Painting Is Dangerous And Here Is Your Proof

The first thing, the big thing:

I'm proud to present my newest video, which marries timelapse live painting footage, acoustic guitar Live PA, and one of my finer essays into a multimedia assault on the uninspired mind.

"Painting Is Dangerous" is a word of caution to you creative types out there (and perhaps a relief to the less-creative)...a reminder of just how potent creativity is and how respectful we must be of it. This video is dedicated to Dennis McKenna and anyone else who ever burned themselves (even a little) on the Divine Flame:

There is a lot more information about it at youtube – which I encourage you to visit anyway so you can rate, favorite, and share this with your friends. (I can't say it about all of my work, but I'm pretty sure you have friends who will appreciate this.)

You can download both the music and the voiceover track for free here, for anyone who wants to mix it into their DJ sets – and the original essay is available to read in its entirety here, for anyone who thinks I talk too fast.

(I'm delighted to discover that this video is already getting a modest amount of exposure, coinciding with new features on me for my second residency at the Wakarusa Festival's Interstellar Meltdown and my developing relationship with the aya-heroes at Chimbre.)

The second thing, the not-so-big thing:

Put down that online poker subscription and invest your tax refund in something you'll admire for years! I'm having my Big Spring Cleaning, I'm-Going-On-Tour-And-Don't-Want-To-Haul-It-All ART SALE.

From now until I leave Boulder on the 7th of April, make me an offer on original artwork and I'll probably take it. (Every available painting, and its value according to an average hourly graphic design wage, is listed here: http://tinyurl.com/michaelgarfieldart – I'm happy to take as little as 50% of their market value, maybe even less if you can sell me on a good story).

So there you have it.

> Imagery

And now, the last exhibits of my recent infatuation with adding new dimensions to old work:

Before

After

Such A Noisy Room

2010 03 18 The Engine Room (EPROM, Mux Mool, Gladkill)

& 2008 10 29 Crosstown Station (Madahoochi, Brother Bagman)

My first gig in Tallahassee, Florida at The Engine Room was as low-key as it was loud. Everyone there was wondering where everyone else was...but not only did that mean an unusually intimate show (always a treat) but something tells me that subsequent trips out won't be quite so anonymous. The highlight for me was meeting Boris Gladkill, who in spite of his name is a kind and mellow guy (above and beyond being a wonderful DJ/producer). That, and getting to commend Mux Mool in person about his "A Glorious Dawn" remix.

This painting makes me feel like it's New Year's at 12:00 AM...or the full moon when all of the corals and anenomes release their sperm into the tides...or everyone in the traffic jam has their windows down and different radio stations blaring out of every window...blissful pandemonium, awkward angel orgies, a cacophony of color. (Unofficial official music for this painting: They Might Be Giants' "Man, It's So Loud In Here.")

Before

After

Drapes & Climbers

2010 03 19 The Maison

(Lazer Sword, Mux Mool, Gladkill, Unicorn Fukr, Rekanize)

& 2008 07 19 Owsley's (BLVD, Souleye, Jantsen, Chordata)

& 2008 07 09 The Fox Theatre (Giant Panda Guerilla Dub Squad)

This painting started as an exploration in partiality, incompleteness, and missing parts – so it's appropriate that a year and a half later, when I was on a layer-adding bender, I picked it back up and recorded what else I know now of these things. I had a chance to play with stroke (the yellow, somewhat ink-bamboo-looking drapery), metallic paint (they look like bubbles from one angle and coins from another), tentacles (I take every chance I get – soooo many permutations!), and the 2D version of one of my favorite aesthetic principles (another win for the Japanese): miegakure, or "hide and reveal," creating "a sense of vastness in a small space" by making it impossible to view the whole thing from any one angle.

This painting is dedicated to Donovan Fannon (aka Rekanize) for being such a photographic badass that almost 6% of his Facebook friends have one of his beautiful pics as their profile image. Thanks for the awesome snaps, Donovan!

> Writing

This week brings another two entries for my Field Guide To Live Artists, a web-serialized collection of interviews with anyone I can find who performs as a visual artist (painter, sculptor, flower arranger...). Know anybody who isn't in there and should be? Tell them to email me! Eventually it'll be published in glorious coffee table book form. First, I have to find another 150 artists. For now, here are lovely-if-brief interviews with live painters Laura Sellers and Dylan Brooks:

Field Guide To Live Artists: Laura Sellers

Field Guide To Live Artists: Dylan Brooks

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)