Live Painter & Science Illustrator
"[Michael's] illustrating, as Huxley would say, the 'antipodes' of the Divine Imagination."
- Alex Grey, Chapel of Sacred Mirrors
Contact me for custom hats, fine art commissions, murals, merchandise design, and teaching.
Michael's paintings are an evolution of his training as a scientific illustrator: a field guide to the strange inhabitants of hyperspace invoked by esoteric practice and found in the ecstatic atmospheres of festivals and concerts. Every work emerges as an exercise in mindfulness — a kind of alien calligraphy — 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. Michael's verdant and exultant imagery blossoms from a fractal growth of paint pen gestures, written in the archetypal tongue of dreams. His style, however, will not be contained by medium and leaps from analog to digital, fine art to illustration to design, science communication to apparel to book covers to experiments in precognition.
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, both onstage and off, and 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, Adam Scott Miller, and many more. A lighthouse in the bustle of the show, his presence has attracted countless concertgoers into deep and often transformative discussion, the interpersonal encounter being just as much a part of Michael's living open process as the fossil of his interactions with the canvas.
In addition to twelve years of festival appearances, he has logged thousands of hours on easel at live art residencies in Boulder, Denver, Phoenix, Kansas City, New Orleans, Santa Fe, and Austin. For over a decade, he played an instrumental role in the growing live painting community as an organizer, advocate, and journalist, including five years as art director for Sonic Bloom Festival and two as art director and Wakarusa Festival. His art has been displayed in the University of Kansas Natural History Museum, the MAPS Psychedelic Science Conference, Santa Fe's Canyon Road Arts District, and on myriad rare and sought-after limited edition merch items.
For more, read Michael's Manifesto for Live Painting and watch his live art playlist on YouTube.
For more, read Michael's Manifesto for Live Painting and watch his live art playlist on YouTube.
"Totally unique."
- Jambase.com
“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 of Art at Georgia Regents University,
Curator of the Inaugural Integral Art Gallery at Sonoma State University
Professor of Art at Georgia Regents University,
Curator of the Inaugural Integral Art Gallery at Sonoma State University
