- Four New Live Paintings From Wakarusa 2011 -

"Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself."

– Henry Miller

"It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience."
– Joseph Campbell

(I apologize in advance for the seasonal shift from a biweekly to a weekly newsletter in order to keep up with the flow of new work – I know we're all feeling the acceleration by now (whether you consider it technological, spiritual, or both) and as the evermore rapid influx of information and energy builds toward a local climax over the Summer Solstice, it's all I can do to get the art, music, and talks I've given over the last couple of weeks online before they start to ferment. For a little while here, we'll be in full-bore festival season mode...hold on tight and open wide!)

This week chronicles my third annual stint as the Wakarusa Festival's resident live artist – and this was the year of fruition. The festival granted me permission to coordinate their first-ever Live Art Team & Gallery, and I was blessed to invite eight of my favorite emerging artists to join me in a forty-foot tent poised directly center of the 50,000 person festival's vending area. With the help of Ehren and Renee Cruz of SolPurpose.com and installation artist Nate "Nature" Hogen, we turned it into a glorious, altar-filled chill spot – a sanctuary from the blazing heat, and a non sequitur sacred space in the midst of the event's commercial bustle. It was the fullest realization yet of my efforts to transmute the raw energy of the festival environment into an opportunity for growth, empowerment, and change, as I mentioned in my popular manifesto, "The Problem – & Promise – of Festivals" back in March.

Huge thanks to all of the live artists and friends who contributed to the space, and to Tia Christiansen at Moving Parts Productions and Ami Heinrich at Tsunami Publicity for helping us make this a reality!

Very soon, I'll have much more to share about that – including video of all of us set up en force at the Main Stage painting to acts including STS9, Thievery Corporation, Shpongletron, & Umphrey's McGee – but until that's ready I want to show you my own work from the weekend. For the first time ever, I had every painting sold before they even started:

(Click on any image to enlarge it for a better look!)

Love Bites

2011 05 28 3SidedWhole (Banu Noor, Kobiana and Friends, Faracet and Autumn)

& 2011 06 02 Wakarusa Festival (Papadosio, Umphrey's McGee)

24"x24" - paint markers on masonite

11"x17" prints available, $25 for 1 / $35 for 2 (s/h included - email me)

I think this one is pretty self-explanatory. And no, it's not about my mommy issues...more about the dual nature of creation and destruction with a cheeky nod to the Cheshire Cat and other slippery archetypes. Plus, I like vampire romance – not teeny-bopper fang fiction, but the gothic profundity of what love means when you live forever and recognize that you subsist on violence (and we all do).

I'm surprised that there aren't more stories out there with enlightened ancient vampires...after thousands of years of satiating your every carnal desire, don't you think you'd long for something more and eventually grow into a deeper wisdom than one human life can hold?

Tree of Eyes

2011 06 04 Wakarusa Festival

(Shpongletron, Ott, Hallucinogen, STS9, My Morning Jacket)

24"x24" - paint markers on masonite

11"x17" prints available, $25 for 1 / $35 for 2 (s/h included - email me)

I just finished reading Catherynne M. Valente's immensely lush and sensuous fantasy, The Habitation of the Blessed, about a lost Oriental kingdom ruled by the legendary Christian king Prester John. In this magical land, anything planted in the ground will return as the fruit of a tree that grows in its place – so the dead are never really dead, only transformed. In a passage I found especially moving, one character brings another to the grave of his wife, whose eyes gaze out from the leaves and branches. He laments how the whim of nature gave back only her eyes and how, even though he is blessed to look upon her still, he misses being able to hear her voice. In line with my mention of vampire love above, I'm increasingly possessed by a fascination with how eternal life shifts our values and experience. What it is to be Forever.

This painting alludes to the sentience of the vegetable world, to the voiceless reaching of our own planet's living skin to the touch of other distant worlds...the drama of cosmic communion in the fathomless depth of space. "I know you're out there somewhere..."

Paradigm Shift

2011 06 04 Wakarusa Festival

(Emancipator, Nadis Warriors, Thievery Corporation, STS9, Big Gigantic)

24"x30" - paint markers on masonite

11"x17" prints available, $25 for 1 / $35 for 2 (s/h included - email me)

Regarding the interplay of one reality emerging from another – of recognizable from crystallizing from the hyper-order of chaotic flow – of layers upon layers shining diaphanous emergence. This piece is a more well-considered continuation of the themes I established last year, in which one painting is interrupted and dominated by another (see "Let It Go" from last year's Rootwire Festival, here). The best stories start in medias res – and the changes we're going through now are no exception. I don't know if I buy into the whole "Ascension" mythos, but I definitely agree that radical change and black swan events in general demand that we surf the change with as much grace as we can muster.

Maria

2011 06 05 Wakarusa Festival

(EOTO with Beats Antique, Jamie Janover, & Karsh Kale)

16"x24" - paint markers on masonite

11"x17" prints available, $25 for 1 / $35 for 2 (s/h included - email me)

My first live painting started and finished for a trade – in this case, the beautiful jewelry by Carl Weiseth of Third-Eye Pinecones. Like Carl, I see more than just a reminder of our own human pineal organ in these natural wonders...I see a potent lesson in the wisdom and intelligence of the natural world. A pinecone is an advertisement for sex, a testament to selfless progeneration, and a window into the timeless now. No wonder this painting ended up with the same mandorla that graces portraits of the Virgin Mary. They both speak to our wonder at the same enduring archetype of creation...

More soon! In the meantime, I've posted a few new summer dates on my calendar – including appearances at Electric Forest Festival (Michigan), Rootwire Festival (Ohio), and Burning Man (Nevada) – and am always available to answer your questions. Have a wonderful week and thanks for reading!

Three New Paintings From The Desert & A Few Words About Music

"This is the first thing you learn about the festival: to get there, you must leave here. You must, in other words, cross over, out of the ordinary world. Maybe you haul your tent to a glade in the middle of nowhere, and maybe you just hand some guy your ticket. But either way, you must cross a threshold... Though the festival rarely marks its participants with the obvious cuts and tattoos of a puberty rite, it does hold out the potential for real change, and this potential lies in the liminal: the deeply felt sense that the normal rules are suspended or warped, that a possible world is emerging, and that a new self can rise to greet it."

- Erik Davis, from the introduction to Tribal Revival: West Coast Festival Culture

First, the art. Then, the articles. Thank you deeply for your time and attention...stay in touch and have a marvelous day!

• Images

Tunnel To The Sun

2010 08 21, 22 3SidedWhole

(Rev, Totem, Lunar Fire, Buddha Bomb, Lil Sum'n Sum'n)

24"x36" - paint markers on canvas

email me about $20 poster prints or the original painting

Every time I go back, 3SidedWhole is more and more amazing, more and more a home away from home. An incredible community brimming with love and talent...

This painting, started on a ceremonial all-nighter of legend, is dedicated to the entire 3SidedWhole community – Dr. Blue, Chance, Ron, Maurice, Ben, Issac, Issa, and everyone else who keeps that place humming year round and maintains the vortex of synchronistic potency out there in the New Mexico desert.

Painted as a counterpoint and complement to July's "Tunnel To The Moon," this one emphasizes brilliance over depth, capturing the desert's fiery, spiky radiance. I don't normally work on canvas, so it was cool to get on the other side of the easel from time to time and see the painting from behind, light shining through:

What you can just barely tell from these photos is that the entire piece shimmers with a translucent red, only visible at low angles...with all these shiny touches, this one has two distinctly different characters, depending on where you stand.

Heart/Space

2010 09 01 Entheon Village

(Audiafauna, Kai, Pyronauts Drum Troupe, Govinda, Heyoka, Vibesquad, Opiuo, Antennae)

24"x30" - paint markers on masonite

email me about $20 poster prints or the original painting

Last year, my painting from the Wednesday night dance party at Burning Man's Entheon Village got me on a thematic roll that lasted the better part of a year and still flares up with a vengeance from time to time...so one year later, when the sun rose after a gruelingly awesome evening of nonstop art and love and music, I took a step back and appreciated predictively what a wonderful year of exploration this painting is about to ignite.

This one feels very much like The Fountain's mycelial microscopy shots simulating the Orion Nebula. My dear friend Nicole Taylor – who accompanied me to and around the burn this year and to whom I dedicate this painting - pointed out how this one is reminiscent of those distant dusty stellar nurseries in the Hubble photographs...a place where hearts are born. (Does it sound like Burning Man is a nebula to anyone else?) Which is of course perfect, because the temporary structure in which all of this occurred is called the Heart Space. And those ("heart" and "space") are kind of synonyms, the longer I think about it...as within, so without.

Endlessness

2010 09 02 Portal Patch

(Lynx, Vibesquad, Future Simple Project)

18"x24" - paint markers on masonite

email me about $20 poster prints or the original painting

A variation on the original design I did for Entheon's Heart Space patch last year. After such an epic experience the night before, this one was also an attempt to downstep it a bit and lean into the comfortably familiar, returning to "old" octagonal themes and simple repeating patterns. I love this one for its simplicity, and even if it doesn't capture the same depth as some it has a cool "official currency of space" feel to it. This one is dedicated to Cameron Grace and all the other kids at Portal Patch for putting together such a killer soundcamp year after year.

For those of you who want a better idea of how insanely inspiring Burning Man is, or who are already getting homesick and want to wade around in sentiment for a little while, my photographs from Burning Man 2010 are now online and visible to friends of friends on Facebook. I wrestled with whether or not to hand these over to those rights-grabbing jerks (Facebook, not my friends' friends), but ultimately it was the easiest way to share. So enjoy


• Words

Guitar International Magazine just republished a few of my finer pieces of music writing. As much as I enjoy visual art, part of me is more deeply connected to the ways that language - messy, imprecise, and frustratingly linear – can so clearly and compellingly communicate an idea in ways that sound and symbol cannot. And however much people see me as a painter, I identify at least as much as a poet. So I'm delighted to share these articles with you – many of them are from a few years ago, but odds are that they're new to you:

"The 3-2-1 of Musical Performance" – Taking multiple perspectives on the artist-audience relationship (impersonal other, personal other, and self), and how that changes the dynamics of a concert. One of my friends just wrote to tell me what a difference it made to read this before playing his first solo show at Burning Man's Center Camp Café:

"It was my first time being the only person on stage [as] the connection point to the audience. And having that awareness of playing with the audience turned it into this beautiful experience of oneness, being connected on such a deep level that there was no me and them. That experience has opened me up to realizing that I'm ready to go out in the world and share that with all those who are open to it."

Best review I've ever had?

"You're the Musician; YOU Make Some Noise!" – Who is actually responsible for the creative act of the live music experience? Further explorations in breaking down that artist-audience barrier...except when it belongs there.

"An Ode to the Chapman Stick" - Waxing (very) poetic about one of my favorite instruments and its sacred significance.

"Best & Worst New Musical Instruments of the 2000s" - Part of a writer's poll for H+ Magazine, in which I stick it to Guitar Hero with one hand and exalt the Reactable with the other.

Lastly, I recently gave a brief interview about my music to Colorado's Mousike Magazine: "Esoteric and intricate, I found myself struggling to describe his sound and style..."

Next newsletter: The musical highlights of this summer's Love Without End Tour; audio from my lecture, "Self as City, City as Self" at Entheon Village 2010; and probably, yeah, some new artwork.