Paintings from an Electric Forest; Music from an Acoustic Jungle

"Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and...stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to walk about into a hitherto unknown world.
If the answer is yes, what more do you want?"

– Wassily Kandinsky (possibly the first live painter)

"The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts."

– Henry Miller (reinvented the novel; also a painter)

This is how I started 2011:  playing and painting in the mountainous rain forest village of Sinai, Costa Rica; watchless, clockless, countdownless, uncertain of when consensus time made the New Year official; enchanted by strange bugs and the quiet depth of its isolated village culture.  New Year's Day, I played a concert outside the village kitchen to a receptive lawn-full of international appreciators, deep in the dreamy mystery of our strange little festival.

That show is now my latest free live recording, Vive En Costa Rica.  I released this album in secret back in March – made it available for people who paid for a copy of The Body Electric – and then figured it might as well just be out there for everyone to enjoy:

Vive En Costa Rica (2011)

The spacey, kinda spooky improvised first track (named in honor of a genuine faerie sighting) scores this reel of the travel clips I took down there.  Looking through my eyes:

Watch it in HD on Youtube

And here are the paintings from my Fourth of July weekend up in Michigan at Electric Forest Festival. Click on each picture to see it in terrifying full detail:

Looking At The Blue Flame

2011 06 30 & 07 01 Electric Forest Festival

(Toubab Krewe & String Cheese Incident, Tiesto)

18"x24" – opaque pens on stretched canvas

$20/1 or $30/2 for 11"x17" signed posters – email me

check availability/price of original painting

My original plan was to have a blue-and-gold series of sculpted pieces based on themes I'd started at Sonic Bloom...but original plans don't count for much in an improvisational sport like live painting.  Especially when the skies open up and drop a huge "welcome to the festival" storm on everyone...which is perhaps why the design ended up with so many little blue dots:

Rainbow Tunnel

2011 07 02 Electric Forest Festival (String Cheese Incident)
18"x24" – opaque pens on stretched canvas
$20/1 or $30/2 for 11"x17" signed posters – email me
check availability/price of original painting

The festival's official documentary team caught a delicious HD timelapse of me (and Christian Jaxtheimer, and Rae Vena) working on this piece, start to finish – check 1:48 of this video to watch the whole Saturday Night String Cheese Incident concert breeze by.  It was a return to older themes, dating all the way back to my idle classroom sketches in college...but in a lively, tribal style that capitalized on my chisel-tip bold markers and completely ignored the patient layer upon layer of outlining I developed in my own pen-specific voice.  Working in the ghost sunlight of my awesome new powerful battery-powered LED lamp, this painting came together like the holographic tunnels in some private realm of sylvan dreaming...I've never felt so eerily transported while working on any other piece.

Lesage's Wall

2011 07 02 & 07 03 Electric Forest Festival
(REO Speedwagon, Big Gigantic, Shpongletron & Railroad Earth)
18"x24" – opaque pens on stretched canvas
$20/1 or $30/2 for 11"x17" signed posters – email me
check availability/price of original painting

In honor of Augustin Lesage, coal-miner turned compulsive visionary artist whose enormous early 20th Century paintings evoked the transcendental architectures of Ancient Egypt as if transcribed onto even greater scale into grandiose heavenly landscapes.  I don't even know where to start in describing how hypnotized I am by Lesage's work, but maybe you'll see it in this Navajo-inflected homage:

...and I painted on a lot of beautiful people while I was there.  Check out the full gallery on my facebook art page:

Body Art at Electric Forest Festival 2011

Announcing "The Body Electric" & My Most Ambitious Painting Yet

"If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders."

- Andrew Harvey

"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude."

- Friedrich Nietzsche

I'm immensely grateful for the nearly 3,900 people that have signed up for this newsletter over the last three years – for your time and attention, for your encouragement – but most of all, for being blessed with the chance to enrich your lives with my work, to give you something in which you can find meaning and inspiration.

But look, guys. I'm having a hard time balancing "listen" and "express." I don't know how to fill this void, this speakerbox, this opportunity to say – but only what you need to hear. So what do you need to hear? Tell me this and I will do my best.

I'm ready to put the days of unfocused explosive creativity behind me and start channeling this energy into something that will truly serve the needs of the people with whom I have connected. To find the sweet spot that will illuminate and exalt us all the most. To do what only I can do in a way that sets your life on fire like only you can burn.

Because it's time for that. From here on out, this newsletter isn't just my rant box; it's my platform for putting my understanding and ability to work for you in the most ambitious, crazy, brave-hearted way we can conspire to achieve.

And with that, I have some things to share with you that I hope will turn you on and get this started.

..:: Visual Art ::..

The first is the most ambitious live painting I have ever attempted...you'll want to click on this one for a full view so you can appreciate all of the detail:

Going Somewhere (Tree of Flowing Jewels)

2011 01 23 Quixote's (Praang)
2011 02 03 Hodi's Half Note (Invisible Allies, Bluetech, KiloWatts)
2011 02 15 The Aquarium (O Fo Sho, Heavy Is The Head)
2011 02 17 The Whole (William Within, Luke Redfield, Noah Earle)
2011 02 26 Cervantes (Papadosio, Heyoka, Larva Ink)
24"x48" – opaque pens, acrylic, & spray paint on masonite
original painting for sale – email me to inquire
11"x17" poster prints $25 each (two for $35) – order by email
full-size stretched canvas giclée poster prints (series of ten):

$400 – order by email

This painting came with me from Denver to Fort Collins, out to Fargo and Minneapolis, and then back to Denver over the course of a month in which I worked on nothing else (artwise). It's the largest piece I've ever done, and because my markers have three-millimeter tips that set a boundary on detail, it's the first live painting in which I've managed to actually accomplish the multiple levels of fractal self-similarity that I allude to in the rest of my work. There's a quality to it that I've only experienced in states when even solid objects seem fluid and selfhood streams like tattering clouds through the gusty sky of the Great Imagination. I can almost hear this painting. It whines and whirs, whispering insect secrets into auroral night. Everything else, every zipping thought and mammalian contraction, shuts off when I look at it, and there is nothing left but the ancient and infinite truth of life, mind, and time...an open secret in which all of our human splendor and dignity, story and drama recedes into unnoticeability, empty as I stare at a foreign sky in silence.

(click to enlarge)

On a slightly less epic note, I've added several new images to my online sketchbook archive on Facebook. If you're not already a friend of my art page there, you might want to be – you'll get updated about my new work a lot faster that way.

..:: Music ::..

As I've gotten more well-connected in the dance music scene through my live art, I've co-evolved to make my music more suitable for the venues and audiences that ordinarily support music made on laptops and synthesizers. Those of you who've been following me for a while have watched as it has mutated, branching off into both intricate percussive fretboard magic built for festival stages and elaborate acoustic-electronic soundscapes at home in chill-out tents and other dusky liminal spaces.

Now, I'm pleased to announce that the transformation is complete. My newest album drops this Sunday – the Spring Equinox, March 20th – morning after the closest Full Moon in years, and a perfect time for the advent of a new age in which the carbon-based past of rosewood and human flesh meets the silicon-based future of blinking lights and loving machines. The Body Electric is my ode to the marriage of the animal and mineral, tradition and novelty.

Recorded live over two weeks at shows in Colorado and North Dakota (while I was working on the painting above...what an epic month!), it's my latest and greatest effort to redefine the guitar so thoroughly that the music shines through unimpeded by instrument. This is acoustic music liberated into an entirely new sonic landscape and philosophical vista. And it comes complete with a lush, poster-sized hi-res file of the hybrid ink-and-digital cover art I designed as a visual counterpart to the music, for your psychedelic eyeball pleasure:

The Body Electric (2011)

The link goes live on March 20th and then it's a free download for you and everyone else...but anyone who donates more will receive a download code for the unreleased recording of my concert in Sinai, Costa Rica at the Geoparadise Festival on New Year's Day 2011. It's a performance I'm proud of, including my best-to-date live take of fan favorite "You Don't Have To Move" as well as a collaborative loopscape with shamanistic throat-singer Matthew Kocel and some of the more unguardedly silly between-song interludes that have ever flowed through me.

In the meantime, you can listen to and download two tracks from The Body Electric – "Tunnel Run" and "Touring The Body Electric (SHORT)" – on my Soundcloud page. And you can watch the video for "Tunnel Run" – stitched together from a year's worth of going over bridges – right here, right now:

(If you can't see it here, you can watch it on Vimeo, Youtube, or my Facebook music page.)

Again, thank you from the bottom of your heart for following me down these corridors of the imagination and into the ornamented chambers I find there. If I've managed to open you up even a little bit to the vast wild isness of our lives, mission fucking accomplished. Goodnight, you guys.

NYE Painting From Costa Rica & "Alive With You," My Definitive Live Album

"All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware."

- Martin Buber

"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered."

- Nelson Mandela

In April 2010, I embarked on an eight-month, 30,000 mile tour across the United States...and recorded everything, knowing that one day I would boil it down to the most potent hour of heart-rending pleasure I could possibly produce.

While I'm locked away brewing my full-length studio opus of acoustic adventure and eschatological angel jazz, I offer you these definitive live recordings of my work as a songwriter, instrumental composer, and gypsy philosopher...a virtual concert experience for those who were there in body and in spirit.

You can listen to it for free here:

Michael Garfield - Alive With You (2011)

Free downloads are available for reviewers, remixers, and self-motivated publicists. Contact me if you'd like a promotional copy! And of course, feedback is welcome on my facebook music page.

...The year ended with me in Costa Rica, kicking off my late-blooming international vagabonding with live art and acoustic guitar at the Geoparadise Gathering. It was an intense experience – what the festival lacked in organization, it made up for with natural beauty and rare collaborative opportunities with DJs, throat singers, and ancient, possibly-extraterrestrial technology. Here are the pictures! I'll be sharing music and video footage soon, but in the meantime here is the latest of my New Year's Eve paintings (and here are the paintings from 2008, 2009, and 2010, for you time travelers):

The Living Mind Of Time

2010 12 31, 2011 1 1 Geoparadise Festival

(Sinai, Costa Rica)

24"x30" - paint markers on masonite

check availability & leave your comments on facebook

11"x17" prints available - email me

(click on the picture for a bigger view)

While I'm putting the next newsletter together and you're grooving on Alive With You, here are some news items I'm happy to share:

• I'm now a musical and visual artist on the impressive roster at Detroit's Deepblip Records;

• Peruvian retreat-slash-spiritual-warrior-training center Shimbre featured my instrumental album Glass Chrysanthemum on their website;

• Badass community news site Reality Sandwich published my video lectures from last fall's Light & Shadow Tour, in which I discuss the role of "the shadow" (the stories and identities we repress) in personal and cultural transformation;

• ...and Guitar International Magazine had me write the introduction to their interview with inventor and musical pioneer Emmett Chapman.

Enjoy, and thanks for your time...drop me a line any time, and have a beautiful day!