MFPA Canada

MFPA Canada MFPA is an international, for-profit association wholly owned and controlled by disabled artists.

10/07/2026

Wisdom Wednesday. Today we would like to tell you about our business model, and what it means when you purchase the packages arriving in your mailbox.
MFPA is a for-profit business. We don't ask for donations. Our packages are landing in mailboxes across Canada this week, showcasing the incredible work of our artists, with the option to purchase if it's right for you.
We're a for-profit democratic co-operative, controlled by and for disabled artists. The artists themselves elect a management board from their own membership to run the organization. When a card or calendar sells, the proceeds don't go to one artist alone — they support the whole membership: Student Members earning a stipend as they develop, Associate and Full Members paid on an ongoing basis for the work they produce.
Plenty of organizations send mail like this and ask for a donation. We don't. What we're selling is the work itself — card stock and print quality we hold to a high standard, and paintings that stand on their own merit, not just their story. And like any business that wants to stay relevant, we pay attention to what customers actually want. When they wanted a way to personalize what they send, we built our photocard and e-card line. When print-on-demand made sense for how people shop now, we added it. We're not producing the same handful of designs year after year.
That structure exists because in 1957, eight painters set out to build something different: a business that let them live with dignity, and be known as artists first. Not pitied for what they couldn't do, and not treated as extraordinary for doing something any able-bodied working artist does every day. They simply wanted to be judged on the merit of their work.
Nearly seventy years later, it still works, one mailing at a time. Self-Help, Not Charity.
On Friday, we will introduce a working artist from our organization who benefits from this model, built on the vision of the original founders.

Our mailings are on their way. 📬Next week, packages from MFPA artists start arriving in homes across Canada. Inside: sam...
10/05/2026

Our mailings are on their way. 📬
Next week, packages from MFPA artists start arriving in homes across Canada. Inside: samples of our new holiday greeting cards and our 2027 calendar, all produced from original paintings by MFPA artists, along with an order form if you'd like more.
There's no obligation to purchase anything you receive. But when you do, that purchase goes toward what our artists are actually working for: artistic excellence and financial independence. It's the backbone of our motto, Self-Help, Not Charity — MFPA is a for-profit business, not a charity, and this is how our artists get paid for their work.
Want this year's collection to find you? Sign up here: https://www.mfpacanada.com/pages/subscribe-to-mailings
More from us this week. 💛

Sunday slow-look.Take a minute with this painting — the crooked little house with its too-many roofs, the trees lit up l...
10/04/2026

Sunday slow-look.
Take a minute with this painting — the crooked little house with its too-many roofs, the trees lit up like they're on fire, the fat yellow moon with bats cutting across it. Nothing about it is trying to be realistic. It's trying to be fun.
When's the last time you let yourself look at something and just enjoy it, without needing it to mean anything? Kids do this constantly. They see a weird house and want to live in it. They see bats and want to be one for a night. Somewhere along the way, most of us trade that in for seriousness.
This is your permission slip to get a little silly this week. Put on the costume. Carve the pumpkin too early. Watch the movie you've seen twenty times. Your inner child doesn't need a reason, and neither do you.
Painting by Christopher Kuster — Spooky Evening. Watercolor, mouth-painted.
Your Sunday is allowed to be a little whimsical too. 💛

Dennis Francesconi didn't set out to become a painter. In 1980, at seventeen, a water-skiing accident left him quadriple...
10/02/2026

Dennis Francesconi didn't set out to become a painter. In 1980, at seventeen, a water-skiing accident left him quadriplegic. During rehabilitation he met Kristi, who would later become his wife, and who encouraged him to find some way to put down what he was feeling. Frustrated at being reduced to an "X" scratched out with a pen wedged between his fingers, he grabbed the pen in his teeth instead and wrote his own name for the first time in years. Writing led to doodling, and doodling led to painting.
A chance meeting with a fellow MFPA artist in 1993 brought him in as a Student Member. Five and a half years later he'd advanced to Full Membership — and with it came a moment he still talks about: going into the Social Security office to say he no longer needed government aid. He and Kristi both went on to earn Associate in Arts degrees with honors, and his work has since shown in roughly 70 exhibitions, from Los Angeles to Chicago to Atlanta and on to Europe, Asia, and Australia.
His range as a painter is wide. In Garden Roses, every petal fold is visible, a spike of red salvia rising beside the bloom. Statue of Liberty renders her in cool, sweeping blues, torch catching the only warmth in the sky. Sailing sets a single boat down on pale sand under a deep horizon, its life ring resting in the sand beside it, and Uphill catches a lone rower's orange scull cutting a straight line across flat blue water, oars caught mid-stroke. He's also painted Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, a reindeer in mirrored sunglasses bright enough to rival the season itself.
And this week, one more of his paintings is doing something new: Santa's Sleigh, a sleigh and reindeer crossing a full winter moon in silhouette, has just launched as MFPA's newest Christmas card. Dennis's own words on what MFPA has meant to him: "MFPA has been the key to unlocking my potential."
Shop the new card: www.mfpacanada.com 💛

Wisdom Wednesday. Today: the card in your hand has a 180-year history.In 1843, a man named Henry Cole was too busy to wr...
09/30/2026

Wisdom Wednesday. Today: the card in your hand has a 180-year history.
In 1843, a man named Henry Cole was too busy to write personal holiday letters to everyone he wanted to greet that year. So he did something no one had done commercially before: he commissioned an illustration from artist John Callcott Horsley, had it printed, and sent it out instead. One thousand copies were made. That's the first commercial Christmas card in history.
It caught on slowly at first — printing was expensive, and cards were a luxury. But by the 1870s, cheaper color printing brought the price down, and sending cards became something ordinary families did every December. By the end of the century, over a billion cards were being mailed each year in Britain alone.
What hasn't changed in 180 years is the idea at the center of it: a small painting, made to be held, sent, and kept. A card someone opens with their hands, sets on a mantel, keeps in a drawer for a few years before they can quite let it go. That's a different thing than a notification that disappears in a scroll — and it's exactly what MFPA's cards carry forward, new work from our artists in a tradition almost two centuries old.
💬 What's a card you've kept for years, and who sent it to you?

New cards from MFPA artists have arrived. 🍁💛Every design is painted by an MFPA artist — mouth or foot, no exceptions, th...
09/28/2026

New cards from MFPA artists have arrived. 🍁💛
Every design is painted by an MFPA artist — mouth or foot, no exceptions, the way it's been since 1957. This season's collection includes fresh takes on the classics: winter scenes, wildlife, warm-and-cozy holiday moments, each one carrying an artist's own hand in it.
These aren't reproductions pulled from a stock library. They're paintings first, made the same painstaking way MFPA's work always has been, then brought to cards so you can send them to the people on your list this year.
Take a look at the full collection and find the one that's right for someone you love at www.mfpacanada.com. 💛

Sunday slow-look.Take a minute with this painting.Wherever you are right now, let your shoulders drop. Take one slow bre...
09/27/2026

Sunday slow-look.
Take a minute with this painting.
Wherever you are right now, let your shoulders drop. Take one slow breath in, and out.
Now imagine yourself walking into it. You're on a path under a canopy of trees turning gold and orange, the light coming through in patches. Leaves are falling around you — not all at once, just one at a time, drifting down without any hurry to get there.
Watch one leaf let go of its branch. Follow it down. Let it land.
That's all it has to do. Let go, and trust the ground.
Take one more slow breath. Let something go with it — whatever you've been holding onto this week that doesn't need to come with you into the next one.
When you're ready, open your eyes. Carry the rest of the walk with you.
Painting by Mariusz Maczka — Jesienna droga (Herbstliche Allee / Autumn Avenue). Oil on canvas, mouth-painted.
Your Sunday is allowed to be slow. 💛

On Wednesday, we talked about art that lives on the things you use every day. Today, here's what that looks like at MFPA...
09/25/2026

On Wednesday, we talked about art that lives on the things you use every day. Today, here's what that looks like at MFPA-Canada.

Our totes, mugs, stainless steel water bottles, and cross-body bags all carry original artwork by MFPA mouth and foot painting artists, wrapped right into the design so the painting is the whole point, not an afterthought. Something for the coffee drinker, the everyday commuter, the one who always needs a bag that can hold a little of everything.

And for the tree this year, we have a new set of ceramic ornaments, both by our own Shane Lynch: Winter Friends and Pass the Puck.

Each one is more than a nice thing to own. It's a small, working piece of one of our artists' careers, out in the world, being used.
Take a look and let us know which one you'd bring home. 💛

Wisdom Wednesday. Today: art you can actually use.Most people think of "real art" as something that hangs on a gallery w...
09/23/2026

Wisdom Wednesday. Today: art you can actually use.

Most people think of "real art" as something that hangs on a gallery wall, kept behind glass, looked at but never touched. That idea is newer than you might think. For most of history, art lived on the things people used every day.

Ancient Greek pottery is one of the clearest examples. The vases and jars now displayed in museums as masterpieces of the ancient world were, at the time, simply how people carried water, stored oil, and served w**e. Illuminated manuscripts were prayer books people actually held and read. William Morris, one of the most celebrated designers of the 19th century, put his artwork on wallpaper and curtains, believing beautiful design belonged in ordinary homes, not just galleries. Even Hokusai's Great Wave, one of the most recognized images in the world, originally sold for about the price of a bowl of noodles, meant to be pinned up on a wall, not hung behind glass in a museum.

The gallery painting, set apart and untouchable, is actually the exception in art history. Art that gets used, held, and lived with is the rule.
On Friday, we'll show you what that tradition looks like at MFPA. 💛
💬 Do you have any art in your daily life, on something you use every day? We'd love to hear.
—
Images and sources: Amphora, Geometric period, National Archaeological Museum (public domain). Illuminated manuscript, Book of Hours, 15th century (public domain). William Morris, Strawberry Thief, 1883 (public domain). Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave off Kanagawa, c. 1831, carved woodblock, British Museum (public domain).

Address

MFPA Ltd 240 Duncan Mill Road Ste 103
Toronto, ON
M3B36S

Opening Hours

Monday 9am - 5pm
Tuesday 9am - 5pm
Wednesday 9am - 5pm
Thursday 9am - 5pm
Friday 9am - 5pm

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