Michael Garfield's Love Without End Tour Newsletter: October 2010

19 October 2010

New Light & Shadow Tour Video, Custom Hat, & Process Pics

“Learn your flaw, because your flaw is also your glory.”

"In fact, something cannot be internalized until we emerge from our embeddedness in it, for it is our embeddedness, our subjectivity, that leads us to project it onto the world in our constitutions of reality."

"The widest audience I'm trying to reach is simply every aspect of myself. The goal is not reaching out, the goal is reaching in."

• "Tin Heart," Another Roadside Music Video from The Light & Shadow Tour

My tour with journalist and film-maker Charles Shaw is almost halfway through – we've been engaging audiences across the country in conversation about the repressed and denied aspects of our personal and collective psyche...and filming interviews for his Unheard Voices Project (an online archive of testimonials about the U.S. criminal justice system...contact him if you would like to get involved). Meanwhile, I've taken a few opportunities to pause along the way and record performances for the serialized video album, Light & Shadow: Unplugged Across America.

Here's the latest – a bantamweight anthem about forgiving ourselves for this whole "incarnation" debacle:


"Tin Heart," by Michael Garfield

The remaining three weeks of our will take us through the South and South East, up to Chicago and then across and back up the East Coast to New York. Have a look at our tour schedule and updated program info...I hope we can meet up along the way!

• New Big Gigantic Custom Ball Cap


My latest custom assignment was for a fellow fan of my home team band, Big Gigantic – those are the Boulder Flatirons along the brim, along with a few of my client's favorite plants making an appearance in the overall cornucopia of delight. Now she can represent with the best of 'em...

I'm always open to doing more custom hats (or whatever I can paint on), so if you have any wild ambitions for embellishing yourself, email me about them!

• Peer into the Process of a Few Earlier Paintings

I recently went back in time and took pictures of some paintings from last year in varying states of completion. Click on the images below to get a better look at my process – how I build up from the broad shapes into increasingly intricate detail:




Field Guide to Live Artists: Jamie Morgan

Jamie Morgan is the latest addition to my Field Guide To Live Artists, an online interview archive with everyone crazy enough to set up an easel at a concert. This is an opportunity for community to develop out of this scattered emergent art movement, for the artists to get to know and promote one another, and for us all to draw from our collective well of inspiration. Know anybody who'd like to be involved? Send them my way!

• MG at Art Outside Festival in Austin, Texas

Next Stop: Art Outside Festival, my first musical gig in Austin and by all accounts one of the finest boutique art festivals in the entire U.S. I'll be playing on this amazing stage at 2:30 pm on Saturday the 23rd, and then painting live alongside hundreds of other performance painters, studio artists, dancers, installations, and other amazing displays of human creativity. Make it out if you can, and if you know anybody within a day's drive of this awesomeness, let them know it's about to go doooooooown... (Here's the facebook event page.)

Thanks for your time, stay in touch, and have a glorious day!

07 October 2010

New Paintings + Light & Shadow: Unplugged Across America

"The nature of infinity is this: That everything has its own vortex, and when once a traveler through Eternity has pass'd that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind his path, into a globe itself unfolding like a sun..."
- William Blake

• Light & Shadow: Unplugged Across America

My six-week, thirty city tour with journalist and film-maker Charles Shaw is well underway (full program & itinerary here)...and with all the time we're spending on America's scenic highways, I've decided to take some moments out to record a series of spontaneous unplugged music videos at a few of the most beautiful places we encounter. Here's the first in an ongoing series, delivered as-live-as-possible to all of you wondrous people at home:


(Be sure to watch it in HD – lyrics, info, & embed code are all on the video page)

You'll be able to download the music for all of these videos free here:
http://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/light-shadow

Want to spend more time exploring our beautiful travails? Check out my regularly-updated tour photo gallery and enjoy how I've abused the macro mode on my new tour camera!

Our next dates are in Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Invite your friends – it's going to be a profound few evenings of conversation and live music!

• New Paintings

Chandelier
2010 09 17 & 18 Granada & Mike's Westsider
(Sub Swara, Quixotic, Sagiquintarius, Mindzeye)
24"x30" - paint markers on masonite
email me for $25 11"x17" prints or to inquire about the original

Zoom in by clicking on the image, and you'll see the myriad tiny rainbows that glisten all over this piece...a further development of my attempts to render crystalline and glassy transparent forms with the limited medium of paint markers. Plenty of glossy goodness, but I made a minor mistake in perspective (email me if you can find it and I'll give you an electronic high-five). This painting is dedicated to my dear friends Tommy and Ruth Carter, at whose going away party (commemorating their move from Kansas City to live with me in Boulder) this was completed.



Temple Burn
2010 09 24 Hodi's Half Note
(Random Rab, D.V.S*, Untied Laces)
18"x24" - paint markers on masonite
email me for $25 11"x17" prints or to inquire about the original

When I got back from Burning Man Festival this year, Boulder's typically bold mountain skyline was shrouded by smoke from a huge forest fire. The Four Mile Canyon fire destroyed over 169 homes, including the new home of my friend Josh Davis and his pregnant star goddess. This was painted at a benefit concert for victims of the fire...I asked another friend of mine what symbol most well-represented the healing potential of this disaster, and she responded, "Don't some pine cones have to burn in order to release their seeds?" Yes, they do. And just like the memorializing Temple Burn every year at Black Rock City, the Four Mile Canyon fire was a sacrament offered up to serve the vision of a new life.



Juliana's Jaguar
2010 08, 09 Rootwire Festival & Studio
16"x20" - paint markers on masonite
email me for $25 11"x17" prints

This portrait of the Water Lily Jaguar is dedicated to my underworld-journeying friend Juliana Willars for her ongoing dedication to reconnaissance on the Other Side...as always with commissioned work I'm glad to have been challenged by the unusual subject, although giving my own touch to the traditional Mayan iconography was surprisingly difficult.

(You can check out some of my other contract pieces here...)


• Press

In related news (insofar as I have made it my career to educate people about their embeddedness in a living intelligence utterly beyond the scale of human drama)...

The lecture I posted last week, "Self As City, City As Self," was transcribed by a gracious friend and is now up online for reading at Reality Sandwich, an excellent change-focused community news site.

The lecture also got a shoutout in TheCoolTV's recent article, "Could Festivals Pave The Way To A More Advanced Society?" (My answer is, of course, "Yes!") And the soundtrack was just reviewed by the Denver Westword's Cory Casciato, who seems unusually susceptible to my music's psychedelic influence...

More new music, art, and assorted multimedia inspiration soon. In the meantime, thanks for reading and have a beautiful week!