New Video, Upcoming Radio Appearances, & Art Show This Week!

"Michael Garfield has some absolutely amazing chops...the

musicianship on this album is truly wonderful."
- Marquee Magazine

So said the first official review for Alive With You, my album of highlights from the 30,000 miles of touring I did last year. Of course, they also said that "just when you start to get lost in Garfield's abilities" my rants about aliens, lucid dreaming, and sex in space break the flow, and that "without the stage banter, this album would be a definite winner." Apparently they didn't much care for the storyteller format - and plenty of people probably agree - so I've uploaded an alternate playlist without the talking for everyone who just wants the music. You can listen to it here:

http://bit.ly/banterless

Before I go any further, I want you all to know that this newsletter is an experiment and I'm thankful to you all for following along with me as it unfolds. Some of you came to me through my music, some through my art, and so I cannot possibly hope to please everyone all the time when one or the other of those strands temporarily takes over my life. (To put it another way, I'm like the Obama of Art...only without international banking family connections.)

This week is heavy on the tunes and light on the views, but it's only because I've been working on an epic new live painting (some of you have seen it in progress at the Praang and Invisible Allies shows...my friend Danny Litin took some amazing pics of me at work on it, which you can find on my facebook profile). I have also started curating a new gallery of my sketchbooks from over the years. Both of those things will show up very soon, so thanks for holding tight! In the meantime...

- "Offering Hands" (Unplugged Across America) -

It's finally online: the last of five unplugged, spontaneous road-side music videos I filmed while on tour last fall. Out of the five, I think it's the finest performance...in no small part due to the ludicrous natural beauty that surrounded me and the relief that two months of touring had finally come to a close. Here's my percussive anthem to finding our common ground in the shared joy and suffering of human experience:

Video Link: http://bit.ly/offeringhandsontour

Download This Song Free: http://bit.ly/mgunplugged

- This Week! -

• 8 Feb, Everywhere - Live@Lunch on KRFC FM 88.9 (Fort Collins)

12 - 1 pm MST, instudio performance/interview

Listen Online - Full Details on the FB Event Page

My first instudio radio performance...you can listen via the dial anywhere on the Front Range, or online anywhere on the planet (and in space, although you might have to wait). I'll have a recording up soon for anyone who can't hear it live.

• 10 Feb, Everywhere - Progressive Radio Network

2 pm EST, guest on Expanding Mind with Erik Davis

Listen Online

Expanding Mind is, without question, my favorite radio talk show - a fearless exploration of the fringes of human understanding, guided by author Erik Davis' encyclopedic literacy of the occult and innumerable esoteric subcultures. I was half-joking when I asked him if I could be a guest...and now it's happening! I'm not sure where the conversation will take us, but it's guaranteed to be both profound and bizarre. I highly recommend you tune in if just for Erik's end of the discussion...

• 11 Feb, Boulder CO - 1111 Wellness (on The Hill)

7 - 9 pm, Time Spiral: A Live Art Reception

RSVP at the FB Event Page

Oh, you live in Boulder? Well, awesome! Come out to my first legitimate art show and meet some kindred spirits in the suffuse glow of fourteen of my live paintings. Live music and snacks will be served unmercifully as you bathe in the delightful aroma of one of Boulder's finest medicinal dispensaries. And Lord only knows when you'll get to see this much of my work in one place again.

- Recent Publications -

• My friends at LostInSound.org recently republished "Live Art Is Nonsense," part five in my ongoing series of essays about performance painting. Here's a preview:

Most art forms are kept hidden in the studio until some dramatic Moment Of Unveiling. Instead, the transparency of performance makes this strange behavior distinct enough to deserve a name that will set it apart in people’s minds from the rituals and religions of conventional studio art. Process becomes an obvious, living part of the piece. Journey and destination take on new meanings. Since music, dance, and theater evolved in context as public entertainment or ritual, they belong in a separate category (especially those composed beforehand). In fact, it is the very change of context that makes something like performance painting strange in the first place.

People have taken to calling this kind of thing “live art.” It is probably better than nothing; but insofar as it is used to realistically distinguish one kind of creative expression from the rest, “live art” is nonsense.

• Thanks to Jonathan "Seymor" Sandberg, who has joined The Field Guide To Live Artists with his recent interview about how he got into live painting and what inspires him to keep rocking out for his friends & family in Detroit...

"I see live painting as a turning point in live entertainment that will offshoot into other new ways and combinations of perception. I see actors, comics, light-operators, photographers, writers, musicians, the unnamed and the not-yet-invented sculpting a new media for an awaiting audience."

Thank you, everyone, for your time and attention. I'm a lucky guy to get to share myself for a living like I do, and I'm always happy to hear from you (be it questions, or comments, heckling, commissions, or whatever) so drop me a line any time...and have a wonderful day!

Announcing My New Design Shop! Also, New Videos From The Light & Shadow Tour...

"If magic were to drop its unfulfillable pretensions as a science and come out of the closet as an art, it would ironically enough obtain the freedom to pursue its scientific aspirations, maybe even sneak up on some unified field theorem of the supernatural, all in terms acceptable to modern culture. In purely evangelic terms, as propaganda for a more enlightened magic worldview, art must surely represent our most compelling ‘evidence’ of other states and planes of being."

- Alan Moore, in "Fossil Angels"

New Merchandise Design Shop at Arts Projekt!

People have been asking me for years whether I put my work on clothing...now I can proudly say I do. Not just cool new t-shirts, but shoes, ties, iPhone cases, stickers, stamps, skateboards, buttons, postcards, and my favorite: the Painting While Dancing 2011 Calendar, with a different piece illuminating each month. Of course, I'll still be selling original artwork and inexpensive poster prints through the holiday season, but take a moment to check out my new project and if you think of anything that should be in the store, let me know - I'll be happy to add your ideas!

http://bit.ly/zazzlemg

Ukulele + Fish Ladder =

New "It Hurts So We're Not Dead" Video

The latest from my series of spontaneous unplugged music videos shot on tour, Light & Shadow: Unplugged Across America. Something about the juxtaposition of such a serious song with the salmon striving to swim upstream behind me gives it that "je ne sais quoi"... Enjoy!

Watch it in HD

Download this song for free

New Video From The Light & Shadow Tour:

MG On the Perils of Letting Go

More footage from last month's national Light & Shadow Tour with Charles Shaw, in which I discuss my issue with so many self-proclaimed "spiritual" people – namely, that we tend to use transcendence as an escape from who we are! (I can squeegee that third eye all I like, but if I'm not this and not that, then what reason do I have to be here?)

Join the conversation about this talk on Facebook!

Watch it in HD

Download this talk for free

Eric Moorcroft & Audrey McNamara

Join the Field Guide To Live Artists

Two brief-but-lovely interviews with some of the live painting scene's freshest faces, as part of my ongoing mission to create a directory of inspiring stories from the front lines of process art:

"Painting and music are two art forms I believe complement one another."

- Eric Moorcroft

"You have to do your thing 'on demand'. You can't get flustered or shy, you can't hesitate or just buckle under the pressure of having others watching. You must be confident."

- Audrey McNamara

Four New Paintings From An Artist-At-Large... Also, Shredding

• Four Live Paintings From Art Outside Festival & Bear Creek Festival

Juggernaut Paisley

2010 10 22 The Parish, 10 23 Art Outside Festival,

11 11 Bear Creek Festival

(Big Gigantic, Alex B, Govinda, Anahata Sound, Ricochet, Toubab Krewe, Alex B, Rebirth Brass Band, Umphrey's McGee)

24"x30" - paint markers on masonite

original for sale - check asking price / email me

11"x17" prints for sale* - email me

Dedicated to journalist and filmmaker Charles Shaw – who, after we struggled through the first three weeks of our Light & Shadow Tour, finally saw me in my element the night I started this painting in Austin. (Not that I don't love playing concerts to empty churches...seriously, I do.) It ain't easy to share the front seat with someone for six freaking weeks, but eventually, our buddy-cop-movie caricature grew into an assuredly lifelong friendship. Intense art-and-activism road trips come highly recommended, if you're looking for your own forty days in the desert.

Together & All Over The Place

2010 11 11, 12 Bear Creek Music Festival

(Umphrey's McGee, Garaj Mahal)

24"x30" - paint markers on masonite

original for sale - check asking price / email me

11"x17" prints for sale* - email me

Dedicated to Fareed Haque, guitarist of Garaj Mahal, with whom I had an excellent conversation while waiting in the dinner line later that night. Fareed's only moonlights as a rockstar; he's a professor of both jazz and classical guitar most of the time, and recently contributed to a book on the neuroscience of guitar. Needless to say, he has a refreshingly unique perspective on the intersections of music, psychology, and biology, and I hope that we're able to continue the conversation in public at some point...

These Things Happen...

2010 11 12 Bear Creek Music Festival

(Eliot Lipp, Everyone Orchestra, Chali 2na, Umphrey's McGee)

24"x30" - paint markers on masonite

original for sale - check asking price / email me

11"x17" prints for sale* - email me

The second mass extinction on an Earth-like planet three stars away, happening right now. Points to anyone who can identify the film from which I pulled the title for this piece. (Hint: The line is in reference to a different extremely rare and disruptive weather phenomenon...)

Dedicated to biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge for their theory of "punctuated equilibrium," which argued that life maintains a kind of business-as-usual stability most of the time, then rockets through periods of rapid and radical transformation...not exclusively gradual or catastrophic. The fractal landscape of evolutionary change, vast and inexplicable.

Chihuly Oyster

2010 11 13 Bear Creek Music Festival

(Dubconscious, DJ Logic, Eliot Lipp, The New Deal, Bonobo)

24"x36" - paint markers on canvas panel

original for sale - check asking price / email me

11"x17" prints for sale* - email me

Keith Haring went on a date with H.R. Giger...

Dedicated to all of the other live painters at Bear Creek, alongside whom I busted my butt all weekend – and to Carrie Curtis and Chris O'Toole, who were hilariously (at least to me) each charged with the responsibility of coordinating the visual arts there. (What kind of festival hires competing art coordinators??) We had multiple visual artists working the main stage for the entire five-day event, and a real family vibe started growing on me by the end of it. I'm already excited about next year, and want to thank everyone involved for making it happen!

• Bear Creek Festival Gallery & MG/Odenedo Collab

Costumes, collaborations, body painting, and over a dozen live artists...this festival was a treat for the eyes. Check it out:

Bear Creek Festival pics at Facebook

Each stage at Bear Creek had large wooden placards with the band names painted on them. It was arranged that we live painters could go to town on them, ultimately auctioning them off to support the festival's greening program...so admirable artist Kevin Odenedo and I finally went to it on our first, long-awaited collaboration:

2010 11 13 Bear Creek Music Festival

(The New Mastersounds)
collaboration with Kevin Odenedo

24"x48" - paint markers & acrylic on laminate board

I doodled on numerous band placards over the weekend, but this is the only one that ended up looking even slightly coherent. (Having such a plenitude of live painters was kind of a traffic jam, but it was still a blast.)

• "Autocatalysis" Music Video From The Light & Shadow Tour

And lastly, here's a new video for an old (2005) solo acoustic guitar tapping etude from my first studio album, Get Used To Being Everything. I already have one video of this, but I wanted another that didn't have me yammering on about evolution before I start playing (although this take is somewhat slower than that one). Plus, the forests of North Carolina were too beautiful not to film something there. Enjoy...more for you next week!

Watch it in full HD / Download the track for free

* 11"x17" UV glossy poster prints (shipping included):

1/$25, 2/$40, 3/$50, 4/$60

On Encountering The Shadow, More Process Pics, & Transglobal Arts

"I work on myself because I realize that the only thing you have to offer another human being ever is your own state of being."

- Ram Dass

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

- Rumi

"...And that is when life really started to pick up its skirt and show

us its beauty."

- Deborah Leigh Givens

• Video: On Encountering The Shadow

Charles Shaw and I just entered the last week of our national Light & Shadow Tour, hosting conversations across the country on the role of the shadow in personal and cultural transformation. We've been on the road for over a month, now, and between the high-speed tire blowouts, run-ins with border patrol, debilitating sicknesses, missing keys, missing equipment, missing friends, and other wonderfully unpredictable encounters with divinely-ordained chaos...it's been utterly amazing, a life-changing voyage that has sharpened my social awareness and impassioned me to serve the best potential of a new world already shaping itself from the wreckage of our current crisis. To anchor here and now the sanity and love of the wiser society we can be, and might yet be.

Consequently, this video – footage from my end of our show at San Francisco's Jellyfish Gallery – is my most transparent, personal, and honest public statement so far. In it, I discuss the best methods I've learned to recognize when something "out there" is really "in here," and to defuse the destructive energies of a denial-splintered mind (and of course, I manage to get a song in there). I hope my reflections are useful to you in your quest for wholeness and self-understanding!

- Watch it in HD -

- Download the audio, free -

• More Process Pics!

While I'm waiting to finish the painting I started at Big Gigantic & Alex B at The Parish in Austin, TX and the Art Outside Festival, here are some series of earlier paintings in successive states of completion. I love to keep these records because they allow me to share and reflect on the thought process behind each piece, and the evolution of my technique in general.

Click on each image to get a look at the full-sized, hi-resolution version:

• Paintings For Sale At Transglobal Arts

I recently arranged with Transglobal Arts to put some of my work on sale through their website, which is designed to market inexpensive hand-made folk artwork from around the world. Net proceeds support the Multidisciplinary Association For Psychedelic Studies and their tireless work to revive the practice of safe, legal, clinical psychedelic therapy.

I'm hardly one to unselfconsciously jump on the whole holiday-commercializing bandwagon, but here I am anyway encouraging you to consider gifting someone you love with one of these, or any of my numerous available paintings – all of which have been favorably re-priced...

2008 12 30 Cervantes

(Panjea, Kyle Hollingsworth, Lynx & Janover)

Buy at Transglobal Arts

- more info -

2009 06 25, 26 B Side Lounge & Mishawaka Amphitheatre

(Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, Fareed Haque, Lynx & Janover, Ana Sia, EOTO w/ Michael Kang & Kyle Hollingsworth)

Buy at Transglobal Arts

- more info -

2009 09 11 Trinumeral Festival

(The Sun Ra Arkestra, Béla Fleck & Zakir Hussain & Edgar Meyer, The Glitch Mob)

Buy at Transglobal Arts

- more info -

More art and music soon...thanks for your time and have a beautiful day!

New Light & Shadow Tour Video, Custom Hat, & Process Pics

“Learn your flaw, because your flaw is also your glory.”

- Ken Wilber

"In fact, something cannot be internalized until we emerge from our embeddedness in it, for it is our embeddedness, our subjectivity, that leads us to project it onto the world in our constitutions of reality."

- Robert Kegan

"The widest audience I'm trying to reach is simply every aspect of myself. The goal is not reaching out, the goal is reaching in."

- Saul Williams

• "Tin Heart," Another Roadside Music Video from The Light & Shadow Tour

My tour with journalist and film-maker Charles Shaw is almost halfway through – we've been engaging audiences across the country in conversation about the repressed and denied aspects of our personal and collective psyche...and filming interviews for his Unheard Voices Project (an online archive of testimonials about the U.S. criminal justice system...contact him if you would like to get involved). Meanwhile, I've taken a few opportunities to pause along the way and record performances for the serialized video album, Light & Shadow: Unplugged Across America.

Here's the latest – a bantamweight anthem about forgiving ourselves for this whole "incarnation" debacle:

"Tin Heart," by Michael Garfield

(free download here)

(watch it in HD)

The remaining three weeks of our will take us through the South and South East, up to Chicago and then across and back up the East Coast to New York. Have a look at our tour schedule and updated program info...I hope we can meet up along the way!

• New Big Gigantic Custom Ball Cap

My latest custom assignment was for a fellow fan of my home team band, Big Gigantic – those are the Boulder Flatirons along the brim, along with a few of my client's favorite plants making an appearance in the overall cornucopia of delight. Now she can represent with the best of 'em...

I'm always open to doing more custom hats (or whatever I can paint on), so if you have any wild ambitions for embellishing yourself, email me about them!

• Peer into the Process of a Few Earlier Paintings

I recently went back in time and took pictures of some paintings from last year in varying states of completion. Click on the images below to get a better look at my process – how I build up from the broad shapes into increasingly intricate detail:

• Field Guide to Live Artists: Jamie Morgan

Jamie Morgan is the latest addition to my Field Guide To Live Artists, an online interview archive with everyone crazy enough to set up an easel at a concert. This is an opportunity for community to develop out of this scattered emergent art movement, for the artists to get to know and promote one another, and for us all to draw from our collective well of inspiration. Know anybody who'd like to be involved? Send them my way!

• MG at Art Outside Festival in Austin, Texas

Next Stop: Art Outside Festival, my first musical gig in Austin and by all accounts one of the finest boutique art festivals in the entire U.S. I'll be playing on this amazing stage at 2:30 pm on Saturday the 23rd, and then painting live alongside hundreds of other performance painters, studio artists, dancers, installations, and other amazing displays of human creativity. Make it out if you can, and if you know anybody within a day's drive of this awesomeness, let them know it's about to go doooooooown... (Here's the facebook event page.)

Thanks for your time, stay in touch, and have a glorious day!

New Paintings + Light & Shadow: Unplugged Across America

"The nature of infinity is this: That everything has its own vortex, and when once a traveler through Eternity has pass'd that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind his path, into a globe itself unfolding like a sun..."
- William Blake

• Light & Shadow: Unplugged Across America

My six-week, thirty city tour with journalist and film-maker Charles Shaw is well underway (full program & itinerary here)...and with all the time we're spending on America's scenic highways, I've decided to take some moments out to record a series of spontaneous unplugged music videos at a few of the most beautiful places we encounter. Here's the first in an ongoing series, delivered as-live-as-possible to all of you wondrous people at home:

(Be sure to watch it in HD – lyrics, info, & embed code are all on the video page)

You'll be able to download the music for all of these videos free here:
http://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/light-shadow

Want to spend more time exploring our beautiful travails? Check out my regularly-updated tour photo gallery and enjoy how I've abused the macro mode on my new tour camera!

Our next dates are in Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Invite your friends – it's going to be a profound few evenings of conversation and live music!

• New Paintings

Chandelier

2010 09 17 & 18 Granada & Mike's Westsider

(Sub Swara, Quixotic, Sagiquintarius, Mindzeye)

24"x30" - paint markers on masonite

email me for $25 11"x17" prints or to inquire about the original

Zoom in by clicking on the image, and you'll see the myriad tiny rainbows that glisten all over this piece...a further development of my attempts to render crystalline and glassy transparent forms with the limited medium of paint markers. Plenty of glossy goodness, but I made a minor mistake in perspective (email me if you can find it and I'll give you an electronic high-five). This painting is dedicated to my dear friends Tommy and Ruth Carter, at whose going away party (commemorating their move from Kansas City to live with me in Boulder) this was completed.

Temple Burn

2010 09 24 Hodi's Half Note

(Random Rab, D.V.S*, Untied Laces)

18"x24" - paint markers on masonite

email me for $25 11"x17" prints or to inquire about the original

When I got back from Burning Man Festival this year, Boulder's typically bold mountain skyline was shrouded by smoke from a huge forest fire. The Four Mile Canyon fire destroyed over 169 homes, including the new home of my friend Josh Davis and his pregnant star goddess. This was painted at a benefit concert for victims of the fire...I asked another friend of mine what symbol most well-represented the healing potential of this disaster, and she responded, "Don't some pine cones have to burn in order to release their seeds?" Yes, they do. And just like the memorializing Temple Burn every year at Black Rock City, the Four Mile Canyon fire was a sacrament offered up to serve the vision of a new life.

Juliana's Jaguar

2010 08, 09 Rootwire Festival & Studio

16"x20" - paint markers on masonite

email me for $25 11"x17" prints

This portrait of the Water Lily Jaguar is dedicated to my underworld-journeying friend Juliana Willars for her ongoing dedication to reconnaissance on the Other Side...as always with commissioned work I'm glad to have been challenged by the unusual subject, although giving my own touch to the traditional Mayan iconography was surprisingly difficult.

(You can check out some of my other contract pieces here...)

• Press

In related news (insofar as I have made it my career to educate people about their embeddedness in a living intelligence utterly beyond the scale of human drama)...

The lecture I posted last week, "Self As City, City As Self," was transcribed by a gracious friend and is now up online for reading at Reality Sandwich, an excellent change-focused community news site.

The lecture also got a shoutout in TheCoolTV's recent article, "Could Festivals Pave The Way To A More Advanced Society?" (My answer is, of course, "Yes!") And the soundtrack was just reviewed by the Denver Westword's Cory Casciato, who seems unusually susceptible to my music's psychedelic influence...

More new music, art, and assorted multimedia inspiration soon. In the meantime, thanks for reading and have a beautiful week!