Clearing House & Moving On (Plus Twelve New Podcast Episodes)

I could see a new world with my middle eye, a world I had missed before. I caught images behind images, the walls behind the sky, the sky behind the infinite. The walls became fountains, the fountains became arches, the domes skies, the sky a flowering carpet, and all dissolved into pure space. I thought I was the quickest mind alive and the quickest with words, but words cannot catch up with these transformations, metamorphoses.

– Anaïs Nin

End-of-an-Era Art Sale

Well, it's been eleven years since I first painted at a concert. Eleven years, 450 paintings, 300 custom hats, a thousand different musical collaborators on three continents...it's been an awesome run.

I won't stop making art, but LIVE art's going to take a nap for now.  (My last live painting gig in Austin will be at the Save Our Springs Alliance Holiday Party on December 7th.)

Between my new job at the Santa Fe Institute and preparations for my first child (due next spring!), I'm undergoing major shifts – and that means letting one or two plates fall so I can spin the rest.

Future Fossils Podcast isn't going anywhere...

The psychedelic field guide coloring book will continue growing page by page on Patreon...

My music's going (even deeper) underground while I get serious about recording a new album...

And I'm getting rid of nearly every painting I have left. They won't fit in our new apartment, and I'm in a giving spirit, so if you would like one of the last big, live originals I'll be making for A WHILE – well, here you go.  Click on the paintings for the swiftly-shrinking list of your remaining choices.

The list price doesn't matter to me anymore; what matters is these pieces finding a good home.  

Feel free to make an offer that you worry might offend me.  We can work it out.

Thank you for every way you've been a part of this adventure, all these years...

New Digital Painting & Time-Lapse Video

In other news, I'm edging slowly into digital, and plan to stream more art from home (on YouTube and Facebook) to compensate for disappearing from the festival scene for a while.

Here is a newer piece, along with a time-lapse of its creation, narrated with an excerpt from the awesome episode of Future Fossils featuring philosopher and culture critic John David Ebert:

(You can grab prints of this piece at my art store.)

TWELVE New Podcast Episodes

Okay, so yeah:  this isn't really a "biweekly" newsletter anymore, is it?  Sorry about that.

Anyway, here are the last dozen episodes of Future Fossils Podcast – some of my favorite ever!

Awaiting you is my first science fiction ("An Oral History of the End of 'Reality'"); my epic first panel discussions for the show; and my long-awaited chat with Erik Davis round out the first 100 episodes – with the Episode 100 slot going to The Tea Faerie – and then we tie it up in 101 with a deep dive into this show's recurring themes...

      

Facts are very special objects, which is why they must be constructed through such careful

and painstaking methods. But they are still human fabrications. We are all wearing

tool belts here, scientists and mystics alike, fashioning experience into

artifacts and realities that feedback on us, inevitably, as stories, shaping

us in turn.

– Erik Davis

New Digital Art & Collaborations, Festival Announcements, HUGE Guests on Future Fossils

Hey friends!  I wanted to save this one until I could update you about my biggest, most intense collaboration yet – but if I wait any longer this update won't fit into your inbox!  

So here's the quick and dirty while I still have the creative winds at my back.  You can see the new monster-in-progress, the mural from Waterloo Music Festival, here.

Quick reminder before the news stuff:  here's the updated list of all of my available paintings at their new discounted prices, and here's days of my electroacoustic guitar music for the healing of your ears and heart.  

Enjoy, be well, and stay in touch!

best

Michael

NEW PAINTINGS

Gonna start sharing more new work made on iPad with Procreate – I'm still learning the ropes with this amazing software but you can expect more and more of my work to be digital, in part because of the automatic time-lapse video feature that lets me share the entire process of every piece.  

Make sure to watch the time-lapse video for this piece, with a profound voiceover from Future Fossils Podcast guest Terry Patten...

"Wholeness Wants To Have Its Say"

Buy Prints • Watch the Time-Lapse

Also, five new tiny canvases mark a wave of collaborations with my partner Nicole Taylor – all of these are available and very affordable, and support the best cause you can imagine (loving creation).

You can find these pieces and many others in my full gallery list for collectors here.

 

NEW PODCASTS

In addition to new episodes of Future Fossils Podcast with some of the coolest people I know (!!!) I also appeared on the warm, wise, and funny Ramin Nazer's Rainbow Brainskull podcast recently.  Here are the links to all of those:

 

 

 

FESTIVAL ANNOUNCEMENTS

After a slow festival summer, it's turning into kind of a crazy festival fall!  Here are some of the bigger and juicier events I'll be part of over the next two months – playing music, teaching workshops, and making live art:

"Hemingway once said that the most important preparation for a writer is to have led an interesting life, to have something important to tell the world. If you place yourself in situations where there is no choice but to move forward, no option but success, you create a momentum that in the end propels you to new levels of experience and engagement that would have seemed beyond reach only years before. Creativity is a consequence of action, not its motivation. Do what needs to be done and then ask whether it was possible. Orthodoxy is the enemy of invention, despair an insult to the imagination."

- Wade Davis

New Digital Art, Time-Lapse Video, & Several Awesome Conversations

Hey everyone!  I'm trying to keep my updates to you shorter lately, and keep pace with the Moore's Law-like miniaturization of attention spans.  Here's your most succinct newsletter yet.  Enjoy!

• I just uploaded all of my fan-favorite musical releases for your free streaming pleasure at Choon, the new blockchain-powered music service that pays playlist curators in cryptocurrency.  Go get yourself signed up and paid for sharing music!  Or just enjoy eleven of my albums, no strings attached.

• Third Eye Drops Podcast had me back on recently, along with my friend Andrew O'Keefe, to talk about my super trippy essay, "The Future Is Disgusting" (and about a zillion other tangents).  Listen to it here.  Always a good time!

• A full-length transcript of Future Fossils Episode 75 with Santa Fe Institute's President, David Krakauer, is now available on Medium – along with one of my favorite short essays ever, "Being Every Drone: The Future of XR & Robotic Telepresence."

• I am still offering up to 50% off the list price for all my paintings – as well as taking payment plans and partial trades.  Deep gratitude to everyone who's purchased art from me so far!

• Oh, and THIS happened.  :)

New Digital Painting + Time-Lapse Video

Watch on YouTube

Buy Prints

This show just keeps on getting better!  And now there are more places you can tune in – including YouTube, Steemit, and soon Choon (currently adding the entire archive, five a day).  Episode 81 with Arthur Brock resulted in my most-successful tweet of all time.  All three of these episodes are great:

Read the show notes & stream this episode: Patreon • Steemit

Read the show notes & stream this episode: Patreon • Steemit

Read the show notes & stream this episode: Patreon • Steemit

New Music + Yoga Mats + Digital Art Time-Lapse + Future Fossils Episodes

Hello friends!  I've got a lot to share this time so I will keep the introduction brief.  

Before I shower you with new creations, let me recommend this episode (304) of the Mixed Mental Arts Podcast – in which we chat about the silver lining of epochal change and how we're going to organize our knowledge into wisdom in the years to come.

I had their host Hunter Maats on Future Fossils Podcast last year and we hit it off.  My episode on his show is some of the best two hours of conversation I've had in a while.

At any rate – I hope all's well with you, and shine my love like sunlight to you through that void across the screen.  Say hi if we haven't spoken in a while!  I'd love to hear from you and how it's going.  

love

Michael

New Music

Hi-Fi Downloads at Bandcamp & Patreon

Streaming at Spotify & Apple Music

I just put out one of my favorite sets of all time and invite you into its gritty, luminous realms...

Recorded live at 3 AM at the Tenth Annual Utopiafest's Guan Yin Tea House tipi, this renegade set was made possible by my friend's questionable Chinese mobile PA system.  (I found out later everyone could hear me play outside the tipi as they walked by, which provided a surreal soundtrack to the nearby silent disco.)

This downtempo quadrupedal trip from the cockpit of my acoustic-electronic starship is a celebration of the sacred hours and an invocation of the magic of a place and time, drawn down into the cozy weirdness of a psychedelic Sunday decompression on a gorgeous autumn evening...

(Cover art by my friend, the amazing Todd Norman Guess.)

New Digital Painting & Time-Lapse

Watch in HD at YouTube or Vimeo

Like with almost everything in life, fate dragged my lazy and protesting ass into the digital painting world eventually.  And lo!  It's wonderful.  I'm still just learning basic skills in Procreate for iPad, but here's an early piece adapting my technique to tablet stylings.  

Because the app will automatically time-lapse whatever you do in it, I can guarantee you you'll see more of these here, soon...

And because it's 2018, you can buy this piece on damn near anything:

 Art Yoga Mats Are Here!

I can't tell you how long I've been waiting for this.  Hop on over to Live Sankalpa and grab one!  

(I mulled this over for a while before deciding on this company.  They're serious about their quality; these are some awesome yoga mats.)

All Prints Permanently Cheaper

Exactly what it sounds like.  I used to sell my prints for $15 each and then it felt like time to give myself a raise...but nobody else in my generation got a raise, because of the recession.  If I had a dollar for every time someone told me they wished they could afford my art, I'd be a rich man. 

I want my art to be there for you no matter what you make, so I've returned the prices on my paper prints to what they were back in 2008, when I was truly awful but it didn't matter.

Also I've dropped prices on ALL canvas prints and ALL original paintings.  

Merry belated/early Christmas.

New Future Fossils Episodes

  

 

If you haven't listened to my podcast yet, now is a great time to dig in.  I have the next 12 weeks' of episodes recorded and post-dated and from here it seems the show just keeps improving on its mission to inspire great conversations on our place in the Big Story...

(Also, I am looking for new sponsors for the show.  Can you recommend someone who believes in the importance of the podcast as a medium for doing Good Work in the world, and wants to put their money where my mouth is?)

Upcoming Fun Stuff

Returning for my fifth year since 2009 to paint, speak about futures, and play cyberguitar.

Moderating a Sunday panel discussion on psychedelic therapy and consciousness hacking.

Playing cyberguitar, painting, and giving a talk at my friends' award-winning mini-festival.