Every Day Is A New Year | MGxGRC Hat #2 | Ethereal Underground | Land Without Evil

"There is absolutely nothing to transcend...only all of Creation to unite with."

– Jeffery Wolf Green

"All things are possible once enough human beings realize that everything is at stake."

– Norman Cousins

Well, we all lived through the long-anticipated 2012 Winter Solstice and civilization's first encounter with the cosmic inflection point: on December 21st, our Sun aligned with black hole Sagittarius A* at the heart of our galaxy.  A lot of people thought something crazy was going to happen, myself included...but it seems increasingly clear that the ride is just getting started.

The embrace of this accelerating change is the subject of my latest painting, as well as new musical and theatrical projects that have swept me up into exciting creative collaborations.  Isn't that why we're here?  To trade surfing tricks and astonished eye contact as we try our new lives on for size...

And now, some of my finest work ever.  Thanks for reading and have a blessed holiday!

My New Collaboration With Grassroots California

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Preorder for $55 (including s/h)

The response to my first embroidered and silk-screened design collaboration with Grassroots California was overwhelming – I didn't make it to a single festival this year without seeing at least one person rocking that hat, and it was a huge honor and surprise to get so much positive feedback.

Like the first one, only 420 of these will be made.  Preorder through me and you not only get the satisfaction of supporting the artist directly (thank you!) but I'll be happy to sign or personalize it for you, too.  And every preorder comes with an exclusive live EP of electronic guitar music.

Preorder price is currently less than retail, but that's bound to change before I get the hats in early February.  Interested parties, hit me up soon!

Every Day Is A New Year

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Buy Signed 11"x17" Poster Prints – $20 plus s/h

"Once we abandon this obsessive fanaticism of absolute complete knowledge, we can continue on with our process of discovery without the headache of a deadline.”

– Henry Warwick

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

– Voltaire

painted live at

• Rootwire Music & Arts Festival, 2012 08 18

Papadosio (electric), Dopapod, Ott, Akara, Papadosio (acoustic)

• The Parish, 2012 09 15

Kaminanda, The Human Experience, Brede

• Art Outside Festival, 2012 10 20/21

Mother Falcon, Russ Liquid, Andreilien, Stephan Jacobs, Brede, ONE4ALL, Pharo, Metranohm, Thriftworks, Henry & The Invisibles, Pyramid, Dimitri's Ascent, Pumpkin

• Texas Music Theater, 2012 11 11

Papadosio, Octopus Nebula, Holding Space

• Cirque Lunaire at La Zona Rosa, 2012 12 01

Bluetech, Phutureprimitive, Ex Stus

• Whompadelic Wednesdays at Club, 606 2012 12 12

KiloWatts, Crazy Fingers, inertG, SoundShaman

Click to view the process:

iPhone Hard Case | iPhone Vibe Case | Laptop Decal | iPad Decal | iPad Sleeve

Ethereal Underground's New Studio Album

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Digital Album + 11"x17" Poster

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"You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path."

– Joseph Campbell

Acoustic and digital, real and imaginary, freestyle and remix, far out and close up, awake and dreaming...  Ethereal Underground is the visionary collaboration between me and beat wizard Tristan Gulliford, aka Dreamcode.  

Between the original sessions and more than a year of Dreamcode's patient sculpting, over 100 hours of studio detail work went into Strangely Familiar – resulting in an ultra juicy 33:33 of...something...not quite witch house, not quite space hop, totally luxuriously weird.  Check us out on FB.

Land Without Evil

I just finished an eight-show run doing live music for this amazing production by Agent Red & Sky Candy, and filmed by PBS for their series, Arts in Context.  A story of colliding cultures in an age of transformation, adapted from the novel by Matthew Pallamary...we got to perform at the historic Stateside at the Paramount Theater in Austin and yes, it totally raised the bar.  Getting to work with such talented dancers, aerialists, video mapping projectionists, actors, live musicians, lighting engineers, and costume designers is just...wow.  This is why I love Austin.

Check out show's teaser trailer:

Watch on Youtube

Custom Painted Hats

I almost hesitate to advertise these, as I'm currently sitting on a huge stack of orders.  Thanks to everyone for your patience!  But if you're in the market for some special way to grace your crown, take a look at my whole gallery for ideas and drop me a line.

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An Inspirational Interview With Ideamensch

Last news but maybe the most interesting:  I recently sat down with Mario Schulke of Ideamensch, a website to inspire your entrepreneurial spirit.  He asked me some big questions, and I answered...  Here's a taste:

What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?
Do what only you can do. There are a thousand people in line behind you except for what critical node in the working body of our species? This is a place where “your deep gladness meets the world’s needs.” (Frederick Buechner)  Go for that.

What is the one thing you do over and over and recommend everyone else do?
I remind myself that my resources are of many kinds, that luck is one of them, that help comes from strange places, and that I’m doing this for love, not money. (Money is just the blood that keeps the body working. I don’t need a basement full of blood.)

Read the whole interview here.

- Four New Live Paintings From Wakarusa 2011 -

"Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself."

– Henry Miller

"It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience."
– Joseph Campbell

(I apologize in advance for the seasonal shift from a biweekly to a weekly newsletter in order to keep up with the flow of new work – I know we're all feeling the acceleration by now (whether you consider it technological, spiritual, or both) and as the evermore rapid influx of information and energy builds toward a local climax over the Summer Solstice, it's all I can do to get the art, music, and talks I've given over the last couple of weeks online before they start to ferment. For a little while here, we'll be in full-bore festival season mode...hold on tight and open wide!)

This week chronicles my third annual stint as the Wakarusa Festival's resident live artist – and this was the year of fruition. The festival granted me permission to coordinate their first-ever Live Art Team & Gallery, and I was blessed to invite eight of my favorite emerging artists to join me in a forty-foot tent poised directly center of the 50,000 person festival's vending area. With the help of Ehren and Renee Cruz of SolPurpose.com and installation artist Nate "Nature" Hogen, we turned it into a glorious, altar-filled chill spot – a sanctuary from the blazing heat, and a non sequitur sacred space in the midst of the event's commercial bustle. It was the fullest realization yet of my efforts to transmute the raw energy of the festival environment into an opportunity for growth, empowerment, and change, as I mentioned in my popular manifesto, "The Problem – & Promise – of Festivals" back in March.

Huge thanks to all of the live artists and friends who contributed to the space, and to Tia Christiansen at Moving Parts Productions and Ami Heinrich at Tsunami Publicity for helping us make this a reality!

Very soon, I'll have much more to share about that – including video of all of us set up en force at the Main Stage painting to acts including STS9, Thievery Corporation, Shpongletron, & Umphrey's McGee – but until that's ready I want to show you my own work from the weekend. For the first time ever, I had every painting sold before they even started:

(Click on any image to enlarge it for a better look!)

Love Bites

2011 05 28 3SidedWhole (Banu Noor, Kobiana and Friends, Faracet and Autumn)

& 2011 06 02 Wakarusa Festival (Papadosio, Umphrey's McGee)

24"x24" - paint markers on masonite

11"x17" prints available, $25 for 1 / $35 for 2 (s/h included - email me)

I think this one is pretty self-explanatory. And no, it's not about my mommy issues...more about the dual nature of creation and destruction with a cheeky nod to the Cheshire Cat and other slippery archetypes. Plus, I like vampire romance – not teeny-bopper fang fiction, but the gothic profundity of what love means when you live forever and recognize that you subsist on violence (and we all do).

I'm surprised that there aren't more stories out there with enlightened ancient vampires...after thousands of years of satiating your every carnal desire, don't you think you'd long for something more and eventually grow into a deeper wisdom than one human life can hold?

Tree of Eyes

2011 06 04 Wakarusa Festival

(Shpongletron, Ott, Hallucinogen, STS9, My Morning Jacket)

24"x24" - paint markers on masonite

11"x17" prints available, $25 for 1 / $35 for 2 (s/h included - email me)

I just finished reading Catherynne M. Valente's immensely lush and sensuous fantasy, The Habitation of the Blessed, about a lost Oriental kingdom ruled by the legendary Christian king Prester John. In this magical land, anything planted in the ground will return as the fruit of a tree that grows in its place – so the dead are never really dead, only transformed. In a passage I found especially moving, one character brings another to the grave of his wife, whose eyes gaze out from the leaves and branches. He laments how the whim of nature gave back only her eyes and how, even though he is blessed to look upon her still, he misses being able to hear her voice. In line with my mention of vampire love above, I'm increasingly possessed by a fascination with how eternal life shifts our values and experience. What it is to be Forever.

This painting alludes to the sentience of the vegetable world, to the voiceless reaching of our own planet's living skin to the touch of other distant worlds...the drama of cosmic communion in the fathomless depth of space. "I know you're out there somewhere..."

Paradigm Shift

2011 06 04 Wakarusa Festival

(Emancipator, Nadis Warriors, Thievery Corporation, STS9, Big Gigantic)

24"x30" - paint markers on masonite

11"x17" prints available, $25 for 1 / $35 for 2 (s/h included - email me)

Regarding the interplay of one reality emerging from another – of recognizable from crystallizing from the hyper-order of chaotic flow – of layers upon layers shining diaphanous emergence. This piece is a more well-considered continuation of the themes I established last year, in which one painting is interrupted and dominated by another (see "Let It Go" from last year's Rootwire Festival, here). The best stories start in medias res – and the changes we're going through now are no exception. I don't know if I buy into the whole "Ascension" mythos, but I definitely agree that radical change and black swan events in general demand that we surf the change with as much grace as we can muster.

Maria

2011 06 05 Wakarusa Festival

(EOTO with Beats Antique, Jamie Janover, & Karsh Kale)

16"x24" - paint markers on masonite

11"x17" prints available, $25 for 1 / $35 for 2 (s/h included - email me)

My first live painting started and finished for a trade – in this case, the beautiful jewelry by Carl Weiseth of Third-Eye Pinecones. Like Carl, I see more than just a reminder of our own human pineal organ in these natural wonders...I see a potent lesson in the wisdom and intelligence of the natural world. A pinecone is an advertisement for sex, a testament to selfless progeneration, and a window into the timeless now. No wonder this painting ended up with the same mandorla that graces portraits of the Virgin Mary. They both speak to our wonder at the same enduring archetype of creation...

More soon! In the meantime, I've posted a few new summer dates on my calendar – including appearances at Electric Forest Festival (Michigan), Rootwire Festival (Ohio), and Burning Man (Nevada) – and am always available to answer your questions. Have a wonderful week and thanks for reading!

Echoes Of An Interstellar Meltdown

> Imagery

These paintings are from my live art residency at Wakarusa Festival's Interstellar Meltdown, a festival-within-a-festival that featured sweet live PA and electronic rock acts all weekend. I was lucky enough to get "official" status for this one (artist's wrist band serial number 00002), so I basically camped at the stage all weekend, up until dawn with the late-night acts every night. It was a super productive weekend. My legs are only now recovering...

2009 06 04 Wakarusa (Studio + Gem, The Floozies, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey) - 24" x 24" masonite board

I've been reading Michael S. Schneider's excellent book A Beginner's Guide To Constructing The Universe. It's a tour of the numerical archetypes 1 through 10, how they manifest in nature, what they meant to the Pythagoreans and Freemasons...and how to construct each in 2D and 3D with a compass and straightedge. So in my last few weeks of living in Phoenix, I spent a few hours every day exploring the arrangement of circles and straight lines to decompose larger polygons into fractal arrays of repeating stars, diamonds, and triangles. I almost didn't want to color this one in, given how lovely and subtle the gloss black and matte black of the paint and board looked together. But I kept photos of that earlier stage and will be making digital stencils for further exploration. And jumping out of the car at Wakarusa to immediately get going on this piece was a blast.

available - 2009 06 05 Wakarusa (Pretty Lights, Praang) - 30" x 15" canvas panel

People have been telling me for over a year that I should try painting on a gradient...so I did. And it was great. Definitely expect a lot more of that...gradients make the appearance of depth even easier than using a black field. And I'm all about the depth.

available - 2009 06 05 Wakarusa (Studio + The Egg, Telepath, Heavy Pets, Heavyweight Dub Champion) - 24" x 24" masonite board

Another experiment pulled from the pages of A Beginner's Guide To Constructing The Universe – this time, the "harmonic decomposition of a square." My mom gave me an octagonal prism lens (kind of like the kind that goes on kaleidoscopes) right before I left for Wakarusa and I was handing it to spun kids all weekend so they could look at this painting. The gold outlines on every harmonic are really sweet in person...this one is so formal and linear that I don't identify with it as much as some of my other works, but that didn't seem to dissuade anyone at the shows.

2009 06 06 Wakarusa (EOTO, 2020 Soundsystem, Madahoochi) - 30" x 15" canvas panel

GOLD BACKGROUND! What else to be said about this one? Except that I threw the plants in kind of late in the process and then had to pull the cubes back out from the background...which reminds me of one time when I was at Clinton Lake in Lawrence KS and saw a UFO fly behind a tree, except that I could still see its lights as if they were in front of the tree, which was very puzzling. Also, I'm really satisfied with the electric sparks coming off the cubes. My friend Nathan who is a huge Futurama dork said this one reminds him of "space honey."

available - 2009 06 06 Wakarusa (Somasphere, Boombox, DJ Rehka) - 30" x 15" canvas panel

Back to black. Above-mentioned Futurama dork was drawing fields of cubes when I hung out with him last week, so figured I'd veer into the realm so skillfully portrayed by Kris Davidson and try to build three dimensions out of two. Freehanding those cubes is getting easier all the time...but barely. There's a bit of multi-perspectival head-twisting with this piece, because if you start from the corners of the trigram it appears that the center cubes are larger but farther away...but if you start from the center, it seems like the closest corner of a tetrahedron pointing toward the viewer. Either way, our confused brains don't want to register this as flat.

available - 2009 06 07 Wakarusa (Shpongle, Chuck Love, Ott) - 30" x 15" canvas panel

Speaking of confused brains, this is what happens on the third night I've desecrated my melatonin cycle in the name of art. Kind of a topographic map of a digital desert under blacklight. I'm eager to explore plenty more concentric lines in future pieces.

> Writing

I was recently given a great extended interview about my art and music by Austin music blogger Tyler Groover on his blog TwoGroove.com – probably the most in-depth any journalist has ever cared to go with me.
Part One - Background
Part Two - Artistic Process
Part Three - Miscellaneous Ranting

I've also been writing for transhumanist magazine H+, where the future of technological and ethical evolution is examined by a community of thinkers who agree we're all about to call into question our deepest assumptions about human nature and existence. My two most recent articles:

Let A Hundred Futures Bloom (on page 67 of their digital edition)
A "both/and" view of the so-called "singularity" that will transform everything we know...my look at numerous possible future scenarios that could bring about a posthuman world, which might not be mutually exclusive.

The Spooky World Of Quantum Biology (not my title!)
It turns out that the "spooky" behaviors of the quantum world – where teleportation, time-travel, and bilocation are par for the course – are the machinery of life. New research indicates that quantum effects might explain the mysteries of biology, finally provide a stable definition of life, and allow us to tap the incredible computational ability of living systems to steer the course of evolution – or fulfill our destiny as pawns of the vast "intelligent design..."