Why I Could Go to Prison for Making This Art - Why I have been quiet for 2 weeks - And what I have decided.

I've been quiet here for the past couple of weeks. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I had too much to say and no idea how to say it well.

On June 18th, Canada's Bill C-9 received Royal Assent. Around the same time, Bill C-22 has been moving through committee — legislation that would compel digital platforms to retain metadata and build in surveillance capability at the request of law enforcement. Different bills, different mechanisms, but the same question underneath both: what happens to expression — religious, artistic, prophetic — when the boundaries of what's "acceptable" to say get redrawn by people who were never going to like what you say in the first place?

Here's what makes this personal for me specifically. Bill C-9 removed something called the "good faith religious expression" defence from Canada's hate speech law — a provision that previously protected people who, in good faith, expressed an opinion on a religious subject or a belief grounded in a religious text. That protection is gone now.

I make prophetic art. That's not a vague spiritual aesthetic — it means the names, the stories, and the meaning behind my paintings come directly out of Scripture. Faith. Rivers of living color, my own riff on John 7:38. These aren't decorative titles. They're sincerely held religious beliefs I'm putting into paint, the same way someone else might put them into a sermon or a written testimony. My process — discovery over illustration, letting the composition lock in real time as I pray and paint — is itself an act of faith, not just a technique.

I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not going to pretend I've read every clause of either bill or that I know exactly how this will be applied. But I know what it means that the specific legal protection for religious expression — the kind of expression my entire body of work is built on — no longer exists the way it did a month ago. That's not a hypothetical. That's the actual change.

Right after I read the news, I watched the movie Leonie. Near the end, there's a quote that undid me:

"Your art will be your weapon. Your art will be your voice. There're no boundaries for an artist, no borders. Through art you can speak all languages and live a magnificent life, anywhere." —Leonie

I sat with that for a long time. Because here's the thing I keep coming back to: fear and faith cannot coexist. Fear is misplaced faith — faith pointed at the wrong outcome. Legislation, whatever its actual reach turns out to be, can become a very effective tool for cultivating fear in artists who would otherwise be brave enough to name the source of what they make.

So this is my decision, stated plainly: I am going to keep painting what Holy Spirit shows me. I am going to keep naming my paintings what they actually are — biblical, prophetic, rooted. I am going to keep being transparent about my process, because transparency is part of my integrity as an artist — even now, maybe especially now. If a painting is going to grow up over years the way mine do, it needs to be born honest.

I don't know yet what either of these bills will mean in practice, for me or for anyone else who creates work that speaks into faith or conscience. What I do know is that I'd rather be vulnerable on a canvas than silent out of fear.

Rivers of living color don't ask permission to flow.

I'd love to hear from you — has anything in the current cultural climate made you hesitate before naming what your work is really about?