Armand Vaillancourt wants to start a revolution by giving you feels with art.

Vaillancourt grew up in the country outside Quebec as the 16th of 17 children in a poor mining family. That all went to hell when the mines closed up and the Vaillancourt clan moved out to a farm. Armand had good times out there, and that experience gave him a love for nature and for hippy-dippy community values. After World War II, Vaillancourt went on a walkabout through North America to see what was out there. He visited museums and factories throughout the continent, trying to get a real-life Kerouac style adventure before heading off to college. Instead, all he got was a lesson about social injustice that informed both his activism and artistic inclinations for the rest of his life.

As a sculptor, Vaillancourt has been something of a visionary. Utilizing found objects to help the world see the beautiful in everything from dead trees to garbage, he's also been an innovator. Like when he originated the use of styrofoam to cast bronze sculptures. For real, if molten bronze won't destroy that stuff then it shouldn't go in landfills or the ocean either. Just saying.

Social activism is an open-ended spectrum for Armand. For instance, he's all but a permanent installation at schools where he tries to instill a love of art in the youth #SartleProud. He's also fond of creating art in front of the public so they can see it's not some mystical, unknowable feat. Other hot topics for Armand include Quebec's independence from the terrors of the Canadian federal regime and raising awareness for the plight and social justice needs for First Nations and Native American people.

Most importantly, for anyone with a love of good music, Vaillancourt's wife, Suzanne Verdal, is a Leonard Cohen song. She's the eponymous Suzanne in the classic hymn Suzanne. Turns out Verdal and Cohen boned in a classic case of Canadian infidelity.