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The idea of sneaking in barbarians started on 95 Street with his Hope Hunter Mural. “I realized I can put things in and probably no one would notice. I thought, ‘I should put in Conan!’ He’s literally 20 feet in the air, you’d have to get binoculars to see him.”

Sure enough, way up, a certain longhair is looking out a window at the action below.

“After that I was like, ‘Should I keep doing this? What if somebody finds out?’”

He laughs, and pauses. “Well, OK, what if somebody does find out? What are they going to do?” So he just kind of carried on.

Friesen doesn’t always throw the sword and sorcery anti-hero into his paintings — I once spent 20 minutes trying to find him in an underwater landscape along the LRT tracks.

“Sorry,” he said. “I enjoyed that one so much that I forgot to put him in!”

But in general, if Friesen’s jagged signature is on a painting, so is the Cimmerian slayer of sorcerers in any number of roles.

Besides the battlefield Conan, he’s terrorizing CFL players in a sportscasters mural, hanging out in cosmopolitan Greece, and, on the side of a rink in Beverly Heights, shovelling the snow with a battleaxe.

Photo by Fish Griwkowsky / Postmedia

But these aren’t the only liberties Friesen has taken. At one point in John Milius’ 1982 film, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Conan is asked by a fur-wearing general, ‘What is best in life?’

The tower of muscle replies: “Crush your enemies. See them driven before you. And hear the lamentations of their women.”

Friesen has eased the warrior-thief into the 21st century, though, on his Famous Five Mural at 10027 102 St. “It’s time Conan became respectful of women,” Friesen says. “So he’s in a rally for women’s rights!”

The artist notes, “The modern Conan has come a long way.”

fgriwkowsky@postmedia.com

@fisheyefoto