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

Rainbow Unicorn Xenomorph Painting • New Psych-Futurist Writing • Electric Ballads EP • Unplugged Peter Gabriel Cover • New Future Fossils Podcasts

“If you have a good idea, SAY IT, for God’s Sake!”

– Terence McKenna

Greetings, everyone – I hope your summer's going well!  (And that if you're in Santa Fe this week, you'll join me and a lot of awesome scientists and artists at the Interplanetary Festival...)

Here are the things I've made for you in the last month:

New Painting:
"They Only Come Out At Night, Mostly...Mostly"

36"x24" - paint pens on stretched canvas

painted live at Cosmic Flux Festival (AR) and Tap Iñ 2 (TX)

plus copious studio time over April & May 2018

- Buy A Print -

For anyone who loves HR Giger or Lisa Frank, or both, or unicorns and rainbows and pegasuses and chestbursters and biomechanical horror. Transgressive, suggestive, and downright queer (in the original sense: weird, strange, abnormal). Not intersectional, though – unless by that you mean the intersection of alien parasites and cuddly mammals (of which I will always approve, in fiction).

The title is a pun.  Guess I'm just in a "let your freak flag fly" mood...in addition to being WAY into skirting that edge between light and darkness, the sacred and profane, the happy and the horrible.  As should be evident in my latest piece of writing:

New Essay: 

"The Future Acts Like You"

Read on Medium

The latest chapter of my book-in-progress, How To Live in the Future, this twelve-minute read explores our coming age of simulated digital persons and the merged analog-digital identities we may one day possess; the effect of human cloning on the War of the Sexes; and as much deliciously freaky psychedelic futurism as I can squeeze into one wild, jazzy riff.  Enjoy!

New Free EP:

"Electric Cowboy Ballads"

Download for FREE on Bandcamp

Three new recordings on voice and solo electric guitar (Oh electric guitar, where have you been all my life?), recorded in Austin and San Marcos, 2018.

My life as a singer-songwriter is understated, passionately soulful but not something that I flaunt around. It is, however, closer to my sense of self than being a live painter, or a futurist, or essayist. Playing guitar and writing music are, I think, the best ways I know how to get a point across. These songs say more with less than I seem to be able to in other writing, or in conversation.

I wrote the closest thing I've ever made to outlaw country, "Don't Fret," in 2001; I wrote the tender neuroscience anthem "Always Catching Up" in 2015 as part of the windfall from an ayahuasca mishap; and I never actually wrote "Electric Improvisation in D Major" to begin with, just attuned to its always-already-ness and let it speak through me. So you're hearing a wide swath of my inner life and musical identity in three relatively short movements.

New Video:

Acoustic Cover of Peter Gabriel's "Don't Give Up"

Watch on YouTube

One of my favorite songs by one of my favorite artists. Peter Gabriel said he wrote this piece after seeing a collection of National Geographic's photographs from The Great Depression...since most Americans haven't benefited from economic growth since the 1960s, and my generation in particular got out of school just as the sub-prime mortgage crisis happened, I feel like many of us can resonate with these powerful lyrics.

This is my own arrangement, down 1/2 step from the original version. And yeah, I know I don't sound like Kate Bush, but hopefully you can forgive me. :)

New Episodes of Future Fossils Podcast

If you're not already in on this stream of amazing conversations, now's a great time to dive in.  As far as I'm concerned the guests and topics just keep getting better.  Image links are to the downloads and show notes for each episode, but you can find them on any podcast platform:

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts • Stitcher • Spotify • iHeart Radio

Join our Facebook Discussion Group

  

 

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