Dear Dale;

Literally some people have been commenting — favourably, I might add — on the fantastic logo you designed for me for NicheMTL. They’ve been saying how eye-catching it is, how it’s familiar somehow, how they’ve seen it around town on the stickers plastered on mailboxes and in the bathrooms of all the hippest places.

I wish that I could send them to you because you’d be getting an awful lot of extra graphic design business. But I can’t give them your email or your phone number or your Instagram. In fact, there is no way to reach you now because you died.

You died just before the pandemic started, Dale, so you missed a pretty dark time. “Escaped” may be more apt. Maybe you got out while the getting was good.

But you were only 47 years old, and there’s no doubt that you had so much more life in you, so much more art to make, so many more smiles with which to lighten any dark time — even a time of plague, war, famine, and death.

It can’t stay like this forever. But there is no way to bring you back.

You were the first artist I ever knew who only made art, who didn’t have a square job. In Edmonton in the 1990s, that was a big deal. Nobody was just an artist in Edmonton. Everyone gave in and worked on the rigs, made enough money to buy a truck, get married, build a new house south of the Henday, and settle into the Alberta dream.

You and I didn’t do that. You moved west, and I moved east, but neither of us ever gave up on making art.

You got me my first studio, Dale, in the AIDS Driving School building on 81st Avenue. You were in the basement, screen printing t-shirts, and I was one floor up, making music. Your door was always open, and whenever I needed a rest, I could always count on coming downstairs for a smoke break, listening to Radiohead, or Björk, and having a conversation about what we were going to do when we were famous.

We used to roll out of bed at four in the afternoon and meet at Tommy’s for breakfast just before they closed. Or at Your Friends and Neighbours. Eggs, bacon, toast, coffee, and cigarettes in one of the back booths.

Then we’d head to “the stu,” as you called it, and work into the night. I always wished we’d had more time to drink coffee and smoke. But you were busy, and you taught me to stay busy.

We did a lot of shows together, at Manifesto café, with Carol and David, and at the Works Festival in Sir Winston Churchill Square. I made music while you spray-painted graffiti on huge sheets of canvas.

Years later at the Tam-Tams in Montreal, I saw a DJ and a graffiti crew doing the same thing, and it made me think of you and me, not that long ago. Good ideas are timeless.

Maybe we smoked too much weed. You’re gone now so I’m not telling tales out of school by saying that you might have dealt a bit to pay the rent. But even the way you sold pot was artful, wrapping it in brown butcher’s paper and tying it up with twine instead of just sealing it in Ziploc baggies like all the other chumps. “Art supplies,” we used to call it. But in retrospect, we probably would have been more productive without those supplies. I am now, certainly.

I remember driving with you and Sarah and Mark Ramsay out to Holly’s mom’s farm near Edson. We sat around the campfire and roasted Mundare sausage, when someone got the idea that we should run naked through the fields under the silver moonlight.

So, we took everything off except for our shoes and socks and felt the tall grass passing between our legs, laughing, chasing each other, not a care in the wicked world. I had never felt as free before as I did that night. Nobody told us what to do or not to do. I’ve never felt that free ever since, Dale.

You gave me paintings which I still hang with pride in my home. The Dream Head, the Special sign, and the 9×5 foot Cityscape that’s a bitch to move, never mind to mount. I almost got trapped behind the fucking thing once. This is your art, and it is dangerous.

I know countless people across Canada — and around the world — still have your pieces in their collections. Especially the Applebet, which made you a modest celebrity in nurseries and Mommy magazines.

You lived out your last days in the Cowichan Valley. I imagine the old-growth forest and the ocean air must have given you comfort as your illness progressed. You might have known you didn’t have much longer. But you still took the time to design a logo for me and my hairbrained scheme of starting a new publication, just as journalism itself was disappearing.

Unlike me, who’s an acquired taste, everyone liked you, Dale. You had that glint in your eye that hinted at some special secret. You always knew the right thing to say. It would have been your birthday on April 29^th. I’m turning 47 this year. Sometimes I wish I could be dead, too. But it’s not my choice to make.

I remember in your studio you had all these aphorisms and daily affirmations hand-written and taped to the walls. “Before you can be, you must do.” I said I wanted to be an artist, and you reminded me, you are an artist — whenever you’re doing art. So, I don’t stop doing art, even when nobody’s looking.

Along with your logo, the cover image on NicheMTL.com is my tribute to you, Dale. The only window with a light remaining on, working after everyone else is asleep.

I’m still working. So, you can sleep now.◼︎

_{Cover Image: Dale Nigel Goble, Love Heads, 1998, Laser-cut wood.}