My Talk From Rootwire, Best Hat Yet, & New Live Music Archive

"There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality

– and then there are those who turn one into the other."

– Douglas Everett

“Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.”

– Albert Einstein

Thank you all for supporting my efforts to make my life an inspiration and example to others, to help people find a way to bring their work and creativity together.  All of us can live a life of passionate and illuminated service.  Here's how I'm doing that, for now:

My Talk From Rootwire Festival

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Just say yes to evolution!  The talk I gave at Rootwire Music & Arts Festival in between awesome offerings by Jamaica Stevens of Tribal Convergence and visionary artist Amanda Sage, and featuring a guest appearance by the awesome electronic producer Evan Skytree Snyder.  May it serve you in your continued growth and learning...

"I think there is a great deal of coming out right now, as we admit ourselves to ourselves.  As we step forward and identify as children of the planet to the parents who may still be identifying with nationalistic or industrial concerns, with specific ideologies or cultural affiliations.  These are things to be celebrated because we no longer rely on them.  They're an art form, now, not a technology of survival.  Terence McKenna said that culture is not your friend, but that's not entirely true; culture is an art project, now.  It can be our friend if we raise it to learn to be our friend, because the choice is ours."

Custom-Painted Hats

Orders for more detailed, time-intensive hats have been coming in, and I've been having a blast with it!  Check out my full gallery of 100+ painted hats if you'd like inspiration for your own custom design.

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New Live Shows, All Free at Archive.org

I put out a lot of music.  A lot.  In order to separate studio-produced or deeply-curated live albums from less epic (but still worth-sharing) recordings, I've decided to launch a page at archive.org's etree Live Music Archive.  These are all partial shows – some more complete than others – free and fun and full of silly banter and strange sonic experiments.

If you like what I'm doing enough to buy some music, here & here are two great albums worth sharing. I'm about to record a long-overdue studio album and can definitely use your help to bring it into being!

Thanks, and enjoy...

download it here

Fifteen minutes of raw, molten basement jams with acoustic & electronic drums.

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Twenty minutes of touchstyle guitar etudes & silly banter from my show in Boulder this summer.

download it here

On sacred land in the desert outside of Albuquerque this summer, I let it get as weird as possible....

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A pretty solid sampling of both my acoustic singer-songwriter music and cyberacoustic improvisations.

Introducing Denver: Live Art Capitol of America

Originally published in Kush Magazine.

 Live painters from across the U.S. working on a collaborative mural at Sonic Bloom Festival 2010.

“The Mile High City,” Denver has developed something of a reputation as a mythic city on the hill, a holy mountain where musicians flock to the sweet nectar of the scene and the “green rush” of medical marijuana has opened the possibility for a new culture of arts patronage.  But the rarefied air of America’s new cannabis capitol is also atmosphere to the historical epicenter of another progressive movement:  live painting.

Painting as a performance, usually as accompaniment to live bands or electronic musicians, has exploded in recent years as a symptom of the evolution from the concert as a spectator sport to entertainment events as participatory multimedia environments. Part of a re-tribalization of culture enabled by border-breaking electronic communication, this new breed of concert encourages dancers, video artists, and installation designers to collaborate on fully immersive spaces that transport attendees from the mundane world outside to mini-festivals where the overwhelming display of creativity triggers a sympathetic response.  The internet world where an increasing slice of society resides is highly interactive, responsive, and tactile compared to television or print…and consequently, people are starting to demand more from these older media.

Live painting – which destroys the ancient stereotype of artist-as-solitary-magician by planting the studio amidst reveling crowds and integrating real-time feedback from the audience – is an idea whose time has come.  And it finds a natural home in Denver, where the music – be it jam bands, bluegrass, or electronica – has always been about making parties happen.

There are many excellent live painters in the accelerated cultures of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, as well as fringey college towns like Austin and Asheville.  But some of the Denver area’s landmark venues have famously supported a multi-generational live art culture that took the art from the sideshow amusement it was in the days of “Speed Painter Denny Dent” to the international movement coalescing today.

Chaeli Cardenas, Michael Garfield, and Kevin Odenedo painting together at Red Rocks for Sound Tribe Sector Nine, September 2011.

The momentum of this movement was obvious when documentary camera crews descended on the Arvada Art Center last year, after community elder Keith “Scramble” Campbell organized an historic marriage of live painting’s rascally outsider culture with the institution of fine art.  There is no one better than Scramble to do so – the man spent decades introducing people to the art form as the resident artist of the legendary Red Rocks Amphitheatre just outside of town.  It was at Red Rocks that I was first inspired to paint at concerts, watching Kris D paint with touring instrumental electronic band Sound Tribe Sector Nine.  I am one of many.  And four years later to the day, I found myself painting at Red Rocks, inspiring an even newer generation of live artists.

Live artist J Garcia speaks to the Film Cartel documentary crew at the Arvada Center in 2010.  Their new movie about live painting, ScrambleVision, will debut in the 2012 film festival season.

Scramble and fellow local live painter John Bükaty – with nearly forty years of experience between them – are two of many who have helped popularize live art at venues like Denver’s Cervantes Masterpiece Ballroom and Boulder’s Fox Theatre.  Concertgoers now often expect it as part of the production.  Local megabands like the String Cheese Incident have always encouraged it, and SCI family electronic music festival Sonic Bloom has one of the strongest showings of live artists in the nation.  (Full disclosure:  I have been live art director at Sonic Bloom for the last few years, so there’s no small amount of home-team pride behind these words.)

Rae Vena, Michael Garfield, and Warren Binder were just three of over a dozen live artists at Sonic Bloom Festival 2011.

Cervantes in particular has kept an open-door policy for local and national artists who want to contribute their talents to the commons.  Live art events like “Thunk,” organized by Scramble and Bükaty, brought artists from across the U.S. – movement founders like Los Angeles’ Norton Wisdom and New Orleans’ Frenchy – to collaborate on massive indoor and outdoor murals.  Throughout the year, Sonic Bloom holds parties that routinely draw nearly a dozen live painters into the 600-person house.  The walls proudly display art created on site, and the mythical lost Welton Street Mural – one of the largest live art collaborations ever – is hidden beneath beige paint outside, cultural catastrophe at the command of a building owner who didn’t get it.

Left to right, live painters Scramble Campbell, Lauri Keener, Dylan Brooks, and Patrick Beery converge on Quixote’s True Blue in Denver for “Thunk,” a multi-generational celebration of painting to music.

The area has made such a name for itself as a haven for live art that deeper forces must be responsible, “something in the water.” Live painters Amanda Sage and Andrew “Android” Jones grew up in Boulder, mere miles from the home of legendary visionary artists Robert Venosa and Martina Hoffmann…connecting the region’s independent western attitude through the Viennese “Fantastic Realists” to a centuries-old tradition of mastery.

 Martina Hoffmann and her husband, the late Robert Venosa, at work on a collaborative live painting at The Mishawaka Amphitheatre in 2010.

Between the noble European tradition and more contemporary graffiti culture, it exerts an undeniable pull. For an entire subculture of nomadic live artists who follow concerts like the native peoples of this land once followed the buffalo, Denver is an important stopping point on the annual festival circuit.  For other more stationary artists across the country, it has become a kind of live art Mecca.

Nationally-acclaimed live painter Jason Garcia moved here from the Bay Area around the same time as an influx of new blood from Kansas, Texas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio, and Virginia.  It is a palpable tide of creativity taking shape.

Internationally-touring visionary artists Alex & Allyson Grey painting at Cervantes Masterpiece Ballroom in April 2011.

Here at the edge of the Midwest, perched on strategically advantageous high ground where the crisp air and mountain view gives everything a sense of adventure, a growing cadre of live artists is working to liberate three generations of suburbanites from their alienation.  Live art isn’t just a symptom of the internet’s new society of transparency, or a gimmick; it’s a spiritual guerrilla movement to help everyone recognize their personal calling and collaboratively create a new positive vision for society.  It’s leadership by example, telling people, “You can do this too.  Don’t deny your creative spirit.  Get out there.  Take the initiative and shine.”

ChelseaLyn Graber painting live at Sonic Bloom 2011.

New Paintings With New Pens

available - 2009 01 17 - Jackpot Saloon (Breakbeat Buddha, Johnny C, DJ Clandestine)

A milestone in both the "redshift" and "blueshift senses: my last gig in Lawrence, and my first gig using the new ultra-fat-tipped "Hardcore" brand markers I bought to mix it up a little. Working with only one width kept me from throwing broad swaths or solid patches of color on the paintings, which led to a lot of tiny, clustered, focused work; the idea was to start with a few bold strokes and then use the finer lines to bring out detail. You know, some kind of actual painting technique! But those big pens with their wide flat tips were more difficult to wield than I had anticipated. It takes A LOT more work to an even line - kind of like being a kid playing with your parents' calligraphy set (if that metaphor connects at all with anyone!). Those fat ribbons ended up a little more wiggly than I had meant to make them... I like how the fat yellow pen is kind of transparent and you can see the ribbons a little bit through the orbs. Keeping everything overlapping in the right order was the biggest challenge of this piece, but I think overall the depth is fairly convincing.

available - 2009 01 26 Hodi's Half Note (Vibesquad, Bass Science, Savoy)

This is what happens when I drive for eight hours and THEN paint, only to try and finish it at 5 AM after the concert, when my brain is wondering why I'm keeping it awake. Exhaustion aside, I got to try out a lot of cool new things with this piece - like making transparent orbs out of concentric circles, and giving scaly leaves to the bold wide strokes of green I laid down first. Another experiment with this one - and something I'm going to have to try again a few times, because the idea is so satisfying - was to create a minor explosion of light IN THE MIDDLE of the object, BETWEEN the tentacles or whatever they are, as if the roots of the thing are ripping open and illuminating everything from the opening rift. The electric blue margin on that foreground tentacle really pleases me, but it wouldn't have looked as if I had extended it anywhere else. Kind of like part of another painting busting into this one.

available - 2009 01 28 The Root (Pnuma Live PA, Lazer Sword, Eskmo, Welder)

The transparent plants were a first. And this one is another attempt to leave more and more of the painting "unfinished" as it goes from one side to the other, to reveal little glimpses of the process. This one didn't leave MUCH unfinished - just a little at the top. I also tried creating a "scalloped" boundary along the outside of the bubbles, giving them a bit more of a liquid look to them, by outlining them with one wavy line and then again by normal curves that partly occluded the waves. You can see some of the original wavy bubbles up toward the top. Looking at it now, it seems like those plants are trying to grab the bubbles as they float by but keep missing. Or maybe that's just how I felt at The Root while painting this. It was a weird night - not many people there, given the talent, and SO cold, even indoors.

Painting While Dancing, Part 3: Stray Dog In The Temple

Sometimes I feel like grabbing someone and pleading with them to please remind me what I'm doing, pretending to be a painter. It's a term I can only offer with the following (usually unuttered) disclaimer:

I don't know how to use a paint brush. I am intimidated by the notion of mixing my own colors. In fact, I have no formal education in art of any kind - and so I use paint markers on foam board. I borrowed an easel to do my first show.

It's one of the enduring ironies of my existence, that I define myself by my work but the best descriptor for what I do is something I don't consider myself to be. There's more than a little imposter's guilt in me when I carry my easel into the Trilogy Wine Bar every Wednesday night to be a painter, like I accidentally received an invitation to the party and I don't have the guts to admit I don't belong there. Like I'm a wild bird that snuck into the aviary to live off the free food. Like I'm a fox pretending to be a lapdog.

But I might make up for my lack of disciplined training with twenty years' experience of doodling in class, at parties, on planes, and in my sleep (although those images rarely survive the morning). A childhood of dinosaurs and aliens carried me into a scientific illustration course in college, from which I was hired directly to draw plates of frogs, snakes, and lizards for species descriptions at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum.

Frogs, University of Kansas Natural History Museum

I reconstructed the fossil armor of bizarre pig-crocodiles, two hundred million years dead...

Aetosaurs, July 2005

...and pieced together the awkward gait of extinct flying reptiles from trackways preserved in the mud of an ancient lake.

Pteraichnus, Tate Museum of Casper College

I brought to life numerous prehistoric invertebrates in ink - alternate-reality lobsters with rows of flippers and compound eyes.

Nettapedoura, University of Kansas Department of Geology

Over the three years that I was working daily hours at the museum, I must have drawn at least a hundred thousand scales.

Gekko, University of Kansas Natural History Museum

How I stumbled into live painting is easy to see, in retrospect: those were three years I spent drawing with headphones on, learning to make the cleanest possible lines with the smoothest possible strokes, making immersive and meticulous detail my natural habitat. Training and straining my attention. Doing my best to hold the pen as lightly as possible and push the rate at which a person can stipple in a relaxed and even rhythm. Dot after dot, slowly sculpting the contours, ridges, recesses, tubercles of creatures as long as my thumb, working under a microscope, moving through my whole arm in slow sweeps and hypnotic pointillist pecking.

The living pulse of this work is trance-inducing, tunneling through boredom into exultation. Hunched and squinting, I felt connected to the ocean of nameless monks whose gilded script illuminates our ancient sacred manuscripts. And there was never any doubt for me that I was working in a church - a temple to the natural world, complete with byzantine catacombs of holy relics, shelf after shelf of preserved creatures from all over the world, soaking in alcohol jars.

But then, I was probably the only one having such thoughts. I was the contract artist in a hall of scholars and their graduate disciples, a hundred others who would probably have balked at the notion of science as a religious institution. (Kansas is, after all, the epicenter of a fierce debate between Evolutionary Biology and the so-called science of Intelligent Design. It's a tender topic.) Not a grad student, not a field researcher, not an official employee, I worked as someone whose dreams of paleontology had evaporated and left me in the alkaline and existential expanse of accidental mercenary illustration.

And so, long before I had ever entertained the notion of live painting, the whole foundation had already been poured. A degree-carrying biologist pretending to be an artist, or an artist pretending to be a biologist? Whether inking frogs in a corner of the herpetology library or staking out easel space to the side of the stage, I can't shake the feelings of being a peripheral animal, living on the fringes. The meditative and monastic quality of my experience as an artist, ritually ornamenting some precious text, has flown from the stone cloisters of the halls of science and landed in the whirling ecstasies of more embodied worship.

While illustrating descriptive papers and field guides in the museum, I used the creative faculties of my right brain to present ideas with fidelity and frugal care. While tracing psychedelic lattices and floral blooms in vivid color at concerts, my left brain remains engaged in executing emergent rules and patterns, the visual genome and evolving geometry of pieces I consider living and breathing artifacts of the evening's energies. The organic metaphors that pervade my identity and work, my doing and being, point to the deep structures of my ecological education - while the creative yearning and the commitment to exact visions are the signature of a poetry that runs through my life in settings hushed or boisterous, scholarly or celebratory.

With all of this in mind, my inability to paint (according to my definition) makes little difference to my identity as a naturalist-artist-monk, exploring the strange fauna of the subtle energy worlds conducted by heaving bass and dancing throngs. Plate by plate, I'm assembling a new field guide: a field guide to living jewelry, the bizarre beauties of a mind just on the other side of this one.

2007 12 14, Trilogy Lounge

2007 12 19, Trilogy Lounge

2008 01 29, Avalon Ballroom

Whenever I set up my easel and pull out my bundle of paint markers, I remember one passage in particular: Aldous Huxley's introduction to his essay, "Heaven and Hell." Before my work in the museum, before I recognized the sacred responsibility of the artist, this passage fell through my eyes and down into my deepest reaches - rippling outward until now, finally, I hear it and know who I am:

"Like the earth of a hundred years ago, our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazonian basins. In relation to the fauna of these regions we are not yet zoologists, we are mere naturalists and collectors of specimens. The fact is unfortunate; but we have to accept it, we have to make the best of it. However lowly, the work of the collector must be done, before we can proceed to the higher scientific tasks of classification, analysis, experiment, and theory making.

Like the giraffe and the duck-billed platypus, the creatures inhabiting these remoter regions of the mind are exceedingly improbable. Nevertheless they exist, they are facts of observation; and as such, they cannot be ignored by anyone who is honestly trying to understand the world in which he lives.

It is difficult, it is all but impossible, to speak of mental events except in similes drawn from the more familiar universe of material things. If I have made use of geographical and zoological metaphors, it is not wantonly, out of a mere addiction to picturesque language. It is because such metaphors express very forcibly the essential otherness of the mind's far continents, the complete autonomy and self-sufficiency of their inhabitants. A man consists of what I may call an Old Wold of personal consciousness and, beyond a dividing sea, a series of New Worlds - the not too distant Virginias and Carolinas of the personal subconscious and the vegetative soul; the Far West of the collective unconscious, with its flora of symbols, its tribes of aboriginal archetypes; and, across another, vaster ocean, at the antipodes of everyday consciousness, the world of Visionary Experience.

If you go to New South Wales, you will see marsupials hopping about the countryside. And if you go to the antipodes of the conscious mind, you will encounter all sorts of creatures at least as odd as kangaroos. You do not invent these creatures any more than you invent marsupials. They live their own lives in complete independence. A man cannot control them. All he can do is go to the mental equivalent of Australia and look around him."

So that's what I do.

(Written for iggli.com.)

Painting While Dancing, Part 2: How I Got Into This

Live painting was a curiosity to me, bizarre and insignificant, until last summer, when I finally got to see it actually happen. I had just moved to Boulder from Lawrence, Kansas, where I had been working as a scientific illustrator. Colorado seemed fertile with opportunity, but I was crazy from coasting on my last few hundred dollars while finishing an online degree program and recovering from what may or may not have been the flaming crash of a three-year relationship. I was teetering like a drunken meadowlark on the fencepost between manic exuberance and a panic attack, when my buddies from Lawrence drove up and took me out to the Red Rocks Amphitheatre to catch Sound Tribe Sector 9 (STS9) in concert.

STS9 is the flagship of a recent musical movement called "livetronica," an integration of traditional band instruments with electronic music elements, manipulated as it is happening, on stage. Although artists had been playing around with "live PA" set-ups for years, a full marriage of traditional and emerging technologies only happened a few years ago, when laptop music production software like Ableton Live suddenly made it possible for artists to do all of their soundsculpting in realtime, while recording, under the heat of stage lights. Live turned the laptop computer into a legitimate instrument, and one of the first bands to capitalize on this was Sound Tribe, for which computers perfectly complimented their already-quasi-electronic breakbeat drumming and trance-inducing guitar patterns. (You can find features on their use of computers in concert here and here.)

But that's all pretext for me to explain how the band's reputation for innovative syntheses led them into partnerships with other performance artists, to augment their already-dazzling concerts. The most famous of these is Kris Davidson, a painter whose works have morphed over time from pretty but somewhat prosaic geometrical diagrams:

...into vivid, layered, and organic dripping scapes reminiscent of natural history illustrations and mycelial microscopy:

The point is that Kris D was painting with STS9 when I saw them at Red Rocks last September. And for the first time in my memory, I got to watch someone paint and dance at the same time. I showed up for the second night of a two-night run, so the evening began with what looked to me like a finished painting on stage...and then Kris spent the next three hours burying it in washes and strokes that systematically and repeatedly redefined it. What started out looking like a wall of cubes became a sprawling cityscape, then the face of a mechanical goat, then a spray of tribal warpaint. The painting was breathing and dripping, shifting and blooming, while Kris dashed in for a few quick brushstrokes before retreating a few feet to gain some perspective. He bounced back and forth in a wide stance, perched on the stage with the ready tension of a bowhunter and the easy, casual hips and shoulders of a track runner.

There was something playful, almost flippant in his back and forth: the springy rave dancer with eagle discernment swooping in to exact some measured micro motion and then yaw back out into loose-limbed and watchful bouncing. And back and forth in those oscillations all night. It was an exaggeration of the double-moded painter stereotype, juiced into a higher octave by the uptempo beats and epileptic light show. Ah: this is the difference between painting alone at home, and painting on the receiving end of ten thousand intoxicated dancers. The incredible intensity of Red Rocks - literally, built over the bones of indians and dinosaurs, and channeling thousands of watts of sound between two ruddy monoliths that thrust up from the mountainside like heaving whales - that energy was rushing down onto the stage and through that brush into the painting.

While my own ass-shaking had merely bled heat energy into the mountain air, Kris D funneled that same vibe into a haunting and mysterious work of art:

Here was someone who wasn't merely doodling in class, or cooped up at home with his canvases and cats. Here was someone who had managed to shine, to really shine, in front of thousands of people, without being a member of the band - a rockstar painter who musicians request to goof off with them on stage. Here was someone who got to play pro at some of the best parties in the country and had found an audience for his work that studio artists can scarcely imagine. Here was someone who made his living by painting while dancing.

And that's when I started taking live painting seriously.

(Written for iggli.com)