Quick Science Rant // New Live Painting // Hummingbird Stickers! // Art Outside Announcement

But First, A Riff on Science & Wonder

"Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop."

– Carl Sagan

We have personal stories and collective stories.  I think it will probably help to see the work I do as a writer and speaker as addressing and investigating the collective dimension of our stories.  William Irwin Thompson wrote that history is the ego of society and myth is its soul.  So learning our evolutionary history is to establish a much deeper grounding for our collective ego…and then to recognize it as a provisional and ultimately groundless scientific fairytale (even as the best we have) is akin to seeing past our ego story into our essential Mystery.  

One of my main theses over the last few years has been that science in its finest form as endlessly unfolding inquiry is basically a spiritual practice – the humility of wonder in pure curiosity, beginner’s mind as a prerequisite to any good experiment.  Of course, the process always ends by disconfirming or confirming a hypothesis, and then we start again with some assumptions – how we choose to ask a question’s all about the paradigm from which we’re asking – so there’s always going to be a point of ingress for the myth, the story by which observations are explained.  Laboratory breakthroughs are the moment of divine invasion; scientific journals are the holy texts.  Each has its visionary fringe more sensitive to the anomalies, the saints in wilderness encountering uncanny revelations, and orthodoxy that rejects new revolutionary insights as if they are immune cells.  The only difference between the institutions we call science and religion are the speeds at which each culture is reformed; the process is identical.  Organized religion’s like a solid; science is a liquid.

And I think we’re on the cusp of something even quicker – the networks that we’re growing are accelerating our adventures in discovery and peer review – and we are possibly approaching our real biological constraints of how fast we can mentally adapt to seeing things in totally new ways.  (Of course, we’re also learning how to be more flexible.  In my finest moments I can let new worldviews flow through me…though I always settle back into a lower state of order.)

Do any of you think about this stuff?  I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Endothelial Goo Conveyor

Poster Prints & Giclées Here

The first piece that I ever got so fed up with halfway through that I actually tried to destroy it, but the spray paint ran out and it ended up looking so cool, I decided to roll with it and finish what I'd started.  Another step closer to the "H.R. Giger takes 2-CB and gets over his natal trauma" aesthetic I started carving out with this year's painting, "New Age Cleopatra Basks Apocalyptically..."

Painted live with oil & acrylic markers and aerosol paint on canvas (36" x 24") at the following events in 2015:

07-25 Quixotes (Cream Cheese Accident), Denver, CO
07-28 Boulder City Park ("painting in the park" with Randal Roberts, Morgan Mandala, Chelsey Crandell, Joshua Wine Morriston, and many others), Boulder, CO
08-01 Taos Mesa Brewing (Treavor Moontribe, Planewalker, Desert Dwellers, Kaminanda, Kannizle, Buno), Taos, NM
09-02 Empire Patio, Create Culture (Zonra, Soundshaman, Sanjiwan, Fractala), Austin, TX
09-23 The Other Side (Spiritual Rez, Red Sage), Denver, CO
10-02 Westbank String Shop, Austin, TX

Original piece still available – email me with inquiries.

New Hummingbird Stickers!

Get Some Stickers

A few years ago, in preparation for Burning Man, I marked up a plain white tee-shirt with the slogan, "Imagination Is Our Greatest Natural Resource."  This motto grew some wings and flew away, just possibly inspiring this book by futurist Ramez Naam.  It's been a while since I had any stickers, and the time felt ripe to resurrect the motto with a kiss from Beija Flor.

If I see you in person, ask me for one – or you can buy them in quantities both small and large at michaelgarfieldart.com.  Help me spread inspiration and encouragement in your town!

A Roadrunner in Progress

One of the reasons I love live painting is to share the entire process with people. To demystify the creative work and invite other people to imagine themselves as empowered creatives (who much have to spend a few years sleeping in their cars, and postpone having kids for a decade, in order to cultivate their dreams into their waking lives). 

This roadrunner kept showing up on my journey through the enchanted American Southwest and, like so many of my other paintings, just asserted itself as the subject of my next piece. Little did I know that I would have to paint through a vicious windstorm, the easel gorilla taped down and still bucking I'm the gusts, to finish this the night it needed to be finished...

You can read more about this piece, and pick up a print, on my art site.

Playing + Painting + Speaking at Art Outside

I'm honored and delighted to share my first singer-songwriter set in years (here and here are some older recordings) with this year's Art Outside family! We've all got to live our passion, and mine is writing songs about psychedelics, making love in zero gravity, the landscape of eternity, and running from the terrifying beauty of our higher selves.

Years of experimental guitar practice will definitely enrich the atmosphere we'll feed and share together in the pecan grove at the Folk It Up Stage on Saturday at 12:30 pm – but this will be a set of finely crafted ballads, odes, and anthems for the dreamers and lovers. I've played this festival each year since 2010 and feel like I'll be coming home – I cannot wait to share an album's worth of new material with you!  (If you're not going, it will be recorded.)

Love and thanks for all of your support!

Epic New Live Painting & Intimate Living Room Recordings

"There is an almost sensual longing for communion with others who have a 
larger vision. The immense fulfillment of the friendships between those
 engaged in furthering the evolution of consciousness has a quality 
almost impossible to describe."

- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Aloha from the Love Without End Tour! In the first week of April I set back out on the road to continue the endless pilgrimage I started in 2006; in these last few weeks I've been back in the saddle, bringing art and music and science-inspired and -inflected presentations to people across the country. It's been an amazing run so far and there is so much more to come…

For now, I trust you all won't mind that my updates have been more erratic than usual. I've been so inspired by the amazing people I've met and events I've participated in that my productivity is through the roof…and so busy it's been hard for me to keep up with everyone in a timely fashion. In order to keep every email readably short, I'm going to start breaking my updates up into smaller pieces and sending them a bit more frequently. That way, we all win: I get to share everything while it's still fresh, and you don't have to wade through a tome every time I send you my new work. So here we go!

> Writing ("best of" gathered here)

D/Visible Magazine: Interview with Live Painter Kris D

After my last brief interview with live artist Kris Davidson, he and I decided that we hadn’t drilled quite deep enough into the mystery of what compels us both to paint. So over two weeks, while Kris was on the road in India and I was couch-surfing in Boulder, Colorado, we kept a lively correspondence about symbolism in art, mapping the unconscious, the visionary experience, anarchism, sacred geometry, and more. Here is the transcript of that conversation – an exchange that inspired us both to go even further sometime soon, that left us both delighted but wanting more...

> Music (listen & download here)

My last few days in Boulder were marked by long-anticipated visits from out-of-state friends and epic goodbye gatherings – including my buddies' monthly art and music event, CASh & Check. The fourth CASh & Check featured a living room open mic stacked with some of Boulder's finest unsung talent, and I was lucky enough to squeeze into the program for a quick one-two.

http://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-cash-check-ep

It isn't often I have the chance to play for such an engaged, attentive, open audience, and you can totally hear the difference. (This EP is dedicated to everyone who was there that night.) You can listen to those eighteen minutes – some of the sweetest and most intimate I have ever played – at my bandcamp page. Among the three songs I performed was a rough first acoustic draft of Yeasayer's "Ambling Alp," my favorite song of 2010 so far – and so, unlike the rest of my recordings for which I accept whatever people care to pay, I'm making this one entirely, don't-even-argue-with-me-about-it free. Enjoy!

> Imagery (full gallery with price list here)

Capture

Before

After

18"x24", opaque paint markers on canvas panel

2010 04 08 320South (Octopus Nebula),

2009 07 23 & 07 24 10KLF (Garaj Mahal & Boombox)

- original stolen; prints unavailable -

On my first day's drive from Boulder to San Francisco, I happened to be in Breckenridge at the same time as my friends Octopus Nebula and ended up sticking around to paint for their show.

This is the first painting to be stolen from me. My apologies for the lousy picture, but I didn't have the opportunity to get a better one; the guy who now has it (his name is Nicholas Hernandez) sold me on a beautiful story about how it reminded him of his lost lover and how profoundly he connected with it. He went so far as to talk me down to half my asking price, grab cash from an ATM, help me pack up my stuff at the end of the night, and offer me a place to stay before he disappeared in the confusion with both my painting and the cash.

I have a sense of humor about these things…I mean, wow, if he needed it that bad, he needed it a lot more than I did. I consider this theft as an initiation into my grand unprecedented road trip, a slight improvement in my gas mileage, and a worthy story. It was also a lovely reminder to trust the world completely, and people only as far as I can throw them. In spite of how entertained I was by the whole debacle, Nick Rodriguez demonstrated an almost hilarious, scarcely believable lack of integrity. This painting is dedicated to him…here is his email address, in case you want to write him a thank-you letter for reminding me to keep my street smarts sharpened (or for any other reason).

As for the painting itself, I took this opportunity to attempt a technique I've wanted to use for years: the distortion of an image through a transparent lens or bubble. Wherever the ribbons coil behind the spheres, there is a distorted refraction…it's an exercise in holding the vision, imagining not just the forms I paint but how they interact. A challenge to start thinking and painting more multidimensionally. That one orb is different – it radiates from the luminous coil held within. If you're curious about the first two nights of work I put into this one, you can read about its origins here.

Venture To The Stars

24"x40", opaque paint markers on masonite

2010 04 10 Yuri's Night Bay Area, NASA Ames Research Center

(Hamsa Lila, Beats Antique, Glitch Mob, Random Rab, Savage Henry, Vibesquad, Flying Skulls, Dyloot, Majitope, Barb)

- original and prints for sale; inquire by email -

(Definitely click this picture for a more detailed view.)

Two straight days of driving later, punctuated by sleeping in the backseat of the Windhorse, my glorious new 1995 Subaru Legacy station wagon (all shiny silver like a UFO), I arrived in Mountain View, California – home to the NASA Ames Research Center and unlikely venue for one of the most incredible day festivals I have ever attended.

Yuri's Night is a global celebration of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's first manned spaceflight, that pivotal moment in the history of our species when for the first time, one of us saw the planet from space with his own eyes. It is a celebration of our solidarity as a species and as citizens of Earth, an opportunity to unite in revelry with our eyes to the future and our destiny amidst the stars. The San Francisco Bay Area's Yuri's Night party was thrown by legendary West Coast promoters Symbiosis Events, who not only managed to somehow throw a rave inside a federal aviation facility (complete with air show, an entire hanger-full of interactive science exhibits, and a surreal number of people walking around in flight suits), but who also allowed me in as the only performance painter for the entire event. (Such is the glory, I suppose, of using pens instead of spray paint or sloppy brushes…I'm far less of a threat to fancy establishments.)

I haven't ever had such a wonderful opportunity to participate in something that simultaneously stimulated my passions for both art and science...mythic grandeur and investigative discernment…it was a cosmic moment in which I felt uniquely prepared to shine for the benefit of everyone in attendance. And sure enough, I spent much of the twelve or so hours I worked on this piece (noon to midnight) talking to fellow partygoers about plasma cosmology, archetypal astrology, cymatics, holarchies, extraterrestrial disclosure, and other wonderful spacey topics I regard as pointing to the future of science and human experience. Epic introductions were made. Titillating friendships were established. I got interviewed on video by NASA's own media team (although, as is typical with NASA's videography of extraterrestrials, I have no idea what became of that footage). I blew minds; they blew mine. I ended up with my biggest painting yet, with which I explored the ancient "blending-paint-with-fingers" technique to a glorious degree. I finally feel like a gen-you-wine painter.

In other words, and in the parlance of our times, it was a total rage-a-thon. I ended up crashing (Flight 1549 style, not Space Shuttle Columbia style) on the couch of my awesome new friend Lou of The Flaming Lotus Girls, arguably the hippest installation design team at Burning Man, who weld together massive and awe-inspiring inflammatory artworks like this.

I named this painting after a line pulled from John Boswell's life-changing Carl Sagan remix, "A Glorious Dawn": "The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will – one day – venture to the stars."

The entwined caduceus serpents of masculine and feminine, left and right brain, the East and West, positive and negative charge, rise up from their earthly origin to dream together about their common future "out there…" Saturn's polar hexagonal storm cell hints at both the mysteries of the unexplored inky vastness and the enlightened science that will open it to us (and us to it).

Saturn rules time, fate, science, and paternity…the planet featured so prominently in Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001, the location of so many anomalies (liquid water-bearing moons, angular moons, and the hexagonal storm are just a few), is also the planet which archetypally "owns" scientists in the Western Zodiacal system. As a Capricorn sea goat, with front legs on a mountain and a fish tail in the sea – one of those paleontologist artist types, living between two worlds – this is a self-portrait, my own inner multitude poised on the brink of the transcendent, looking outward the into Great Beyond.

To quote Sagan again: "The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. Recently, we've waded a little way out, and the water seems inviting."

Carl, this one's for you.

> More Soon! (tour calendar here)

More art, music, and inspiring mouth-noises coming very soon from my legendary weekend at the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies Conference, Alex & Allyson Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors Bicycle Day Benefit at Temple SF, 420 at Golden Gate Park, the San Francisco Evolver Spore, Beats Antique in New Orleans, and other beautiful events...

In the meantime, you can check out my swiftly-growing Love Without End Tour photo album on Facebook – don't hesitate to reach out with your questions or comments, and thank you deeply for your time and support.

your comrade in (very) low-Earth orbit,
Michael