Live Paintings & Body Art From Jazzfest & Shpongle's Texas Run

"We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable."

- Terence McKenna

Unsurprisingly, West Coast vortices and innumerable synchronicitous diversions have kept the creative influx coming faster than my ability to report on it. That, and the problem of sending unreadably huge newsletters bursting with too much artwork to appreciate at once, is leading me to reconsider my publication schedule. As of today, I'll be doing my best to actually keep up with it all – and consequently posting shorter, more digestible, weekly updates.

So, this week chronicles a painting completed during my wonderful foray to New Orleans during Jazzfest, as well as two new pieces and a body-painting gallery from Shpongle's Texas run in early May.

Next week will bring an epic earthscape from the 41st Annual Whole Earth Festival, more body painting, and – finally – a new live album gathered from recordings of my concerts at the MAPS Conference, Sera Phi, The Whole Earth Festival, & Om Shan Tea!

If you have any questions, comments, raves, requests, or non sequiturs...you know where to send them. Thanks for your time and have a beautiful day – the kind of day that makes sense of the suffering, that brings breath into the body, that tingles your toes with the full force of raw red life, loving its way into the world through your tiny human frame.

• Imagery (check out the full gallery with price list)

Bliss's Butterflies

2010 03 26, 27 & 04 23, 24

Luna, Artmosphere, 12 Bar, Dragon's Den

(Gravity A, DS@STR, Beats Antique, Random Rab, Sidecar Tommy)

paint pens on canvas panel - 15"x30"

11"x17" prints & full-size giclee prints for sale (email to inquire)

This one came together patiently, gradually, element by element, all over the state of Louisiana. It was an interesting change of pace to just let it meander toward the sea...and toward the sea it did meander, ultimately landing in the home of a raw food chef in Santa Cruz. It was a trip to meet her in New Orleans and deliver it to her in person in California a few weeks later. Wish I had more to rave about the shows, but the first three of the four were honestly pretty much busts. The impromptu, underground-on-the-second-floor Jazzfest afterparty at the Dragon's Den, however – at which I got to open for Random Rab and Sidecar Tommy of Beats Antique (and after which, Rab told me I'd been "the perfect opening act") – was pretty great. I think the butterflies look like kites.

Dawn Over The Temples

2010 05 01

CoSM Benefit La Zona Rosa

(Shpongle, Nadis Warriors)

paint pens on cradled gesso board – 16"x20"

11"x17" prints and fullsize giclees for sale (email to inquire)

Another legendary benefit for the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, hosted by visionary artists Alex & Allyson Grey (who, this time, were whisked away by the winds before I even had a chance to say hello...Mercury was fully in retrograde at the time, no doubt about it). And my inaugural voyage to Austin, Texas, which was so long-awaited that my actually being there was surreal to everyone involved. Seventeen hours in the city, and five times that many friendships seeded. My friends and I ended up at an all-night backyard afterparty, at which I spent a few hours discussing the community implicit in this piece – the sangha, the coming together, that represents the true fruition of enlightenment. No wisdom is complete until it is expressed in the world, brought into the city, given to the market, tested against the critical insights of the people. This painting is the sequel to the Bicycle Day's "Seed of Awakening," a reminder that seeds eventually grow into plants whose roots all intertwine...that true realization is enthusiastically engaged in, with, through – and as – the world.

Unfurling

2010 05 02 Trees

(Shpongle, Nadis Warriors)

paint pens on canvas – 16"x20"

11"x17" prints and fullsize giclees for sale (email to inquire)

For my first gig in Dallas, I luckily chose a simple subject – because I spent about half the night face-deep in body painting. Thus, half of the night's work is above, in the form of a translucent frond opening up into the luminous night; and the other half is below, on my visual art page at Facebook, where you can see all of the beautiful people I was lucky enough to adorn with my penwork throughout the evening. One thing I'll say about the above image, though – and one of my favorite things about it – is that I used three different shades of black. Click on it for a better view and check out how the matte black background almost hides, but not quite, the glossy black "rain" and the bold final outline of the unfurling plant itself.

Body Art @ Shpongle Gallery (Facebook)

• Upcoming (click links to view Facebook event pages)

The Rite of Spring's 97th Birthday Party
@ The 1809, Kansas City, Missouri
Back in Kansas City from his West Coast leg of the Love Without End Tour, I'll be bringing some heart-activating acoustic guitar wizardry home to synchronize the hemispheres with a newly-alchemized depth of purpose and clarity. But the age of the lone wolf is over, and no reunion party would be complete without a full-bore, circus-level showing from the some of the heartland's shiniest human sense organs...with spoken word by Sara Glass, live painting by Mike Hooper, and many more demonstrations of local excellence.

Live Painting Residency
@ Wakarusa Festival's Interstellar Meltdown, Mulberry Mountain, Arkansas
My second year as the home-team artist for what will be the largest electronic music event ever to grace the Midwest...Interstellar Meltdown is one killer festival-within-a-festival, well worth the drive out to Arkansas' glorious woodsy expanses.

An Evening of Acoustic-Electronic Guitar w/ Animus Invidious
@ The Ancient Mariner, Manitou Springs, Colorado
My own acoustic "guitar wizardry" and the "guitar sorcery" of Animus Invidious are sharing a stage for their first, long-anticipated concert...an evening of music that weaves the new from the familiar and promises to plunge listeners into a parallel dimension of ecstatic musical mystery. Like a solar eclipse, you'll just have to be there...

Convergence: A Live Painting Exhibition
@ The Arvada Center, Arvada, Colorado
This exhibition, guest-curated by Colorado artist Keith “Scramble” Campbell, features twenty national and regional artists who paint in various music venues during live concert performances. The Arvada Center is the summer hub for these performance painters, many of whom will also appear in other Denver metro music venues.

New Music Videos, Painting In New Orleans, Praang & Crystallize Festival

> Music

I just posted new music videos for two of my old (2002) songs that come about as close to "standard" status as it comes: my zero-gravity love anthem "In Zero With Grace" and my live looping theodicy-in-a-first-person-cosmology ballad "Time Machine Dream." The first is all rowdy passion; the second is a slow-burning cathedral to the illusion of life and death. If you enjoy these enough to rank or favorite them on youtube, you'll want to know you can download the audio tracks for them at michaelgarfield.net...

"In Zero With Grace"

Live at Avery Brewing Company

Boulder, Colorado - 2010 01 14

"Time Machine Dream"

Live at Quixote's True Blue

Denver, Colorado - 2010 01 28

In related news, my 2008 self-produced studio EP, Double-Edged Sword (download it free here), finally just got its first review. Performer Magazine said:

"Michael Garfield's extraordinary acoustic work...finds the ears captivated and entranced in a dance of delightful sonic textures. A gifted instrumentalist...Garfield's vocal prowess should not go unheard either, resonating in haunting fashion, full of chills and thrills. This is wonderful, simple music for the listener's ears to feed on."

Woot! You can read the whole review here.

And if you're in Denver, come see my next show there, back at Quixote's on the 19th with my friends in The Mile High Sound Movement's numerous excellent projects and Hawaiian hip-hop-jazz outfit Guerilla Jazz.

> Imagery

First, the tying up of loose ends.

Before

After

Sawmill

2009 06 28 & 2010 01 14 Sonic Bloom & Studio

(Tipper, David Starfire, Beats Antique, Heyoka)

20"x30" - paint markers on canvas panel

11"x17" prints available - $20

I hate it when I call a painting "done" for the purposes of demarcating a moment in time and then people tell me it looks incomplete...so I had no choice but to add a ludicrous amount of detail to this piece from last year's Sonic Bloom Festival, even though I ended up losing a significant section of the original pattern. It's the first piece I'll be making available (soon) through the excellent Transglobal Arts, a business that deals artwork from around the world and donates 10% of all proceeds to charities of the artists' choice. When this goes up for sale there, in all likelihood I'll be having 10% go to either the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies or Students For A Sensible Drug Policy – both groups that are making important strides toward a saner and more humane world.

This painting is dedicated to my friend Lady Chadwell, whose gypsy adventures with me on the last night of Sonic Bloom are the reason this painting was never finished properly in the first place.

In other news, I passed a major personal milestone a week ago when ActionPacker Pro Presents flew me out (!) to paint their first two events in New Orleans and Lake Charles, Louisiana. Jeff and Felicité of ActionPacker Pro are among the most gracious hosts I've ever encountered, and I had a magnificent time tromping through the haunted festival of blooming decay that is the creole South. Seriously, something feral and adventurously irreverently deranged takes over a person, there. To compound matters, it was the weekend that The Saints got into the Super Bowl. Major league sports aren't my ladle of étouffée, as it were, but it's hard not to get swept up on a wave like that...

When we got to the first night's venue, The Maison on Frenchman Street (not a joke), I found my concert poster on the telephone pole outside. Kind of like attending your own funeral...especially because the actual sign outside for The Maison was in the exact same font I'd used on the flyer, which weirded me out to no end and continues to feel a bit strange. This poster is dedicated to Jeff and Felicité, in honor of their inaugural shows, and to whom I am profoundly grateful for giving me the respect and treatment of a professional performance artist (all too rare for live painters in the Denver area, a reality I lament and work hard to correct).

Ferrofluid Palace

2010 01 22 The Maison

(Mimosa, ESKMO, Samples)

18"x24" - paint markers on masonite

11"x17" prints available - $20

My friend, fellow painter and force of inspirational weirdness Kevin Odenedo, who taught me how great it is to sneak into shows and paint with a headlamp, also suggested to me that I try his technique of starting with a black silhouette and building from from it with lighter colors. This painting is dedicated to him and to Tourmaline Todd Shepherd, whose centered and strongly symmetrical mandala-like formalism frequently evokes (for me) celestial cities and fantastical palaces...

I painted this in the bizarre cabaret/attic/barroom upstairs The Maison's jazz club. (Apparently, they had to keep a jazz band playing downstairs to cover the sound of the dubstep, because the venue is on a block known for a specific sound and they might've otherwise gotten in trouble...ha!)

As for the title, ferrofluid is a new and totally bizarre magnetic material that grows dramatic spikes in elaborate patterns when electrified. Starting with a black form and working up, I quickly developed a weird angular fractal volume in this painting that looks like nothing more to me than the ominously beautiful geometry of dynamic ferrofluid art.

I ground-scored these after the show. Never mind that they didn't fit my head...I finally felt enough like a member of the Muppet band Electric Mayhem to cop a sense of belonging in New Orleans.

Corals

2010 01 23 Luna Bar & Grill

(Mimosa, Samples, Nasty Nasty)

18"x24" - paint markers on masonite

11"x17" prints available - $20

This one goes out to Sloan LaMotte, whom I met at Trinumeral Festival and who determinedly recommended me to ActionPacker Pro (and thus, who is responsible ultimately for hooking me up with a trip to Louisiana in the first place). This one went down in Lake Charles, Louisiana, which is totally different from New Orleans...a lot less going on, which made the show more savory, somehow. Plus the venue was open to the humid night air on both ends, and even with a roof overhead the outdoors invariably change the experience of – and thus the quality of – my work.

It isn't clear from the above photographs that I added a silvery sheen to the backgrounds of each piece, which make them shimmer and shift as you walk past and view them from different angles. This picture makes it more apparent:

Louisiana was amazing, and I'm eagerly anticipating round two.

Wisps

2010 01 29 Quixote's (Praang)

20"x30" - paint markers on masonite

11"x17" prints available - $20

This is the artifact of an excellent evening with the adventurous electronic/instrumental hybrid project of legendary guitarist Steve Kimock, monster drummer Jason Hann, hammer dulcimer master Jamie Janover, and keyboard loop wizard Michael Travis...a truly wild and entirely improvised roam through heavenly heights and dirty dubby depths, a show at which Scramble Campbell and Don Calleman, two of the live art scene's sage elders, were working on a huge collaboration right next to me (Don gave me a pair of his 3D glasses to trip out with while I worked...it was pretty impossible to wear them and paint at the same time). Travis and Hann's main touring project EOTO often stays in the grindy dubstep hellspace for too much of their shows for my taste, but it worked perfectly in tandem with Janover's irrepressible positivity and Kimock's mythological guitar heroism. It was cumulus clouds one moment, fire and brimstone the next...a delicious combination, especially since this group only gets together to play for a few dates a year. This painting goes to the lovely lady whose birthday it was that night and whose name I forget, but to whom the painting will soon be going...

Symbols of Awakening

2010 01 28 & 30 Quixote's & Crystallize

(Zach Deputy, Audio Virus, DJ Lucina, Paradigm, Coral, Earthmen, E11even)

20"x30" - paint markers on masonite

original available

11"x17" prints available - $20

Every one of those medallions is in a different state of completion than the rest, all of them more complete in some ways and less in others. The whole first night, painting during Zach Deputy, was an exercise in simplicity; the whole second night, a frenzy of experimentation. This was the third painting in over 160 in which I played with the threateningly-messy dripscapes, originally (as usual) an accidental consequence of playing with new and unfamiliar markers. Crystallize, produced by Guildwerks and Sound/Mind, was the first legitimate psytrance party in Denver in YEARS, in recorded memory...considered by all to be a bona fide resurrection, complete with fancy lights. Zach Emmendorfer and I had the entire second room, the chill-out lounge, to set up an enormous gallery (the second room used to be a racquetball court, to give you an idea of size...the walls were the same solid maple as the floor and I bent dozens of nails trying to hang the panels).

This painting is dedicated to Liz Wheeler (aka E11even) for bringing me on board Crystallize and for being so instrumental in the revival of Denver Psytrance. It is another one of those that has so many different subtle sheen effects in it from the wide variety of paints, I have to show you an angled detail photograph to give you a multi-perspectival, three-dimensional handle on it:

And now, off to The Sixth Annual (and my second) Gem & Jam...