2023
“The universe is inherently beautiful, and a sense of beauty is itself a gift from its Creator. Painting is my form of worship, therapy and at-one-ment in this age of man-made destruction. Planetary scale fascinates me most which is why I am drawn to shorescapes where sky, land, ocean, space and light dance with each other.” 
I was born in 1948, in Toronto, a place where I never actually felt at home, perhaps because all the wooded areas I loved as a kid were disappearing so rapidly. My teenage years were spent in Ottawa, before it became a real city. When people ask me when I started painting I answer... we all started painting, I just never stopped. But I started painting quite realistically in oils when I was thirteen. To the question did you go to Art School or are you self taught, the answer is both. Under pressure to pursue careers in science and engineering, as we all were during the Cold War, I decided to take Applied Chemistry at the University of Waterloo (final high school mark 98%). Today, I value very highly my understanding of physics, most especially what I recall from the optics and statistics 101 courses. But a career in Applied Chemistry? No way. However, a year later in the fall of 1970, I signed up for a course in television production, thinking the employment possibilities would be better. The school, which turned out to be nothing more than a fancy name in a newspaper ad, a rented room, and a desperately entrepreneurial effort by an American draft dodger living with his wife and young child in a Volkswagen van, soon collapsed. In the middle of my effort to make a music video in a huge old church, the equipment was re-possessed. Our fearless leader, a former writer for "Let's Make a Deal" (according to him) fobbed off some of his students into apprenticeships at the local cable TV station and persuaded the rest of us into becoming an amateur theater group. He next got an LIP grant to transform the big bankrupt church into a wonderful 800-seat theater. We tore out the exquisite woodwork of pulpit and choir and replaced it with a stage 40 feet wide and 20 feet deep. The deal was that the materials were paid for by Canada's National Ballet and the first public performance on it was a ballet by their graduating students. From the balcony, I got to see the sweat on Veronica Tennant's young face. Two years later, she was starring with Nureyev. Renovations in the daytime, theater at night, it was
exhausting and the "amateur theater" very much
so. I had a hand in everything, soon becoming both
assistant director and stage manager. I learned a lot,
but not about television production! That effort never got out of Ontario. My motorcycle broke down in Kirkland Lake. Deep into the 'stagflation' economists had assured us couldn't happen, the only job I could find in Toronto was outdoor hard labour in the middle of winter, building a new channel for the West Humber River - made out of rocks packed into Gabion wire baskets that are then sewed together, all with wire and pliers. It was an absolutely necessary toughening up before a memorable summer of hiking in the Rockies with the new friend I had worked with at the 'pit'. Joined in September by his girlfriend, we hopped a freight for a cold full moon ride out of Jasper National Park. In Kamloops, we were chased by railroad cops. Spent one night next to a beehive burner inferno and all-night sawmill. Slept in Stanley Park. Took the midnight CP ferry to Nanaimo. We were treated very kindly by a guy we met named Ted who put us up until we moved on to Ladysmith seeking a job at the mill. Unable to gain employment, we returned to Nanaimo. There, sitting across from the Bastion and feeling low indeed, a passing long-haired stranger handed us a joint which we smoked right there. A fateful moment, we noticed the cliffs of Gabriola, paid the 40˘ fare and arrived the afternoon of September 29, 1973. We immediately connected with and were welcomed into
the "hippie enclave" consisting mostly of fellow
refugees from Southern Ontario's endless urban and
industrial landscape, plus a few American draft dodgers. People often comment “I’ll bet you’ve seen a lot of changes in that time” I answer, “Yes but the rate of change has been much slower than any other place I’ve lived.” This island is so beautiful it is a privilege to live here and a duty not to spoil it. So far most Gabriolans seem to understand that. Which is why I’m still happy to call this place home. My wife Tsiporah was always the biggest fan of my art. After her part-time job at a health food store ended in 1999, I asked her to be more active in the art business. Although she had already gone on the road selling cards featuring my artwork, and taking paintings to display in local galleries on Vancouver Island and Vancouver, she became competent to deal with the financial aspects of the business, which freed me to focus on painting. An art agent saw my work and decided she wanted to take my artwork to New York City’s huge Art Expo. I must admit that after that show, it was very seductive to realize that I could send the agent an unfinished image of a painting, and a gallery would commit to buying it. This was unprecedented in my reality as an artist - to be paid for a painting before a gallery sold it! But signing a contract meant doing what someone else wanted ... which was definitely not my style. The next year, the agent gathered a few other artists and I was asked to create a website for all of us. Ultimately, the experience with an art agent taught us whose values and aspirations we wanted to live by, which led us to take back our sovereignty. We gained control over the publishing of canvas reproductions of my paintings, called giclées, and never looked back. By this time, all 4 of our children had left home, and
we became empty-nesters. Tsiporah and I both became very
interested in geo-politics. This was after 9/11, which
to us was the pivotal event of the new millennium.
Tsiporah’s interest in healthy food led her to learn
about how our food is grown, and she started writing
about food. Growing a garden every year made us acutely
aware of the difficulties faced by all who farm for a
living. Since then, she has written several Meanwhile, I was drawn by my environmentalist studies and activism to realize that all will come to nothing if we can't escape the existing growth dependent money system. I was voracious to learn about the banking industry, specifically how money is created. This led to several intense years of creating animated movies describing just that. The first Money as Debt movie was released in 2006, and went viral immediately. I was overwhelmed with thanks, including by well-known authors whose reviews inspired me to continue this work. After the 2nd movie was released in 2009, Tsiporah and I traveled to several cities in Europe to meet people who were fans, culminating in showing my movie in Glasgow, considered the monetary reform capital of the UK. In 2011, I released the third and final movie of this series ... a proposal for a whole new economy based on the alternative concept of money that has been with us for at least 5,000 years. This was the time of the Occupy Movement. Several organizers from big cities - New York, Amsterdam, Frankfurt - thanked me for explaining money creation to the masses. We sold 12,000 DVDs, shipped to people in over 50 countries, despite the fact that they had been put online by some buyers. I eventually created translations for these movies - full translations in French, the first 2 in Italian, and the 1st one in Hungarian. Anonymous volunteers in countries around the world soon posted dubbed or sub-titled versions in their own language. We did see a total of 26 languages online! It was clear the world’s people were hungry for this information. All this time, I still managed to produce a few paintings, because I always loved painting. I was grateful that Tsiporah enjoyed taking my artwork to our local weekly summer market. She also became an organizer of a variety of community events - music programs, food forums and documentary film festivals. I always helped by designing posters, and being her tech man. Eventually I created a website for her film festivals. We were always a good team. For many years, all 4 of our adult children lived in the big city of Vancouver. We became grandparents - 2 girls, 2 boys. Our oldest son, who has always been an outdoors person, got his carpenter’s ticket and after years of working for big companies, is happy to be self-employed and is back living on Gabriola. Our older daughter, while being a mother of two girls,
worked at several responsible jobs in which she had to
make important decisions for her bosses. This business
experience helped her decide to open her business, which
she did in 2015 with a partner - an award-winning
flour-milling business that ships its product across
North America - freshly milled, organically grown wheat
flour from Canadian farmers. After a few years, they
decided to open a bakery, which has become a loved
community hub.
The younger son went to culinary school, and rose in the ranks from sous-chef to chef, worked in several Vancouver restaurants, came third as Canada’s representative in an international cooking competition in Germany, and currently teaches cooking at a community college. Our youngest daughter, who had made a good living for 20 years in the hospitality industry as a server, then a supervisor of catering and special events, lost her job when Covid happened. So she went back to school as a mature student, and earned her diploma as a Registered Massage Therapist, which she loves. ....................... What did we do when the world changed in 2020? All our years of looking at how political leaders made decisions about everything - going to war, how taxpayer money is spent, how corporations have enormous power - led us to look at Covid through the lens of 'cui bono' - who benefits? From the beginning of the era of Covid, we spent hours every day learning as much as possible about all things Covid-related. There was nothing more important to do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poynter_Institute We have never strayed far from our hippie roots. As
back-to-the-land hippies, we had chosen to learn how to
grow food. We also learned what foods were nutritious to
keep us healthy. Basically, as we listened to the
medical advice the world’s people were "mandated" to
obey, we simply did not trust the so-called “science”
because we knew to ask who benefits? Clearly, the pharmaceutical companies. Medicines for specific diseases only sell to those who have the disease. However, vaccines, especially mandatory ones, make far more money.
But the truth goes much, much deeper than corporate greed. Deeper than most people are willing to believe even when publicly announced to their face. |
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I
did one year at the New School of Art in downtown
Toronto. But I skipped most of the classes in order to
do life drawing all day. I also enjoyed abstract
expressionist painting. I credit that year with teaching
me how to be an artist, more than technically how to
paint. 
Tree-planting,
house-building, having children at home, enjoying
potlucks and music and beach trips together, the “hippie
days” on Gabriola still bring warm memories and feelings
of kinship and community among all who shared them.
articles
on topics ranging from growing up Jewish to profiling
for us the work of censored heroic doctors still being
persecuted even though the truth has already been
exposed about the Covid lies.
And what we
found was that the corporate media, the medical
establishment and our governments at all levels were
lying to us ... even when their own "official"
statistics and scores, and hundreds of valid published
scientific studies clearly contradicted everything they
claimed. The source of these lies was actually a "global
network" "uniting" 100's of fact-checkers - and funded
by several billionaires of note, including Bill Gates.
