...So Begins Another Epic Festival Summer! Live in SF, New Mindfolds, & The Lost Painting

"I think of mythology as a function of biology, a statement of the impulse system of the body and the organs. Not something that’s made up in the head. What’s made up in the head is fiction. What comes out of the heart is myth."
– Joseph Campbell

"The history of the song is based on the ballad, and the ballad is based on the narrative, and the narrative is based on the epic, and the epic is based on the anecdote.  It's all very interrelated."

– Sufjan Stevens

We start with the dissolution of boundaries, and a new complex space opens up between us...

When The Orbit Curtain Falls

Watch in 720 HD on Youtube
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My ode to the day we meet our extraterrestrial neighbors and learn to sit at the galactic Adult's Table.  Inspired by half a dozen UFO sightings at Clinton Lake, just outside of Lawrence, Kansas, in 2006 - 2007. What's not to love about our initiation into a vaster cosmic understanding than we currently imagine?

Live at The Center SF

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So, I played this amazingly fun show during the solar eclipse at The Center SF on Fillmore with Cello Joe and eitch.  We were blessed with live painting by Randal Roberts and Dela and Scott Ferguson, and dancing by Cressie Mae.  If you weren't there you can download this and pretend like you were – and if you were, you can get all sentimental while we're waiting on the next one.

Also, I found out that someone recorded my entire set opening for Papadosio in Lawrence on May 1st!  (Not a bad set, either...see video above.)

And the love is still going strong for my latest EP, Yellow Leaves.  Go grab yourself a free copy of that one if you haven't already; definitely one of the most inspired instrumental sets I've ever played.

If you're curious about what inspires me:

From my recent interview on UniTiger:

"The reason I call it 'cyberacoustic' music, and the reason I understand it as a performance of a Unity paradigm, is because of how this music is inspired by my study of cybernetics, nondual spirituality, and the evolution of consciousness. Cybernetics is all about feedback loops and understanding a living organism more as a pattern of relationships with the environment – a dynamic nexus of energies – than as a discrete individual living 'in' and acting 'on' the world. By using a live microphone and a magnetic soundhole pickup my musical inputs are open to the sound coming through the speakers, so there is a chaotic sensitivity to the environment that weaves all of these unplanned variables into the creative act. Just as 99% of our decisions are not made by the conscious mind and the pursuit of a deeper-lived Unity calls us to integrate what we consider self with what we consider other, I invite the unexpected and the audience and the mechanical and architectural context of the performance into its actual musical expression as much as possible.

It’s also a way of saying that we have no clear boundary between organic/born and artificial/made, the analog and the digital, producers and consumers, past/present/future…it’s a way of preserving these distinctions while still pointing to the arch-reality in which you and I and all of this equipment are here together, now, participating as polarities within one phenomenal event. Looking at us as interpenetrating fields of influence that are also harmonics within a greater unified field. Nature and Culture, Inner and Outer worlds in an alchemical wedding."

Read the whole interview here.

The Lost Painting:

Tunnel of Glass & Ferns

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Started in Deerfields, North Carolina at Trinumeral 888 (and made of 8s, if you look) for EOTO and Conspirator on the day that Beijing opened the Olympics; compounded and layered in Denver, Colorado in a DIY gallery weekend throwdown in 2010; rounded out in spring of 2011 in New Orleans, where I was on a streak of working over old pieces.  Lost in New Orleans for a while.  Rediscovered.  Gifted away.

Custom Mind Folds

I'm pleased with this development, let me tell you.  Email me if you'd like to order one and I'll send you the details.  (Hats are still an option, of course.  As is pretty much anything else.)

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Wow, That Happened Fast...

The festivals I'm delighted to be romping with, this summer – including a few promising upstarts:

(View my full calendar on the left sidebar here.)

Thank you for your time and your support.  We nourish each other!

New Paintings From Sonic Bloom & Custom Hat Frenzy

"I have been possessed by a great yearning to go and find, far from men and far from toil the place where dwell the vast forces that cradle us and possess us, where my overtense activity might indefinitely become more relaxed...To me in turn, as to all the sons of man, it was speaking as every generation hears it speak; it was begging me to surrender myself unreservedly to it,

and to worship it."

– Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

(paleontologist-theologian & my patron saint)

While you're browsing my recent live paintings from my now-annual stint as Sonic Bloom Festival's live art gallery coordinator, enjoy this dinosaur-skeleton-inspired number from my recent gig at the Dallas Natural History Museum.  It's free track on my new album, A Million Anniversaries: CyberAcoustic Guitar For Lovemaking – a 94-minute voyage through America's sacred landscapes and the hyperspace of improvised acoustic-electronic music...

Watch it in HD on Youtube / Vimeo!

Next week, I'll have the memory reel from this year's awesome twelve-person live art lineup at Sonic Bloom (because I had so much fun making the video for the Wakarusa live art team).  But for now, here is the latest harvest of psychedelic art – you can click on each image to view it full-size:

Sigil Egg

2011 06 10, 11 Tribal Convergence (SunDragon, Manoj, Mazeguider, Solus, Cohen)

& 2011 06 26 Sonic Bloom Festival (Tipper, Signal Path, Future Simple, An-Ten-Nae)

opaque pens on tempered hardboard – 24"x24"

signed 11"x17" posters – $20/each or two for $30 (plus $5 s/h) – email me to order

check availability of the original painting

Starting with the automatic writing (aka "channeled text," aka "light language"): The first layer of seemingly meaningless symbols, the closest I've ever come to direct translation of the grooves and melodic strains of live music, are constantly re-identified by friendly strangers as some kind of angelic script.  To me it's free jazz – honing the razor edge of my intuitive spontaneity until I can move with the music like one wing in flight.

And yeah, ongoing pine cone obsession.  (And yeah, there were pine cones everywhere at TideWater Falls during Tribal Convergence – a remarkable congregation of intentional creatives from across the Western U.S. and a weekend of potent practical idea-sharing as well as celebration...)  And the seven-sided star ties this piece back to my pine cone painting from Wakarusa through the archetype of the Virgin Mother (the number seven is historically associated with indivisibility/purity/virginity).

As cloud chamber tracings of a different kind of wild pure energy laps like waves around the protective sigil, the prayer of the scribbled glossolalia blanket and illumine the sleeping cone/egg...

Erosion

2011 06 24 Sonic Bloom Festival (Zilla, MartyParty, Break Science, Prophet Massive)

opaque pens on stretched canvas – 24"30"

signed 11"x17" posters – $20/each or two for $30 (plus $5 s/h) – email me to order

check availability of the original painting

The latest in my ongoing exploration of incompleteness – letting each new layer cover a smaller and smaller area and thus leaving the entire process out in the open.  Must be a holdover from my paleontology years, my fascination with fossilization and sedimentology: how the dead dinosaur is covered by mud layer by layer, then its bones replaced by minerals layer by layer, then the fossil bones eroding back out with wind and time after millions of years...

Expect more of these:

Sound Pond

2011 06 25 Sonic Bloom Festival (Octopus Nebula, David Starfire, Tipper, EOTO, Vibesquad)

opaque pens on tempered hardboard – 24"x32"

signed 11"x17" posters – $20/each or two for $30 (plus $5 s/h) – email me to order

check availability of the original painting

Keywords: topographic map, sound waves, interstitial, canyons, corduroy, myosin, rain, onions, cross-section, terraces.

Special notice to the white highlights on white banding that gives the whole thing a much more sculptural feel:

Custom Hats!

Hand-painted and waterproofed, each hat completed in a state of sensitivity to the buyer's natural energy and personal disposition.  Like with body painting, these hats create a savored opportunity for me to connect with people on a kind of profound and mysterious level.

If you'd like one, write me with your specifications: budget, colors and patterns, and whether you have a hat already or need me to find you a particular size and style.  Got a couple of relatively mellow weeks ahead of me – plenty of time to make you something beautiful.

for Allison

for Caleb

for Sarah

uncommissioned – check availability & details

And that's not even touching on the beautiful work from last week's Electric Forest Festival – where the vivid, swirling nightscape of color-shifting LEDs and blacklights on endless branches seeped into me for some of my most otherworldly art to date.  More on that next week.  :)

Gem & Jam, Entheon Videos, and a Valentine's Day Exclusive Track

> Imagery

Crystal Eggs

2010 02 04 Plush

(Ana Sia, BLVD)

20"x30" - paint markers on masonite

- check availability -

(signed 11"x17" prints available, $20)

I can't seem to shake the bad habit of hauling ass on zero sleep from Colorado to Arizona only to leap out of the car and immediately begin painting...which is exactly how it went down at last year's Gem & Jam, and exactly how it went down this year, as well. My friend, globetrotting photographer Megan Illgner, and I made it there with literally five minutes to spare before Ana Sia went on, after burning a fierce downhill highway from Durango to Tucson in one lightning stretch. It was pretty epic to begin with, considering our two-day drive together rang in her first real foray into vagabonding (and snowy mountain driving...ask me to tell you about our near-death experience on an icy road over Durango, one of these days). And no, I'm not just trying to terrify my mother. We were perfectly safe the entire time.

This painting is inspired by the oil pattern on the lenses of a pair of sunglasses I bought that morning (they were so cool I had to buy them, but they bore an MTV logo I had to scratch off with a pair of scissors so as not to infect my vibe), and it is dedicated to Amy Otto the masseuse, who took good care of my hands that night and is a luminous woman. After such a strenuous trip down, painting this in the company of friends I rarely see was a real treat. And I think it shows.

Whomporaptors vs. The Sunrise, or Dubstep Dinos Defeat The Dawn

2010 02 05 Rialto Theatre

(Telepath, Random Rab, EOTO)

20"x30" - paint markers on masonite

- check availability -

(signed 11"x17" prints available, $20)

After my recent critical review of EOTO's ongoing dubstep obsession, I figured I'd make a point to tell keyboardist/guitarist/looper Michael Travis that whatever they played that night would not be dark enough. Because I'd be painting dinosaurs. Half kidding, but I really was in an unusually grindy mood, and after all my railing on their overwrought fixation I was smitten by irony: their set was, indeed, not dark enough for my tastes. However, Megan and I talked on the way down to Arizona about how we wanted Travis to include bongos in their dubstep, and we had a high five moment when it actually happened at the show...pioneering a new genre she and I have lovingly dubbed "bongstep."

So this painting is dedicated to Megan, and indirectly, to bongstep. Here's to having the first Google hit for something (like I did for the statement, "Imagination is our greatest natural resource"). It's a direct response to my friends who insisted on more dinosaurs, and it was a challenge to myself, since the Maniraptorans were covered in feathers and I knew it'd be a growth opportunity to attempt them. Also, it's difficult to tell from this photograph but the background of this painting has a lot of really intricate dripwork and subtle color layering going on. I had a lot of fun prepping it.

As for the dinosaurs...well, I meant for them to be Velociraptors, originally, but I hadn't looked at any in a while. So we ended up with one likely Velociraptor in the middle, there; one anonymous sickle-clawed beast above; and something that looks like a primitive Tyrannosaurid (perhaps Dilong) in the lower right. I had no choice but to invent a taxon for this bizarre menagerie...genus Whomporaptor. So much for scientific precision. :)

Serpent DNA Love Regeneration

2010 02 06 Rialto Theatre

(Pnuma Trio, Vibesquad, Boombox)

20"x30" - paint markers on masonite

- check availability -

(signed 11"x17" prints available, $20)

Another painting named courtesy of the lovely Leesah Noble. I need to draw more snakes...after all, they're one of the few subjects with which I have significant professional experience from my time at KUNHM's Department of Herpetology, and it'd be a shame to squander what little official training I have in these things. So I got all Jeremy Narby on the green-and-yellow-and-silver background and delighted in scales for a few hours.

This painting is dedicated to Taylor Lupardo, with whom I stayed (along with about a dozen other people) during Gem & Jam, and whose Facebook profile picture I took at sunset from the roof of the parking complex across the street from his place...one of the most magical moments I had out there, maybe the closest any of us got to soaking up "real" Arizona during the festival. Thanks for the crash space, man.

> Writing & Speech

At Burning Man's Entheon Village in 2009, I participated in a series of lectures and panel discussions on evolution, consciousness, 2012, and the future of our species. And they were videotaped! I am SO excited to share with you the fruits of that project:

In this first (two-part) video, I'm on a panel with authors Daniel Pinchbeck, Tony Vigorito, and Mark Heley, as well as the mysterious Mark Martinez. It was incredibly fun to share the stage and assume the guise of expertise for this conversation about the evolution of consciousness and our current global transition, and except for a few rough spots the discussion was truly inspired and inspiring. It was an honor to participate, and it's an honor now to finally get to share it with you.

http://entheonvillage.blip.tv/file/3194601/

Right after the panel, I gave what is doubtlessly the most important speech of my life so far: a half-hour presentation on the emerging science of biogeomagnetics, a discipline that studies the relationship between living creatures and the electromagnetic fiels of our planet and star. By describing how magnetic fields trigger the release of various human biochemicals, and by grounding the presentation in the understanding that mind and matter are two perspectives of the same phenomenon, I suggest that the 2012 prophesies may actually have a legitimate, modern, naturalistic explanation – and that biogeomagnetics may offer us a prescription for how to stay afloat through the tumultuous years to come.

http://entheonvillage.blip.tv/file/3183885/

Those are my good friends, visionary artist Adam Scott Miller, activist and hero Taylor Steelman, beacon of joy Tessa Ruttan, and synchromystical faerie goddess Jacqueline North listening rapt in the audience (both pics are courtesy of the magnificent Sergio Lub, founder of favors.org, who moderated many of the panels that week with wisdom and grace). These talks are dedicated to anyone who might benefit from them, but I'll give a special nod to my friends who were actually in attendance that amazing day.

> Music

For my last gig at Quixote's in Denver, my friend M Vincent Miller, virtuoso pianist, sat in on about half of my set. It was messy, unrehearsed, and utterly ridiculous...it was also a dream come true. I've wanted to gig with Vince since we met in the fall of 2007, and I am so, so glad that at least some of the recordings came out well enough to share them with you. As a blog exclusive (except, of course, for the people who were there), here is one of my more intense love ballads – a gift to you all for Valentine's Day.

This unusual recording of "Underground River" captures my first-ever duet performance with Vince, who turned this ordinarily brief-but-trancey number into a sprawling, edgy jazz-scape. Truly strange and beautiful...enjoy!

"Underground River" feat. M Vincent Miller

(2010 01 28 Quixote's True Blue)

http://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/track/bonus-underground-river-feat-m-vincent

Album Review: EOTO's Fire The Lazers!!!

When I starting keeping an ear and eye to EOTO two years ago, I had no prior experience with the duo's wildly different band-of-origin, The String Cheese Incident. I knew nothing about these guys, actually, except that they were trying something that combined live instrumentation with software audio looping technology to create improvised electronic music – and that, as a looping musician uninterested in retreading someone else's creative terrain, I would do well to pay attention.

And at first, I was mightily unimpressed. Without the starry eye of a rabid Cheese fan, I saw no reason to privilege this project with the benefit of a doubt. What I saw was one guy admirably drumming his ass off and the other guy just goofing around – no matter what a monster musician Michael Travis was in his other ensembles, here he was just twiddling knobs, more stage presence than virtuosity. When I saw them for the first time at Wakarusa Festival in 2007, I waited fifteen minutes for him to pick up the guitar, and then he put it back on the stand after looping a positively uninspiring two-note diddy that didn't take long to start drilling into my brain. Jason Hann's drumming was stamina-licious, but didn't hold my attention for long. I didn't understand the hype.

How things have changed.

What at one point a was loosey-goosey garage jam of a psytrance outfit has hit the books and the road hard, executing heroic workaholic tours and internalizing the diverse idioms of the world's finest electronic musicians. When these guys aren't practicing, they're asleep, and it shows. Jason Hann has significantly stepped up his game, wresting the King Kong Drummer title from KJ Sawka and Zach Velmer of STS9 by learning a veritable zoo of beats. And Michael Travis is now back-of-hand familiar with the synthesizers and looping programs that define their sound. Together, the two exercise a telepathic sensitivity to the energies of their audiences, uncanny in their capacity to know just when to remix the beat or kick up the intensity, drop out one theme or introduce the next.

I'm a bit embarrassed to admit this, because I know these guys, and I call myself a fan; but it used to be that I was only in EOTO's scene because they had a crowd that liked to watch me paint at their shows. Now, I hold these guys in high respect. I look up to them not only as musicians but as working musicians, people who are constantly challenging themselves to grow and learn, experiment and play, with fair dues paid to what they don't know and a sharp eye to the road ahead.

And in this shift, I've gotten kind of attached. Emotionally invested. I'm not a big sports fan, but I imagine this is what it feels like – when they execute a sterling endgame play, I'm out of my seat and in the air whooping; when I see them slump back toward autopilot mode I'm waving my fist because damnit I know you can do better!

So I'm of two minds about their latest studio release, Fire The Lazers!!!

In one respect, it's the most intense and apocalyptic of the three albums so far – and that feels right, given that their name is an acronym for End Of Time Observatory. There was always something dark and tremendous I wanted them to capture and now they've not only netted it; they've tamed it and bred it into something even more monstrous and awesome. Dubstep and glitch hop have been good to these guys; they know how to ride the scene. I'm amazed that what is in essence a live instudio concert, produced in exactly the same fashion as their live shows and edited only for length, manages to evoke such grandiosity with only two guys. Tone choice is perfect. The mix is crystal clear. And it should not go unsaid that the album's design is pretty classy, perfectly branded with tongue-in-cheek 1950's comic space adventure art and even a trippy lenticular insert. (Although, as an aside: It's not a "hologram," guys. They're two totally different technologies; please stop muddying the waters of lexical precision.) It's one of the most epic sets I have ever heard from these guys, if I block out 2008's Halloween show in Lawrence, KS.

But I'm not too happy with what they've left behind in the process. In spite of its faults, early EOTO managed to balance their darkness with something sparkling and transcendental. No matter how much I felt sucked into the maw of Kronos by their explorations, there was a happy subcurrent, something I came to associate with the influence of Pleiadians and Buddhas they wore on their sleeve. If I suspended disbelief, I could damn near believe this duo was a conduit for divine energies, holding down some seriously sacred vibes while still getting me deeper in my own embodied groove. Plus, I got spoiled: I caught Travis actually wail on that guitar once or twice, saw what he's capable of with a fretboard. I saw the fruit of this holy union between laptops and a live band that reached heights that, with all due respect, groups like STS9 and Boombox would never dare to go. They stirred me into ecstasy with that stuff. And it's painfully missing from Fire The Lazers!!!, which seems a bit more wrapped up in the concept and cool, the groovy club dimension, something...kind of...smug.

In all fairness, I do occasionally see the contours of a gothic cathedral traced in the terrible majesty this album evokes, like in its chill-inducing first track, "Flying Red." But it's never long before those arches disappear into the murky fog of what other listeners would describe with words like "nasty," "sick," and "dirty."

Not to mention, grit aside, the fact that the studio presents a unique opportunity for a band like this to do something truly different, something impossible in their live shows, to stir it up with more sophisticated and fantastic arrangements, inconvenient instruments, and freaky post-production magic tricks. And they blew that one completely.

It isn't easy to be notorious badasses and still keep it fresh; you're constantly at risk of alienating your audiences (no pun intended). And so I'm finally giving these guys the benefit of a doubt. I'm willing to believe that I'll look back on this as EOTO's Dark Night of the Soul, their fling with the Dark Side, where there are no guitars and the shimmering depth is momentarily replaced by some kind of sexy-but-nasty postmodern chic. In fact, I'm almost certain, knowing these guys, that they're probably already kind of embarrassed with this stuff. That the last few months since their last studio sessions have seen a resurrection after their three days underground, a glorious and newly-integrated resurgence I can't wait to hear on the next album.

In the meantime, I love EOTO and what they do enough to tell you that Fire The Lazers!!! is worth a spin. It's a perfect album for certain situations – mostly the kind in which you want to be turned on and spooked out at the same time: autumn midnight drives, deliciously dark psychedelic forays, edgy sex and its neon club seductions. It has kind of a David Lynch-directs-Tron vibe, which is great, and certainly close to what they had intended. And it's light years ahead of their earlier live sets.

But I know they're going to read this review. And I hope they take it as a friendly challenge to bring back the divine intergalactic exultation I fell in love with. Crop circles, after all, aren't made with lazers.

(Written for Colorado Music Board.)

New Merchandise Store & CO Paintings

First of all, I'm excited to announce that I've been inducted into the roster at ArtsProjekt.com, a super-hip and progressive online artists' collective. Which means that I have a new merchandise shop – now, you can buy my artwork in the form of postage stamps, coffee mugs, postcards, buttons, stickers, skateboards, and soon plenty of other items. I'll be adding new products with some regularity and am happy to take suggestions, so if you have any ideas for sweet art/merchandise pairings let me know! And enjoy your new options...

2009 08 14 Mishawaka Ampthitheatre (EOTO, Vibesquad, Big Gigantic)
16"x24" - paint markers on masonite

Another trip out to the beautiful Mishawaka Amphitheatre yielded this lively number...an attempt to cover "surfaces" with tetrahedral reliefs, a la the Epcot Center's Spaceship Earth and other quasi-geodesic structures. Thanks to the Mish's crazy late-summer weather, I did indeed get to paint while it was raining for a while...right next to me, fellow painter Kenzie Page was having a blast with her drippy acrylics, whereas my pens were impervious to the weather. It worked out for both of us. The show was a blast – I've made it known on every possible occasion how much I enjoy painting for all of those artists. And I got to soak up a lot of Colorado love, lots of friends I haven't seen in ages. This show made it very, very hard to stay away.

2009 08 15 Boulder Theatre (Freq Nasty, Heavyweight Dub Champion, Ana Sia, Jantsen)
20"x30" - paint markers on masonite

The next night was the homegrown SoundQuake Fest at the Boulder Theatre – a real landmark venue, and one I'd never painted in before (although once upon a time I DID get to play Chapman Stick on stage there, for the 2008 Bao Bao Festival, in a fairly ridiculous highlife band). Majestic and spacious, the Boulder Theatre was decked out with fabulous chill spaces and a stage half-filled with busted old TVs displaying static and weird visual noise. My man Ralf put the whole show together himself, a real grassroots achievement...even if the Boulder crew was strangely thin that night, probably still burnt out from Phish tour and STS9's Day Out Of Time. Eva Andreano set up along the opposite wall, painting on board and frame all at once. And I ran the whompy, aggro theme of the night, applying my unique appreciation for heaviness and paradox to the night's work. It feels good to be getting back to more focused, centralized, object-oriented compositions, after a summer of so much play with background layers and fields. This piece goes out to a special woman in my life, who wonders if our feelings for each other are more wings or anchors. Here's your answer, babe.

10,000 Breaks & My Lark For Zuvuya

> MusicBefore we dive into the paintings, I'd like to invite you to dive into my latest album: Quixote's Lark For Zuvuya, a live recording of my recent opening set at Quixote's in Denver for Zuvuya (the acoustic side project of Zilla's Michael Travis & Jamie Janover, with Xander Greene on acoustic guitar). Being invited to play in support of these fantastic musicians was a tremendous honor, and I had no choice but to seriously step up my game for their audience. Which was easy enough, because it was already a very significant day (marking my little brother's 10th birthday, as well as the transformation of a very long and difficult romantic relationship into something more nameless and profound)...this recording captures one of my most energetic and passionate performances ever, as well as the debut of several new live looping arrangements for older songs. You can download it for free here – or name your price for the music, if you're in a generous mood.

For those of you who were there, thanks so much for your patience in getting this online! For those of you who weren't, check it out! The performance swerved from swinging balladry to acoustic guitar techno to spark-shooting instrumental etudes...and it's yours as a gift of appreciation for your time and attention. So please, download it and enjoy!

> Imagery
FYI, I'm having a liquidation sale f some of my earlier paintings, which have been discounted 30% - 50% from their original asking prices. If you've been waiting for this apparently seasonal event to roll back around so you and your buds can scoop up some affordable original work, have at it! You love art; I love health insurance. Let's play "win-win." Here's the list of available paintings (at facebook and at myspace). And now, onto the new work...

2009 07 24 10KLF (Everyone Orchestra) - 18x24
Certify Electrify

I got into my virgin 10,000 Lakes Festival last week, a delicious gathering in upstate Minnesota held on permanent festival grounds (flushing toilets and shaded camping = major luxury). I was granted entry on journalistic assignment for GratefulWeb.com (my extensive festival write-up coming soon) and spent most of the weekend taking pictures and notes, but found some time to paint for some of my favorite artists. The Everyone Orchestra show was spectacular – with Dominic Lalli of Big Gigantic on saxophone and Steve Kimock on electric guitar, and conductor Matt Butler's energy was higher than I've ever seen. The show was a benefit for The Rex Foundation, founded by the Grateful Dead, which was raising money to buy instruments for local music programs – check them out and offer support if you can.

As for the painting...I've been getting more and more into intricately preparing backgrounds with cross-color fades and metallic spraypaint. In this case, I got so carried away with the background that this piece was an exercise in leaving it visible behind my penwork. The result was a perceptual paradox in which foreground objects appear to be behind background objects, like those trick rooms you look into through a viewfinder and kids appear taller than adults. Entirely unintentional. The guy who bought this one named it...he was on a "certify" kick that night.

available - 2009 07 23 & 24 10KLF (Wilco, Steve Kimock Crazy Engine) - 18x24
Swimming In Words

I'd never seen Wilco before and wasn't expecting much...but they rocked my socks half off. That Nels Cline was wailing on the electric guitar – but unlike fellow headliners Widespread Panic, Wilco's lead lines were integrated into a jangly wall of sound, instead of pushing the rest of the band into the background. And that's my style; I prefer band-as-explosive-organism to band-with-a-badass-hired-gun. I set up in the concrete beach of a general admission area down front for this one, which was kind of foolish. It was a high traffic area but TOO high traffic. One girl spilled an entire new beer all over the place and very nearly destroyed my book of prints; I got bumped into a lot; it wasn't especially visible to anyone but the river of people, and difficult for anyone to actually stop and watch. It was much easier to finish this during Steve Kimock's set, although I was baking in the midday sun the entire time for that one. Regardless, I consider this one a successful experiment in laying down a complex monochromatic background beforehand and spending the "live time" pulling out details and creating many layers from one. It reminds me of what it must be like to live in the naked Logos, deeper than space and time, swimming through the fundamental language of reality.

available - 2009 07 23 & 24 10KLF (Garaj Mahal & Boombox) - 18x24
A Wall Of Windows

I had the honor of painting onstage during Garaj Mahal for this one...if you don't know Garaj Mahal, make it a point to and you'll know what I mean. Every member of this jazzfunk supergroup is a master of his own instrument, and two of them (Fareed Haque on guitar and Kai Eckhart on bass) are actually music professors for most of the year. This band is their recreational project, which gives the music a playfulness and spontaneity rare even among jam bands. And of course, I love painting for Boombox whenever possible. Another experiment in dualtone backgrounds with gold spray. Looking through a fan coral at the evening's first stars, or the reef's reproductive bloom...

2009 07 05 & 24 Rothbury Festival & 10KLF (EOTO, Shpongle, Alex B, Big Gigantic & Big Gigantic) - 18x24
10,000 Breaks Vestibule

I had started this one at Rothbury, painting as an unofficial member of the ReSOurce Center's IAMU visionary art gallery next to the Tripoli Stage. But I was pretty distracted by other things that weekend and didn't have the opportunity to lay the finishing touches until 10K, which was just fine: I had another opportunity to paint for Big Gigantic's heady mix of live drums and saxophone with killer laptop production, which is always a treat. It was weird to be (to my knowledge) the only itinerant sidestage live painter at this festival, but I got a lot of welcome appreciation for it when I set up in the entryway to the event's Saloon Stage (the only permanent indoor venue I've ever seen at a festival – very cool). Thus the title (again, courtesy of the buyer).

available - 2009 07 31 Beaumont Club (Nick Steady, Mixed Method, Galactic Soul Tribe, Clandestine) - 18x24
Bassdream

I can't seem to shake those ferns! This one "happened" at Cicada Rhythm's Sunshine Bassdream, a lovely two-stage mini-rave in downtown Kansas City, where I set up outside in the glorious and unseasonably cool evening air and listened to great local live electronic hybrid acts and uptempo DJs until the wee hours. My friend David Titterington, a truly amazing visionary painter who puts my work to freakin' shame, was in town from Japan, and I enjoyed having him around to offer his painterly advice. The first time I ever started one of these pieces with an intricate background from scratch at the show, which was messy but fun. And even though I didn't know where I was going with it at the time, it does seem to have captured both the "summer" and "bass" vibes of the event with fidelity. I'm sure watching Planet Earth's "Grasslands" episode the night before had something to do with that. :)

> Writing
I've been a busy writer this summer. Here are some recent essays for your reading pleasure, as well as a few solid little interviews:

Vivid Journal – "Michael Garfield: Exposed!"
(...in which they ask me about my artistic process and how I've braided together art and music and writing in my life.)

MusicAndSpirituality.com – Interview w/ Michael Garfield
(...in which I contribute to an ENORMOUS survey of music visionaries by offering my own interpretation of the spiritual significance of music.)

D/Visible Magazine – "Biomimicry: Breathing New Life Into Design"
(...in which I introduce the emergent field of biomimicry, which seeks to solve human design problems with nature's own pre-existing solutions.)

Colorado Music Board – "Field Guide To Colorado's Live Artists: Kenzie Page"
(...in which I interview one of Boulder's newest live painters for my ongoing comprehensive survey of Colorado's insane live art scene.)

Colorado Music Board – "Sonic Bloom Festival In Pictures"
(...in which I share a very tiny slice of a very lovely weekend at one of the most beautiful venues in the world.)

Colorado Music Board – "Luke Redfield's Folk Mysticism And Mystic Folk"
(...in which I review recordings by my friend, legendary nomad-meditator-troubadour Luke Redfield, who demonstrates that spirituality knows no genre.)

> Share this with your friends!

The First Of A Busy Summer's Fruit

2009 05 30 & 31 Sail Inn & Rhythm Room (Endoplasmic & Black Moth Super Rainbow)

16x24 - masonite - available

My last painting from Phoenix...a poignant few nights. Endoplasmic is a band of national-level talent mysteriously stuck playing local gigs...going out alone to paint for them at the Sail Inn for probably the last time was a strange, quiet affair amidst all of the jamming. Black Moth Super Rainbow the next night co-headlined a show with School of Seven Bells. The latter made me turn off my lamp during their set (a first-ever for that one...but then again, they'd just come off a European tour, if you know what I mean). But the former were more pleased than anyone ever has been to have me...an adorably nerdy ensemble, very friendly and very real, the frontman sitting cross-legged onstage below crowd eye level and the girl drummer anonymized and androgynized behind a ninja costume. They said they were happy to have something else for people to pay attention to. This painting is the sequel to the painting from Zilla and Glitch Mob's NYE 2008 run at The Fox Theatre in Boulder...another tentacled alien god shimmering into the foreground from some oceanic mindscape.

2009 06 11 & 13 Crosstown Station & Jardine's (The New Mastersounds & Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey)
20x20 - canvas - available

After checking out both The New Mastersounds and JFJO at Wakarusa, to paint for them both again in Kansas City the week after was a summer-synchronous treat. Jardine's - the Odyssey's favorite KC jazz club haunt, tucked away over the green shoulders of the Country Club Plaza - is the classiest spot I've seen in this town...although I'm sure they're playing had something to do with how much I reveled in the find. This is the last in a trilogy of twenty-inch circular canvases...it falls somewhere between the first's crystal structure and the second's leafiness. An integration.

2009 06 17 & 23 501 Club & Quixotes (Brad Senne, Luke Redfield & Zuvuya)
16x24 - masonite - available

After extensive preparatory background work, I started this one on my first night touring my music through Minneapolis. I'd just set up the easel to paint during the other two acts (my friend Luke, a fine folk musician, had hooked up the gig) when I realized I'd locked my keys in the car. Luckily one of the friendly locals let me use her AAA membership to call a locksmith...but only after I'd broken off a cocktail stirrer in the door trying to break in with the power of sheer dumb chance. Until I was able to dig the plastic piece out later that week, I had to walk around the car to unlock it every time. Mildly tragicomic. Minneapolis is BEAUTIFUL. A garden city, lakes and trees and footpaths and bohemia and strange elegant sweeping architecture. Most of this painting, however, was completed in Denver at Quixotes', where I was granted the honor of opening for Zuvuya (Michael Travis and Jamie Janover's acoustic dance jam band with Xander Greene on nylon string guitar and guest Garrett Sayers of The Motet on delicious bass). There were five painters crowding the venue's entire south wall that night...I'll have much more to say about that show in the next entry when I'll finally have finished mixing the recordings of my show that night. For now, suffice it to say that I'm not sure if that jellyfish has more to do with my friend and fellow live painter Kayla Andreano's jellyfish obsession (I'd been staying with her that week, talking jellyfish A LOT) or that these beautiful stinging beasts are the unofficial mascot of Michael Travis' home team, The String Cheese Incident (who were playing a private rehearsal for their forthcoming reunion at Rothbury Festival the next night, and cheesy anticipation was in the air).

2009 06 25 B Side Lounge (Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey feat Fareed Haque) - collab with Todd Shepherd and Kayla Andreano
30x30 - canvas - available
I loved the look on the faces of JFJO when they saw me show up to paint for them for the third time in three weeks in three different states. :) Half the show I spent preparing the painting below for further work at Sonic Bloom Festival the next day, but the other half of the show I spent in pure artistic bliss on my first live collaboration with Kayla and "Tourmaline" Todd Shepherd. We were all so stupified by what emerged from between the three of us that we stared at this painting for over an hour after the show, mumbling dumbfounded partial sentences. Also, this is the only painting I've ever stepped on. We (mostly Todd and Kayla) spent a good chunk of the afternoon preparing the canvas with layer after layer of paint, and at one point Kayla and I painted our feet and walked a few circles around it...unfortunately all that remains visible of that are a few stray toeprints.

2009 06 25 & 26 B Side Lounge & Sonic Bloom Festival (Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey feat. Fareed Haque & Lynx and Janover, Anasia, EOTO + Kang + Kyle)
20x30 - canvas panel - available

Fareed Haque's guitars and equipment were put on the wrong plane and ended up in Wichita the night of this Boulder gig, so he had the audience clap along instead of laying down live loops. Of course they were all a bunch of musical laypeople with a few drinks down, so the rhythm was dubious...I took the initiative and clapped and danced as cheerleader to help everyone keep the beat. Later Fareed let me know how much he appreciated the energy I helped bring to the evening (both as cheerleader and painter) and ok'ed me to paint for his band Garaj Mahal at 10,000 Lakes Festival in a few weeks. Yay! As for the night I completed this painting, what can I say about this year's (and my first) Sonic Bloom Festival except that Mishawaka Amphitheatre is one of my favorite venues in the world, and you should go there. I'm sure the canyon river right behind the stage and the beautiful blue skies had a direct influence on the "vibration" of my paintings. And of course I feel I produce better work when painting for world-class musicians.

2009 06 27 Sonic Bloom Festival (Boombox, Big Gigantic, Sasha Rose, Zilla)
20x30 - canvas panel - available

Krystle Smith and I were responsible for assembling a visionary art gallery at this year's Sonic Bloom, which we put together (with lots of help) on the indoor stage at Mishawaka. We moved all of the lounge's couches up onto the stage and made it a sweet elevated chill spot with art sprouting from every direction – including the diagonal ceiling, where I had a row of my own paintings attached with velcro (making the gallery kind of a danger zone...a few times they fell off and nearly beaned somebody...but because of weak adhesive, not the velcro itself). Anyway, this painting is about the closest I've ever come to making a "Krystle Smith" painting. Lots of layers, lots of blue, lots of simple floating elements and hexagonal geometry. At one point I accidentally smeared the green paint on one of those fronds, but ended up smearing the other fronds as well and it acquired a very painterly effect that was previously impossible for me to attain with markers. I'll probably do more "destructive" smearing like this in the future. And DEFINITELY more painting on gradients.

2009 06 27 Sonic Bloom Festival (Random Rab, Bassnectar, Mochipet)
20x30 - canvas panel - available

Each of these bubbles was painted in advance with Wildfire brand UV ultra-white paint, the kind they use for film backdrops (apparently). When you hit this one with a blacklight everything inverts and the bubbles all glow a profound luminous blue. It's totally sweet...I picked up a 9 UV LED flashlight while living in Arizona (at the Walgreens, billed as a "scorpion finder" because the chitin in their shells is UV-reactive) and would occasionally dip out of "normal light mode" and into "UV light mode" while working on this one as an additional layer of strangeness for the audience. I hope whomever ends up with this painting puts it in the same room as a lava lamp.

2009 06 28 Sonic Bloom Festival (Tipper, David Starfire, Beats Antique, Heyoka)
20x30 - canvas panel - available

Harkening back to simpler days, this one. It kind of reminds me of a logging mill, eating away at the fabric of spacetime itself. By this point in the weekend I'd worked myself pretty raw, so I consider this painting an example of what happens when I'm "frame-dragging" (the computing term...although had this been framed at the time, I'd probably have been so tired I'd have been dragging it around).

2009 07 02 Rothbury Festival (Toubab Krewe, Keller Williams, Lotus)
18x24 - canvas panel - available

Rothbury was a very different live painting experience from my residencies at Wakarusa and Sonic Bloom. I was working from the crowd the entire weekend – and even then, only out of a sense of artistic duty, because I was first and foremost there to spend time with a rarely-assembled group of friends. But I still managed to squeeze in some learning, especially as regards preparing panels with various paints and sprays (thanks to Tourmaline Todd for suggesting I use silver spray paint for stars). I'm not normally a big Keller Williams fan (he's too glib for my tastes) but he put on a killer trance party that day. And Toubab Krewe jammed out on "Billie Jean." All was well in the world.

2009 07 03 Rothbury Festival (String Cheese Incident)
18x24 - canvas panel

This one was painted from the hill above The Odeum, Rothbury's main stage (capacity somewhere around 50,000 people?), where my friends and I squatted for the headliners each night right in front of the giant wicker-and-Christmas-lights Rothbury sign (each letter in the word was about eight feet tall...an excellent landmark, and right next to the water refill station). I can't express how difficult it was for me to make this...the first String Cheese Incident show I'd ever legitimately attended (if you don't count the time my girlfriend and I scaled the mountain behind Red Rocks to catch their last show in 2007 for free), and all I wanted to do was dance, my feet were dancing out from underneath me, I wanted to throw myself down the hill and into the heaving costumed flesh festival but I'd pre-sold this painting to some friends weeks before the festival and had to be responsible in the most inopportune moment. Somehow I think the tension helped with a graceful execution, and in person the silver spraypaint gives the whole piece a luminous quality, as if looking up through the waves to the rippling sunlight above. I'm happy with the results, but finally had to admit that calling my live art blog "Painting While Dancing" is a bit of a misnomer, because it was impossible for me to really get down and work on this at the same time. It was an evening of five minute breaks and intense yearning.