A native of Weyburn, Saskatchewan, Shirley Douglas worked with directors including Stanley Kubrick ("Lolita") and David Cronenberg ("Dead Ringers"), and she won a Gemini Award for her performance in the 1999 TV film “Shadow Lake.”

She tirelessly supported a variety of causes throughout her life, including the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers and the fight to save Canada's public health care, pioneered by her politician father.

In 1965, Douglas married Canadian actor Donald Sutherland, with whom she had two children before they divorced — twins Rachel, a production manager, and Kiefer, who became a film and TV star in his own right. Douglas had another son, Thomas, from a previous marriage.

Born on April 2, 1934, Douglas showed an early interest in the arts as well as politics as she journeyed on the campaign trail with her father, who became premier of Saskatchewan, a national leader in the New Democratic Party and a socialist icon.

She attended the Banff School of Fine Arts and went on to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in England, where she acted in theater and TV and participated in anti-nuclear marches.

In the ’60s and ’70s, while living in California, Douglas campaigned against the Vietnam War and protested for various causes. She helped to establish a fundraising group called Friends of the Black Panthers. Her support for the group brought controversy — she was refused a U.S. work permit and charged in 1969 with conspiracy to possess unregistered explosives. The courts eventually dismissed the case and exonerated her. She also was a co-founder of the first chapter in Canada of the Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament.
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Douglas, though, was foremost a champion for Canada's medicare system. She would speak of the importance of a universal health care system at virtually any opportunity and lobbied government officials.

- The Associated Press

Katherine Dawn Lang grew up in Consort, Alberta, a Canadian prairie town, the youngest of four. Her mother was a teacher and her father ran the local drugstore. When she was 12, her father left for another woman and, apart from a chance encounter when she was an adult, lang never saw him again (he died last year and neither lang, nor her siblings, went to his funeral). She bristles when I mention her father, but she appears to have made peace with him.

After winning a singing competition as a child, lang knew this was where her future lay and all but gave up on school. She spent the 80s singing country, although by the time lang came out in 1992 (not only as gay but also as vegetarian, fronting an animal rights campaign), the affair with Nashville was over. She switched to torch songs, moved to LA to be near a married woman she had fallen for and channelled that unrequited love into Ingenue. There and then, lang exploded.

Lang had been touring Ingenue for a long 18 months and was getting tired and disillusioned. "I was starting to wake up to the 'nothing is free' perspective," she says. "I felt like there were all these expectations on me - from my manager, from the gay community, from myself." Her next album, All You Can Eat, was she says, "like the food at a buffet - total carbohydrates and no nutritional value. It sold, like, 38 copies and it was perfect because it did what I wanted it to do, which was snap me out of it."
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She took herself off, started learning about Buddhism, met her partner, Jamie, a fellow student and settled down in her modest wood cabin in LA with their dogs. 

​- Emine Saner, The Guardian

​Award-winning Kainaiwa (Blood) artist Joane Cardinal-Schubert was also a successful and influential curator, lecturer, poet and director of video and Indigenous theatre. Her artworks and writing often addressed contemporary political issues such as Indigenous sovereignty, cultural appropriation and environmental concerns. She supported other Indigenous artists as a curator and activist, while also questioning methods of displaying historical and contemporary Indigenous artworks.

In the last year of her life, Cardinal-Schubert travelled across Alberta on behalf of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts to meet with other First Nations artists and identify artworks from various phases in their careers that were not represented in the Foundation’s collection. Her support of Indigenous artists was a common thread that ran throughout her career. For several years, she was a lobbyist for the Society of Canadian Artists of Native Ancestry (SCANA).

~ The Canadian Encyclopedia

I'm often asked what I use in my Iwata airbrush, and I have to say that after trying a number of different products, Liquitex Acrylic Ink is my preference. It's a nice consistency with a large selection of colours, plus I can mix them myself. And it's easy to clean out of my airbrush, too, which is extremely important as it isn't an inexpensive piece of equipment and I'd like to take care of it so I can use the for the rest of my life. I recently ordered a couple of opaque inks which I really like...they do need a lot of shaking as they do tend to settle between uses but they are so nice. They are permanent and non-fading. My favourites, though, tend to be the muted tones, especially muted violet and muted turquoise because I like the tones against my vibrantly coloured backgrounds. The inks are also fabulous to use to create drips and dots on the backgrounds.