Michael Garfield's Love Without End Tour Newsletter: Art

Art

Live Painter & Science Illustrator

"[Michael's] illustrating, as Huxley would say, the 'antipodes' of the Divine Imagination."
Alex Grey, Chapel of Sacred Mirrors

Michael's live art is the evolution of his training as a scientific illustrator: a field guide to the strange inhabitants of hyperspace invoked by the ecstatic atmospheres of concerts, festivals, and other live events. Each work emerges as an exercise in mindfulness and a response to the unique tone of a place and time – casting shadows of a moment's shifting energies to capture vivid scenes of unabashed intensity, verdant and exultant imagery erupting from a fractal growth of calligraphic paint pen strokes and written in the archetypal tongue of dreams.

Since 2007, Michael has painted in a legendary range of situations – from raging basement clubs to NASA's Ames Research Center to the Australian outback – day and night, onstage and off, and often alongside the legendary artists Alex & Allyson Grey, Robert Venosa, Martina Hoffmann, Mark Henson, Android Jones, Amanda Sage, Oliver Vernon, Mars-1, Chris Dyer, J Garcia, David Hale, and others.

In addition to countless festival appearances, he has logged thousands of hours on easel at live art residencies in Boulder, Denver, Phoenix, Kansas City, New Orleans, and Austin.  He has also shown up for the growing live painting community as an organizer and a journalist, including five years as art director for Sonic Bloom Festival and two as art director and Wakarusa Festival.

For more, read Michael's Manifesto for Live Painting and watch his live art playlist on YouTube.


"Totally unique."
Michael Travis (SCI, EOTO)

"Super intense and completely focused...his attention to detail consistently raised the quality bar."
- Jambase.com




About this piece:

“Michael Garfield’s Fire Flower, like many works in his corpus, revels in the esprit of scientific illustration and the energy of musical vibration, affecting a fearless curiosity about what is. He is an ‘illustrator’ – a creative illuminator – of the subtle domains of being, whose modes of existence are sonorously vibrational. In the Renaissance, architecture (like that of the great Palladio) was organized via ratios proper to musical harmonies, such that seeing the building was also ‘hearing’ the harmony of that edifice and its lived spaces. In the early twentieth century, with the Renaissance view of painting and poetry as sister arts having fallen away, new inter-media comparisons emerged – as that between abstract painting and music – exemplified in the work of Kandinsky. Garfield’s art deepens this exploration of the art of painting as visual music, attuning us to the subtle vibrational aspects that accompany gross sound – translated into folds of the visual register. His art is seamlessly synaesthetic. We see, feel – and hear – the presence of mysterious and magical subtle beings who pulse with vitality, challenging standard cultural assumptions about what should count as Life.”
– Michael Schwartz, PhD
Professor in the Department of Art at Georgia Regents University,
Curator of the Inaugural Integral Art Gallery at Sonoma State University



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