Two Paintings-In-Progress, Going Away Concerts, & More Cyborg Philosophy

"As if snapping out of a trance, I found myself not out of my mind, in the sense that I was crazy, but rather, inside of my mind, which was now discovered to be everywhere, in that I was beginning to realize that I was dreaming."

- Paul Levy

"Everything is funny as long as it is happening to Somebody Else."

- Will Rogers

As summer turns to autumn and my impending move from Boulder to Austin looms ever-nearer, change is in the air.  Appropriate to the season, it's a time of closing accounts and kisses goodbye.  But I won't wear black to my own funeral – so the next couple of weeks are going to be full of parties!

Beyond hosting a flexible-price sale on all of my original paintings to raise money for the move, here is how I'm celebrating the end of four years in Colorado and the leap into a new adventure:

• 14, 15 October, Denver CO - Cervantes Masterpiece Ballroom

8 pm - 2 am: live painting & body art by donation at SONIC BLOSSOM

with Ott, Random Rab, Kraddy, Janover & Karsh Kale, Octopus Nebula, Project Aspect,

Phadroid, Govinda, The Human Experience, Bird of Prey, and more

- last scheduled live art gig in CO -

• 21 October, Denver CO - Jake's Denver

8 - 11 pm: three full songbird & cyberacoustic guitar sets (FREE)

• 25 October, Denver CO - Cervantes' Other Side

9 - 10 pm: cyberacoustic songbird set w/ Three-Legged Fox ($7)

• 28 October, Estes Park CO - Aspen Lodge

6:30 - 9 pm: balladry & cyberacoustic guitar sets (FREE)

- last scheduled concert in CO -

...and now on to the juice.  We got new artwork, new writing, and new music in this one.  But first, here are pictures from last weekend's live painting fiesta at Art Outside – an absolute gem of a festival, positively overflowing with amazing undiscovered artists and musicians.  Click through to the gallery, and feel free to comment!

Photos: Art Outside 2011

As part of my emphasis on process, I've always tried to find ways to make this blog more immediate and immersive – to bring the people who can't be at every show into the experience of live art and music.  (Hence the photo album above.)

But I'm spending more time on each piece these days, which means a longer lag between when you saw me at the show working on the painting and when it finally spreads its feathers and does a mating dance for your brain.  So here are snapshots of two paintings-in-progress that I started over the last month, caught in their awkward pimply adolescence.  Click to view full-size:

Many Worlds (tentative)

2011 09 01, 02 Burning Man Festival - Fractal Nation Village

(Left Coast, Heyoka, Mimosa, Dov, FreQ Nasty, Ill Gates, An-Ten-Nae)

& 2011 09 10 Red Rocks Amphitheatre (STS9, Savoy)

paint markers on stretched canvas - 24"x36"

A minor homage to the worlds-within-worlds paintings of my friend Melissa Leigh...minus the worlds, of course!  So that's where this piece is headed:  a unique terrarium ecology for each of those floating orbs.  If something goes horribly wrong, I might just paint a big Brontosaurus on top.

Mobius Brain (tentative)

2011 10 07, 08, 09 Art Outside Festival

(Psymbionic, David Starfire, Bird of Prey, Riders Against The Storm, Sorne, Ricochet, Dolomites, Soundfounder, Butcher Bear, Kinder Lo Phi, Ntropy, Nicoluminous, Happy Happy James)

paint markers on canvas panel - 24"x30"

As many paradoxes as I can fit into a single painting...it's like the Impossible Fork times a million.  Painted myself into a corner with this one, and eager to see how I paint myself out of it.

Recent Philosophy Riffs

For those of you who enjoy heady ideas (and that's hopefully all of you), here are two recent articles I wrote for transhumanism website Acceler8or about 1) our evolving relationship with emotional machines, and 2) the implications of CERN's recent superluminal neutrino research...some of the more interesting topics, I think, here at the edge of the future:

"Coevolution & The Technology of Desire"
A few years ago, the first emotional robot pet hit the market. Designed by the co-inventor of Furby, Pleo the Dinosaur is an adorable little beast, big eyes and feet, curious and playful and a little awkward...just like a baby dinosaur, except it comes in a box and is full of electronic innards.  Pleo — as well as earlier incarnations like Furby, Teddy Ruxpin, and even the Pet Rock — speak to a deep-seated human desire to relate with the world around us. It only makes sense that as the machine world becomes more and more a part of daily life, our technology’s rocket trajectory out of the spirited and sentient world of our ancestors would plunge right back into an age of cute computers. (read more)

"And Now, Faster-Than-Light Culture"
Last week’s discovery at CERN of neutrinos traveling faster than light has physics forums buzzing about the possibility that this is “solid” evidence of long-hypothesized additional dimensions. This is big news. For the first time in the modern world, the existence of invisible spatial dimensions is in the public discourse. Science is the closest thing much of the literate planet has to religion these days, and this is far closer to the otherworldly transcendent mythos of early cities than the heady, highly existential relativity physics delivered to us from on high by Einstein. (read more)

New Cyber-Acoustic Guitar Videos From Burning Man

I was honored to play the Center Camp 2011 Aerial Dance Showcase at this year's Burning Man.  Unfortunately, dust got into my digital audio recorder and the only surviving record of that performance is here, captured in these two short videos...a glimpse of dust and light, love and survival:

Much more music video on its way as I gear up for the 11/11/11 release of Rites of Passage: Live At Burning Man – in the meantime, all of my music is (as always) free or pay-what-you-like at MichaelGarfield.net.  If you haven't already, take my latest live album, Alive in the Zone of the Rose, for a spin...it's a transporting hour of my signature blend between acoustic songwriter fare and electronic guitar looping psychedelia, the musical version of my visual art.

HUGE thanks to everyone for supporting my tireless efforts by buying music, introducing your friends to my work, offering your thoughtful feedback, and inspiring people with your own creative lives.  Don't hesitate to write if you have something to say, and have a beautiful day!

New Paintings from Papadosio, Burning Man, STS9 – and Vinyl Stickers!

"One doesn't discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time."

- André Gide

"In their daily life, all are braver than they know."

- Henry David Thoreau

My adventure at Burning Man 2011 was a success.  I played five concerts in an inhospitable desert environment, including one as "opening act" for living legend John Perry Barlow and one improvising the score for an aerial dance showcase; spoke to a packed house at Red Lightning Camp and sat in on a now-annual panel discussion with my friends Daniel Pinchbeck and Mitch Mignano; and helped hold it down at the kick-ass new visionary art camp, Fractal Nation Village in my own modest way.  More importantly, however, I helped friends new and old navigate their own rites of passage, and they helped me through my own.  I wrote a short note about it you can read here, if you like.

The music and talks will all be ready to share in time for the next newsletter...

In the meantime, here are the latest offerings from my visual universe.  Click any image to enlarge:

New Vinyl Stickers!

2"x6" die-cut vinyl indoor/outdoor stickers

$3 each or $10 for five (shipping included)

(to order, use the "donate" link at my blog – leave your address

and the name of the prints in a note when you check out)

This is the closest thing I have to a slogan – I came up with it in 2008 as a retort to the argument that capitalism could not continue to grow unchecked, because obviously if we trade in ideas we can have a closed-loop material infrastructure and continue to expand exponentially into the imagination.  Or maybe I'm wrong.  But insofar as the invisible environment of one age becomes the conscious canvas of the next, I do think it's time we took a lead from Terence McKenna and Bucky Fuller, and started treating our planetary problems as shortages of imagination.  There's always an overlooked perspective that solves even the most impossible paradoxes...and now you can share that insight with anyone who sees the back of your laptop.  Maybe – just maybe – this will help us reach critical mass.

River Dragon

2011 08 24 Hodi's Half Note & 2011 08 26 The Fox

(Papadosio, Damn Right)

24"x36" - paint markers on stretched canvas

signed 11"x17" poster prints $20/1 $30/2 plus $5 s/h

(to order, use the "donate" link at my blog – leave your address

and the name of the prints in a note when you check out)

original painting negotiable – serious inquiries, email me

I just finished reading David Wade's excellent Crystal and Dragon: The Cosmic Dance of Symmetry and Chaos in Art, Nature, and Consciousness – basically, a thorough overview of the ways that crystalline and fluid patterns have alternately dominated human art, religion, and philosophy.  Wade contrasts the intensely crystalline tradition of Islam, with its emphasis on extraordinarily precise geometries as a way of pointing to the ultimate reality of divine perfection, and the chaotic tradition of Taoism, with its emphasis on the light and motion of water, gnarled pines, and other ephemeral natural phenomena as a way of pointing to the ultimate reality of the ever-changing Tao.

He turned me on to an an awesome new term:  "shang shui," or "mountain-water," the name for an entire school of Chinese painting that praises the fluid forms of nature.  To the shang shui tradition of painters, it's less important that you capture the exact shape of a thing than its motion, life, and essence...and by that criterion, I identify with this tradition.  "River Dragons" is an attempt to connect with the vitality of this lineage and their higher truth.

Fiestaraptor

2011 09 01 Burning Man - Fractal Nation Village

(Imagika Om, Janover, Ganga Giri, Future Simple Project, Sub Swara, FreQ Nasty, Opiuo, LowRIDERz, PussyMonster, Heyoka)

24"x36" - paint markers on stretched canvas

signed 11"x17" poster prints $20/1 $30/2 plus $5 s/h

(to order, use the "donate" link at my blog – leave your address

and the name of the prints in a note when you check out)

original painting negotiable – serious inquiries, email me

Most of y'all know I was trained as a paleontologist and scientific illustrator, and every once in a while I try to bring my old life into my new life.  I get the feeling, after working on paintings like this one, that I'm not doing it frequently enough.  Somewhere between festival culture and museum culture lives "Fiestaraptor," the painting I made during Fractal Nation's opening night of all-star programming at Burning Man.

(For the record, I'm still kind of ambivalent about the idea of a big-budget production theme camp at what is supposed to be a radically-participatory event...putting on huge concerts out there seems to support spectator culture and ends up being a weird badge of pride for the producers, when what I really love about Burning Man is the emergent, collaborative, collective, personal, intimate, and weird experiences everyone creates together that cannot be reproduced anywhere else.  That said, this was basically a party put on by my friends, and it was an honor to contribute to it.)

While I was working on this piece, I was also responsible for keeping people out of the backstage area – so there was a lot of "bouncer" energy that went into it.  Sometimes I had to use my longer-than-Tyrannosaurus arms and actually grab people and pull them while they were jumping over the gate.  I can't help but think it influenced this intense, roaring, guardian vibe this one radiates.  Maybe, also, the fact that Tribe 13's unprecedentedly awesome sixty-foot dome visionary art gallery was just two hundred feet away had something to do with it.  I didn't see any ayahuasca-sauruses when I was down in Peru last March, but Lord knows Tyrannosaurus is one of my spirit animals...

STS9 Red Rocks 2011 (Guerrilla Poster)

signed 11"x17" poster prints $20/1 $30/2 plus $5 s/h

(to order, use the "donate" link at my blog – leave your address

and the name of the prints in a note when you check out)

My latest foray into hybridizing the hand-painted work with basic digital layering techniques to create something that shines with the best of both worlds, this piece alloys work from The Manifestation Celebration, Bear Creek Festival, and Electric Forest Festival.  It wasn't quite a full moon when STS9 showed up to rock Colorado's most legendary sandstone slabs, but close...so I worked to make something that conveyed what a lot of people were probably feeling (maybe even seeing) that weekend, crowded between the rocks and gazing into the extraordinary fullness of theater and the sky beyond.

This is a signed and numbered series of 75 prints and I have a few left, if anyone would like one.

Press

First, here's an entertaining short interview with me about my crazy path from biologist to vagabond-artist by precocious and inspirational video blogger Kevin May (aka Phil Osophical). I had the pleasure of meeting Kevin last month at Papadosio's Rootwire Festival and was happy to talk while we ran to the bathrooms in the crescendo of anticipation right before they burned the Man...the excitement is palpable all around us as Kevin and I run from my panel discussion to the bathrooms:

In music news, taste-making electronic dance music site TheUntz.com just gave my latest album, A Million Anniversaries, a sterling review – especially cool, given it's not really EDM:

"It takes creativity to make the next step in a newer, more shocking direction, but it takes a visionary to go beyond the breaking point and meet music on the other end of the spectrum. That’s what Michael Garfield does."

(read the whole review here)

Musician and blogger Skinny Hendrix also gave me a feature on his site and had some kind things to say about that same album.  It's always a special pleasure to find approval from a fellow artist:

"Beautiful soundscapes....Garfield has a dynamic ability to express himself on the acoustic guitar and to allow the listener to climb inside of his head and connect with him on a deep level."

(read the whole review here)

...and while it's not exactly a review, this lovely poem by my friend Sofia was inspired by the album and is a kind of tribute:  "The Dripping Place"

Enjoy!  Thanks to everyone for your time, attention, and support.  It takes a planetary village to raise the emergent starchild of the human "superorganism."  We're all in this together.

From Independence To Integration, Part One

"As a man's real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing, but does only and wholly what he must do."

- Ursula LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea

The last few weeks found me out on the road again – first, from a swirl of exit gigs in Boulder up to Edmonton, Alberta for the Motion Notion Festival; then to Portland, Oregon for a lesson in the permaculture and sacred arts of dying developed by medieval monks; then down the California coast for stops to paint alongside Alex & Allyson Grey at Trinity Tribal Stomp before sitting on a panel about the future of art at the Integral Theory Conference. (You can find a photo gallery from the tour so far on my facebook page.)

Hopefully, I'll be able to resolve the challenge of integrating hardcore travel with personal availability, and can turn this fall's forthcoming national tour (!) into an awesome live internet chronicle of discovery and creativity. (I'm definitely interested to hear suggestions for creative ways to engage everyone from the road...) In the meantime, you have my apologies for letting work pile up until we have to choke it all down at once.

There is so much more to come – music, presentations, timelapse videos, and small-format art – but for now, I hope you enjoy this flurry of recent live paintings!

Stay in touch and have a beautiful day...

(Click on any image to enlarge it – especially the process pics.)

Temporary Autonomous Zone Flag #1

2010 07 03, 05, 10 Mishawaka, Red Rocks, Fox Theatre

(Whitewater Ramble, Colorado Symphony Orchestra, Jeffrey Hyde Thompson Band, Dechen Hawk, Varlette)

24"x24" - opaque pens on 1/8" masonite

11"x17" poster prints for $25 - order

original painting available - inquire

The "Temporary Autonomous Zone" is Hakim Bey's idea of an anarchic ephemeropolis, based on the understanding that the universe is too creative for any one vision of perfection to stand forever. Even the most noble utopian visions eventually degrade into fascism as time marches on and our current ideals are replaced with newer forms...even the American Dream eventually became the American Nightmare. So the T.A.Z. isn't about revolutions; it's about insurrections. It's about knowing that nothing lasts and that we party here today in service of kosmic creativity, not our fixation to human political agendas.

And by the way, Oh My God, part of this piece was painted during my first creative sojourn to Red Rocks Amphitheater for their free July 5th Colorado Symphony show – all the good old American standards like the 1812 Overture and Yankee Doodle. Painting alongside Scramble Campbell, I now know why he's made that place his home away from home for live art...

In honor of Bey and Thomas Jefferson – America's first paleontologist – I dedicate this painting to the ongoing spirit of independence, exploration, and ethical humanism that drove this nation's founding, even though those ideals have now congealed into something horrifying. Here's to hoping that that T.A.Z. spirit – ecstatic, irreverent, erotic, and deviously, lovingly, tragically hopeful – finds itself again in all of us, like flowers growing from rotten meat. Constructive deconstruction.

Gestalt

2010 07 15 & 16 Motion Notion Festival

(Fergie, Cruz-ae vs Tristan Newton, Sundrop, Schwag Dankus, Lo Progression, k3v, Groovy Cuvy, Kristoff, Organic Manic)

23"x31" - opaque pens on 1/4" masonite

11"x17" poster prints for $25 - order

original painting available - inquire

I'm sure this one had a lot to do with the incessant rain at Motion Notion...beautiful, but it turned the entire festival into a Woodstock-esque mud party and prevented me from wearing my white pants. And I'm sure it had something to do with the repetition of psytrance oontz for days on end. It's not often I limit my color palette so dramatically, but doing so deepened the meditative quality of this one, both during and after. And it's true to the incessant electronic rhythms in which I was bathing as this piece emerged.

This piece is dedicated to James Katalyst, organizer of Motion Notion, who gave me a fabulous reception and who nearly ran himself into the ground to put on a killer weekend of dance music. Thanks for having me up in Canada, James...and that includes "Thanks for letting me play the only acoustic guitar set at your electronic dance music festival, on the same stage as Bluetech, Blue Lunar Monkey, and Crystal Method." Aw, yeah.

Gate Crashers

2010 01 16 & 24 BMoCA & Trinity Tribal Stomp

(Fresh2Death, H1N1, DJ Grabass, Elephant Art Jam)

20"x30" - opaque pens on 1/8" masonite

11"x17" poster prints for $25 - order

original painting available - inquire

Not a new piece, but considerably more deep and defined than when I first posted it. It was definitely missing something after the first night, and after months of looking at it funny I finally gave it the treatment it deserved. Something to the tune of "salts crossing a permeable membrane," or (since, I guess, salts don't have tri-radial symmetry) the collective and narrative version of this painting.

Tunnel To The Moon

2010 07 24 Trinity Tribal Stomp

(Dumpstaphunk, Clan Dyken, Garaj Mahal, David Starfire)

25"x31" - opaque pens on 1/4" masonite

11"x17" poster prints for $25 - order

original painting available - inquire

It was a full moon in Aquarius the night this painting emerged in epic fashion from the piney woods of Northern California's Junction City Park. Garaj Mahal (a seriously amazing group, all musicians of rare talent) missed the dimly-illuminated turn-off to the festival and ended up getting there hours late – but it was ultimately for the best, because they played in the late night dome, at ground level, creating a house concert vibe that I haven't seen since...well, since they got screwed out of a gig in Lawrence, Kansas a few years ago and ended up playing an actual house concert. The rest of the music was fabulous, as well...Fareed Haque of Garaj Mahal played guitar with DJ David Starfire for much of David's set, which was a total treat – to say nothing of Dumpstaphunk's loose and delicious throwdown earlier in the evening.

And did I mention I got to paint alongside Alex & Allyson Grey again? If it's not obvious, creating in their company forces me to seriously step up my game. This painting has a few things going on that I've never even attempted, including an Escher-esque stairwell paradox if you follow the diamonds around in a circle (the rainbow ones are going in and the white ones are going out, which is impossible in three dimensions because of how they overlap). And the Fibonacci Sequence is in there in two different dimensions: both as Golden Spirals in the plane of the board, and also from five to eight staring down the tunnel at the Moon. Lots going on, here.

This painting is dedicated to Johnathan Singer, maestro VJ and the guy who coordinated the visual arts for the Stomp. What a mensch!

Fiddleheads

2010 07 25 Trinity Tribal Stomp

(The Wailin' Jennys, Freedom Tribe Reunion, Heyoka)

24"x24" - opaque pens on 1/8" masonite

11"x17" poster prints for $25 - order

original painting available - inquire

A variation on a familiar theme...be they ferns, tentacles, or whatever, I'm obviously kinda hooked on the grabby swirls. These strike me as somewhat "mecha-caterpillar," like the self-assembling military robots in the climactic scene of Greg Bear's badass sci-fi novel /Slant. Look closely and you'll see the eight-pointed star motif that has become another of my calling cards, ringing out in rows through the resonant space.

This painting is dedicated to Alex & Allyson Grey for all they have done to inspire me and so many other artists...what else can I say?

Seraph Body

2010 07 17, 18, 25, 29, 31 Motion Notion, Trinity Tribal Stomp, ITC 2010

(Blue Lunar Monkey, Anahata, Bluetech, Adham Shaikh with John Wilkinson, Jay Michael, Michelle C, Cary Chang vs David Stone, Crystal Method, and during poster presentations)

17"x23" - opaque pens on 1/4" masonite

11"x17" poster prints for $25 - order

original painting available - inquire

The Caduceus, as a low-resolution map of the human subtle body, doesn't really translate here. Too many wings; not enough coiling. The serpents are joined at the bottom, where all five of the lower chakras are fused into a contracted nub. What's going on, here? Near as I can figure, we're looking at the corresponding map of a seraph or "burning one," historically related to the serpent, six-winged and unexpressed in its lower chakras (no material form) but wide open up above. A being of musical intersections and mathematical balance, reeking of eternity, glowing from within, too aware for human rationality to fathom without terror, rising calmly from the eternal flux of creation and destruction. (Tangentially, I find it extremely interesting that the angels nearest to God take form as burning serpents...)

I finally crossed the event horizon for this one and bought some empty paint markers to fill with my own colors. First stop: interference pigments like the pearlescent red filling the background space in this piece (even though it's hard to make out in pictures).

It'll be a while before I get over the novelty of starting this piece at an outdoor rave in the Canadian wilderness and finishing it in a Hilton hotel in California during the poster presentations at an academic conference. In the meantime, I dedicate it to Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, my once-professor and founding chair of John F. Kennedy University's Integral Theory Program. You changed my world, man.

More art next week. :)

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)