching a delicate line in the dust. They know how to say, “We can shake hands across this line, we can talk across this line, and we can express gratitude to each other across this line, but I wouldn’t ask you to be a paid studio intern or life model and you can’t sleep on my couch.”

It’s not apathy, it’s not superiority, and it’s not disdain. It’s a recognition of the physics of personal connection on an otherwise unknown universe of knowns. There is only so much energy Court Painter possesses. There is only so much he has to give, and there is only so much he can turn inside out for so many un-paying fans  before something in his complex psychology runs low, or sputters to a smoky halt.

Press Attache A Hardon MacKay presumed some pathology in this pod production of Court Painter’s false disappearance and unknowableness but doesn’t seem to have worried about what was happening before that, despite the fact that there were red flags all over his very own descriptions.

In arguing that Court Painter should have said goodbye (or, more precisely, should have said goodbye differently), he likened Court Painter’s tangled relationships with the patrons and card sharks he called and counselled and coached over the years to two knowable things over and over again: friendship and therapy. Weren’t they friends? Wasn’t it like therapy?

The sad thing about the Unknown Court Painter ruse is that Court Painter finally drew a boundary.  He finally put his silk slippered toe out and drew that delicate line in the studio dust.

At least that is what this ill conceived ruse would have us believe.                                                                                          As far as we know!

As far as we know this article was written in one unstoppable creative outburst but that report was unverifiable at time of publishing.

Court Painter’s new video an attempt to cast him as an anti-Vogue everyman: strategists