Paintings from an Electric Forest; Music from an Acoustic Jungle

"Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and...stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to walk about into a hitherto unknown world.
If the answer is yes, what more do you want?"

– Wassily Kandinsky (possibly the first live painter)

"The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts."

– Henry Miller (reinvented the novel; also a painter)

This is how I started 2011:  playing and painting in the mountainous rain forest village of Sinai, Costa Rica; watchless, clockless, countdownless, uncertain of when consensus time made the New Year official; enchanted by strange bugs and the quiet depth of its isolated village culture.  New Year's Day, I played a concert outside the village kitchen to a receptive lawn-full of international appreciators, deep in the dreamy mystery of our strange little festival.

That show is now my latest free live recording, Vive En Costa Rica.  I released this album in secret back in March – made it available for people who paid for a copy of The Body Electric – and then figured it might as well just be out there for everyone to enjoy:

Vive En Costa Rica (2011)

The spacey, kinda spooky improvised first track (named in honor of a genuine faerie sighting) scores this reel of the travel clips I took down there.  Looking through my eyes:

Watch it in HD on Youtube

And here are the paintings from my Fourth of July weekend up in Michigan at Electric Forest Festival. Click on each picture to see it in terrifying full detail:

Looking At The Blue Flame

2011 06 30 & 07 01 Electric Forest Festival

(Toubab Krewe & String Cheese Incident, Tiesto)

18"x24" – opaque pens on stretched canvas

$20/1 or $30/2 for 11"x17" signed posters – email me

check availability/price of original painting

My original plan was to have a blue-and-gold series of sculpted pieces based on themes I'd started at Sonic Bloom...but original plans don't count for much in an improvisational sport like live painting.  Especially when the skies open up and drop a huge "welcome to the festival" storm on everyone...which is perhaps why the design ended up with so many little blue dots:

Rainbow Tunnel

2011 07 02 Electric Forest Festival (String Cheese Incident)
18"x24" – opaque pens on stretched canvas
$20/1 or $30/2 for 11"x17" signed posters – email me
check availability/price of original painting

The festival's official documentary team caught a delicious HD timelapse of me (and Christian Jaxtheimer, and Rae Vena) working on this piece, start to finish – check 1:48 of this video to watch the whole Saturday Night String Cheese Incident concert breeze by.  It was a return to older themes, dating all the way back to my idle classroom sketches in college...but in a lively, tribal style that capitalized on my chisel-tip bold markers and completely ignored the patient layer upon layer of outlining I developed in my own pen-specific voice.  Working in the ghost sunlight of my awesome new powerful battery-powered LED lamp, this painting came together like the holographic tunnels in some private realm of sylvan dreaming...I've never felt so eerily transported while working on any other piece.

Lesage's Wall

2011 07 02 & 07 03 Electric Forest Festival
(REO Speedwagon, Big Gigantic, Shpongletron & Railroad Earth)
18"x24" – opaque pens on stretched canvas
$20/1 or $30/2 for 11"x17" signed posters – email me
check availability/price of original painting

In honor of Augustin Lesage, coal-miner turned compulsive visionary artist whose enormous early 20th Century paintings evoked the transcendental architectures of Ancient Egypt as if transcribed onto even greater scale into grandiose heavenly landscapes.  I don't even know where to start in describing how hypnotized I am by Lesage's work, but maybe you'll see it in this Navajo-inflected homage:

...and I painted on a lot of beautiful people while I was there.  Check out the full gallery on my facebook art page:

Body Art at Electric Forest Festival 2011

New Work From Burning Man & Trinumeral 999

> Imagery

2009 09 01 Burning Man (Heart Space Sign) - 24"x48"

The entry sign for Entheon Village's Heart Space at this year's Burning Man. The Heart Space was where all of the presentations, discussion panels, and musical performances were at Entheon, and Entheon is one of the most progressive and inspirational theme camps out there. For those of you unfamiliar with Burning Man, here is a fabulous video segment on it by Time Magazine. This sign was adapted (in pseudo-Shepard Fairey style) from the staff patch design they asked me to create, which was unfortunately lost on the way to the printers and so still exists only in digital form:
The tesselated octagons (two kinds – one in which every other point faces inwards) are an Islamic symbol for The Breath of the Compassionate, the endless cycle of creation and destruction of forms within the divine mind. Looking at this pattern brings me great peace by reminding me of the greater context, the infinity in which we all participate...it seemed an appropriate design to contemplate during Burning Man's ritualistic embrace of personal and social transformation. So I went with it while working on the other paintings I made during the music that week:

2009 09 02 Burning Man (Sonic Bloom - Anahata Sound, Beats Antique, Lynx & Janover, Vibesquad, Heyoka, Mimosa) - 20"x30"

Jamie Janover imported Sonic Bloom to Entheon Village this year, organizing a fabulous dance party on Wednesday night. I set up immediately in front of the entrance to the Heart Space and painted shirtless for the first time ever because 1) the weather was incredible, and 2) someone had painted a seven-pointed star with a heart inside of it on my back in henna that afternoon, which I wanted to show off (seven is the number of the virgin, of undivided purity...a cool thing to have emblazoned on one's bod). What an incredible amount of love I felt that night! This piece wrapped itself up at the very last note of the music, just as dawn was stretching over the horizon...you can kind of feel it in the red "window" panels. It was a real trip to be painting for so many familiar artists in such a strange and distant land...

2009 09 07 Burning Man (Hookah Dome - Random Rab, Radiohiro, Eskmo, Welder, Thievery Corporation) - 18"x24"

A lot of nonsense gets spread around as news at Burning Man. One camp put a Kraftwerk & Daft Punk concert in the What/Where/When, which I knew was a prank...but I wasn't so certain about the alleged Thievery Corporation show I'd heard would take place on Sunday night. It ended up being in a different place and at a different time, but sure enough I got to paint for the guy at his first-ever set at Burning Man! (He told us all it had been the best week of his life... The other acts all played excellent sets as well, but I'd painted for them all before so excuse me for not expressing quite as much excitement.) "So I've got that going for me..." (– Bill Murray, Caddyshack, on being granted total consciousness at the moment of death by the Dalai Lama as a caddying gratuity) I got to test out my new battery-powered 20-LED "SquidBrite" lamp, which definitely proved its utility while I painted from a cozy high-traffic spot off to one side of the crowd. And it was an amazing way to end the festival, celebrating after the Temple Burn, squeezing every living volt out of the tail of the week.

2009 09 10 Trinumeral Festival (Pnuma Trio, M80 Dubstation, Conspirator) - 18"x24"

After helping strike camp at Burning Man and driving cross-country with my friends for a day and a half, I repacked in Kansas City, slept three hours, got on a plane to North Carolina, rode out two hours from the airport to the festival site for Trinumeral 999, jumped out of the car, set up my easel, and knocked this one out during my first Pnuma Trio concert. Where the energy came from, I don't know...and in fact, I think this piece betrays how frazzled I must have actually been. But I dig the white-to-purple-to-blue electric glow, and intend to keep working on those tetrahedral surfaces. It has kind of a Navajo blanket vibe.

2009 09 11 Trinumeral Festival (The Sun Ra Arkestra, Béla Fleck/Zakir Hussain/Edgar Meyer, The Glitch Mob) - 18"x24"

What an eclectic festival! To have Sun Ra's old 13-piece band reassemble for this event, followed by the debut performance of a mind-blowing experimental neoclassical supergroup I could scarcely believe, followed by The Glitch Mob? On the same stage, too. I don't even know where to start with that, so I won't. I'll just say that in going for the 999 theme, I tried to work out a pattern based on the Borromean Rings, each of which only interlocks with one other, but together all three are inseparable. Threes and nines (the nines only insinuated by the logarithmic curve of each extended ring). It ended up somewhat messy, but encouraged me to attempt more Celtic braidwork in the future. And I like the snakey green cybertube vibe it ended up with.

2009 09 12 Trinumeral Festival (The Egg, The New Mastersounds, Toubab Krewe) - 18"x24"

At this point, I suppose, I'd given up on the nines. Kind of a petroglyph-circuitboard, weird and dimensionless but nonetheless it still captivates my eyes. Hanging out and painting next to Kris D all weekend must've rubbed off on me, all that abstract geometry.

2008 11 05 & 2009 07 29 Hodi's Half Note (DJ Rootz) & in-studio - 18"x24"

Here, by the way, is an older painting I spent some time updating this summer and haven't yet re-posted in its final form. Radiating bronze lines over gold spraypaint really solarizes this one, although it's hard to fully appreciate from a photograph. It's kind of the counterpart to the Pnuma/M80/Conspirator piece...the hole to its peg. Simple, bold, molten.

> Writing
I'm ultra-proud to announce that my latest epic article, "The Psychedelic Transhumanists," made the cover of H+ Magazine's Fall Issue. It's an adventurous exposition on the common vision of various psychopharmacological visionaries for the future of humanity and consciousness in general...a "virtual conversation" between Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna, Erik Davis, Mark Pesce, and David Pearce, culled mostly from previously un-transcribed video materials and tied together with my own virtual persona as moderator. Topics include emotional machines, the linguistic nature of reality, the illusion of control, the evolving definition of "selfhood," and whether there is even such a thing as "artificial" intelligence. It's one of the more profound things I've ever written and I'm so, SO happy to share it with you. You can read the entire article in the latest issue's free pdf version, or read just the intro on my friend EROCx1's blog, or buy a paper copy at your local newsstand next month. (I highly recommend option #1.)

> Music
Coming soon: my recordings from Entheon Village.

1) My Saturday night pre-burn concert in Entheon's dining hall;
2) My Tuesday and Friday afternoon presentations ("Does Evolution Have A Direction?" and "The Science of 2012: How Geomagnetics Influence Human Consciousness"); and
3) The Friday afternoon discussion panel on "The Evolution Of Consciousness," in which I participated as an "expert" alongside Daniel Pinchbeck, Tony Vigorito, Mark Heley, and Mark Martinez.

These were the most inspiring public presentations and conversations I've ever had, and I can't wait to share them with you. It's an enormous amount of audio material to mix and render, however – some of which is still in the hands of Entheon, so I'm at the mercy of their clock. But I'll have them available for free as soon as I can!

In the meantime, thank you for your time and attention, and feel free to write with any questions or comments! Have a beautiful day...

love
Michael

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The First Of A Busy Summer's Fruit

2009 05 30 & 31 Sail Inn & Rhythm Room (Endoplasmic & Black Moth Super Rainbow)

16x24 - masonite - available

My last painting from Phoenix...a poignant few nights. Endoplasmic is a band of national-level talent mysteriously stuck playing local gigs...going out alone to paint for them at the Sail Inn for probably the last time was a strange, quiet affair amidst all of the jamming. Black Moth Super Rainbow the next night co-headlined a show with School of Seven Bells. The latter made me turn off my lamp during their set (a first-ever for that one...but then again, they'd just come off a European tour, if you know what I mean). But the former were more pleased than anyone ever has been to have me...an adorably nerdy ensemble, very friendly and very real, the frontman sitting cross-legged onstage below crowd eye level and the girl drummer anonymized and androgynized behind a ninja costume. They said they were happy to have something else for people to pay attention to. This painting is the sequel to the painting from Zilla and Glitch Mob's NYE 2008 run at The Fox Theatre in Boulder...another tentacled alien god shimmering into the foreground from some oceanic mindscape.

2009 06 11 & 13 Crosstown Station & Jardine's (The New Mastersounds & Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey)
20x20 - canvas - available

After checking out both The New Mastersounds and JFJO at Wakarusa, to paint for them both again in Kansas City the week after was a summer-synchronous treat. Jardine's - the Odyssey's favorite KC jazz club haunt, tucked away over the green shoulders of the Country Club Plaza - is the classiest spot I've seen in this town...although I'm sure they're playing had something to do with how much I reveled in the find. This is the last in a trilogy of twenty-inch circular canvases...it falls somewhere between the first's crystal structure and the second's leafiness. An integration.

2009 06 17 & 23 501 Club & Quixotes (Brad Senne, Luke Redfield & Zuvuya)
16x24 - masonite - available

After extensive preparatory background work, I started this one on my first night touring my music through Minneapolis. I'd just set up the easel to paint during the other two acts (my friend Luke, a fine folk musician, had hooked up the gig) when I realized I'd locked my keys in the car. Luckily one of the friendly locals let me use her AAA membership to call a locksmith...but only after I'd broken off a cocktail stirrer in the door trying to break in with the power of sheer dumb chance. Until I was able to dig the plastic piece out later that week, I had to walk around the car to unlock it every time. Mildly tragicomic. Minneapolis is BEAUTIFUL. A garden city, lakes and trees and footpaths and bohemia and strange elegant sweeping architecture. Most of this painting, however, was completed in Denver at Quixotes', where I was granted the honor of opening for Zuvuya (Michael Travis and Jamie Janover's acoustic dance jam band with Xander Greene on nylon string guitar and guest Garrett Sayers of The Motet on delicious bass). There were five painters crowding the venue's entire south wall that night...I'll have much more to say about that show in the next entry when I'll finally have finished mixing the recordings of my show that night. For now, suffice it to say that I'm not sure if that jellyfish has more to do with my friend and fellow live painter Kayla Andreano's jellyfish obsession (I'd been staying with her that week, talking jellyfish A LOT) or that these beautiful stinging beasts are the unofficial mascot of Michael Travis' home team, The String Cheese Incident (who were playing a private rehearsal for their forthcoming reunion at Rothbury Festival the next night, and cheesy anticipation was in the air).

2009 06 25 B Side Lounge (Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey feat Fareed Haque) - collab with Todd Shepherd and Kayla Andreano
30x30 - canvas - available
I loved the look on the faces of JFJO when they saw me show up to paint for them for the third time in three weeks in three different states. :) Half the show I spent preparing the painting below for further work at Sonic Bloom Festival the next day, but the other half of the show I spent in pure artistic bliss on my first live collaboration with Kayla and "Tourmaline" Todd Shepherd. We were all so stupified by what emerged from between the three of us that we stared at this painting for over an hour after the show, mumbling dumbfounded partial sentences. Also, this is the only painting I've ever stepped on. We (mostly Todd and Kayla) spent a good chunk of the afternoon preparing the canvas with layer after layer of paint, and at one point Kayla and I painted our feet and walked a few circles around it...unfortunately all that remains visible of that are a few stray toeprints.

2009 06 25 & 26 B Side Lounge & Sonic Bloom Festival (Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey feat. Fareed Haque & Lynx and Janover, Anasia, EOTO + Kang + Kyle)
20x30 - canvas panel - available

Fareed Haque's guitars and equipment were put on the wrong plane and ended up in Wichita the night of this Boulder gig, so he had the audience clap along instead of laying down live loops. Of course they were all a bunch of musical laypeople with a few drinks down, so the rhythm was dubious...I took the initiative and clapped and danced as cheerleader to help everyone keep the beat. Later Fareed let me know how much he appreciated the energy I helped bring to the evening (both as cheerleader and painter) and ok'ed me to paint for his band Garaj Mahal at 10,000 Lakes Festival in a few weeks. Yay! As for the night I completed this painting, what can I say about this year's (and my first) Sonic Bloom Festival except that Mishawaka Amphitheatre is one of my favorite venues in the world, and you should go there. I'm sure the canyon river right behind the stage and the beautiful blue skies had a direct influence on the "vibration" of my paintings. And of course I feel I produce better work when painting for world-class musicians.

2009 06 27 Sonic Bloom Festival (Boombox, Big Gigantic, Sasha Rose, Zilla)
20x30 - canvas panel - available

Krystle Smith and I were responsible for assembling a visionary art gallery at this year's Sonic Bloom, which we put together (with lots of help) on the indoor stage at Mishawaka. We moved all of the lounge's couches up onto the stage and made it a sweet elevated chill spot with art sprouting from every direction – including the diagonal ceiling, where I had a row of my own paintings attached with velcro (making the gallery kind of a danger zone...a few times they fell off and nearly beaned somebody...but because of weak adhesive, not the velcro itself). Anyway, this painting is about the closest I've ever come to making a "Krystle Smith" painting. Lots of layers, lots of blue, lots of simple floating elements and hexagonal geometry. At one point I accidentally smeared the green paint on one of those fronds, but ended up smearing the other fronds as well and it acquired a very painterly effect that was previously impossible for me to attain with markers. I'll probably do more "destructive" smearing like this in the future. And DEFINITELY more painting on gradients.

2009 06 27 Sonic Bloom Festival (Random Rab, Bassnectar, Mochipet)
20x30 - canvas panel - available

Each of these bubbles was painted in advance with Wildfire brand UV ultra-white paint, the kind they use for film backdrops (apparently). When you hit this one with a blacklight everything inverts and the bubbles all glow a profound luminous blue. It's totally sweet...I picked up a 9 UV LED flashlight while living in Arizona (at the Walgreens, billed as a "scorpion finder" because the chitin in their shells is UV-reactive) and would occasionally dip out of "normal light mode" and into "UV light mode" while working on this one as an additional layer of strangeness for the audience. I hope whomever ends up with this painting puts it in the same room as a lava lamp.

2009 06 28 Sonic Bloom Festival (Tipper, David Starfire, Beats Antique, Heyoka)
20x30 - canvas panel - available

Harkening back to simpler days, this one. It kind of reminds me of a logging mill, eating away at the fabric of spacetime itself. By this point in the weekend I'd worked myself pretty raw, so I consider this painting an example of what happens when I'm "frame-dragging" (the computing term...although had this been framed at the time, I'd probably have been so tired I'd have been dragging it around).

2009 07 02 Rothbury Festival (Toubab Krewe, Keller Williams, Lotus)
18x24 - canvas panel - available

Rothbury was a very different live painting experience from my residencies at Wakarusa and Sonic Bloom. I was working from the crowd the entire weekend – and even then, only out of a sense of artistic duty, because I was first and foremost there to spend time with a rarely-assembled group of friends. But I still managed to squeeze in some learning, especially as regards preparing panels with various paints and sprays (thanks to Tourmaline Todd for suggesting I use silver spray paint for stars). I'm not normally a big Keller Williams fan (he's too glib for my tastes) but he put on a killer trance party that day. And Toubab Krewe jammed out on "Billie Jean." All was well in the world.

2009 07 03 Rothbury Festival (String Cheese Incident)
18x24 - canvas panel

This one was painted from the hill above The Odeum, Rothbury's main stage (capacity somewhere around 50,000 people?), where my friends and I squatted for the headliners each night right in front of the giant wicker-and-Christmas-lights Rothbury sign (each letter in the word was about eight feet tall...an excellent landmark, and right next to the water refill station). I can't express how difficult it was for me to make this...the first String Cheese Incident show I'd ever legitimately attended (if you don't count the time my girlfriend and I scaled the mountain behind Red Rocks to catch their last show in 2007 for free), and all I wanted to do was dance, my feet were dancing out from underneath me, I wanted to throw myself down the hill and into the heaving costumed flesh festival but I'd pre-sold this painting to some friends weeks before the festival and had to be responsible in the most inopportune moment. Somehow I think the tension helped with a graceful execution, and in person the silver spraypaint gives the whole piece a luminous quality, as if looking up through the waves to the rippling sunlight above. I'm happy with the results, but finally had to admit that calling my live art blog "Painting While Dancing" is a bit of a misnomer, because it was impossible for me to really get down and work on this at the same time. It was an evening of five minute breaks and intense yearning.

New Year's 2009 Week Paintings (Denver & Boulder)

Each painting is available in 11"x17" prints for $15 each.
(Email me - michaelgarfield at gmail dot com - if interested.)

18x24, available for sale - 2008 12 29 Cervantes (Everyone Orchestra, Eric McFadden Trio)
Experiment in pseudo-tesselating stars, hexagons, and diamonds; three variations on a bubbling fringe; suggestions of a hidden gold and white layer behind and between; broad hatches as background noise; an occasional eye; implying directionality in flow. At Everyone Orchestra conductor Matt Butler's suggestion, I got this one signed on back by half of the band (a first).


18x24, available for sale - 2008 12 30 Cervantes (Panjea, DNALand, Lynx & Janover)
Play with ribbons: creation of an "obstacle scape" through which to thread orbs while teaching myself about layering; precision trial in black outlining; attempted "curtain" effect with ambiguous implied-motion relationship between ribbons and orbs (Rising together? Falling together? Moving past one another?); use of simple color theory to suggest depth (blues behind reds to simulate "bluing" with distance).


18x24, reserved until February - 2008 12 31.1 Quixotes (Sporque, Vibesquad) (late show for the 30th)
One continuous field of hexagons (reiterated inside themselves) split into two "passing" schemes; an attempt at something more primordial and diagramatic (as if those two things go together). Purple lines in the blue sections half-create cubes, and half leave it looking like a cross-section. It reminds me of a microscopic view of pollen collected on some membrane, or maybe natural glass.


18x24, available for sale - 2008 12 31.2 Cervantes (Panjea, DNALand, Lynx & Janover)
Another study in curtains of helices and bubbles, this time more formally related. Hoping to follow the festive New Year's theme resulted in inadvertently and uncannily illustrating the purple ribbons hanging from balloons on stage (although they weren't released until after I'd started the painting...). People kept asking if I was painting the balloons. I guess I was.


18x24, available for sale - 2009 01 01 Crowne Plaza Hotel & Owsley's (Boombox, Everyone Orchestra, & Vince Herman) (late shows for the 31st)
Picked up from a monochrome tunnel pattern I started on this board but left in my trunk for a month, this one's awkwardly balanced between two and three dimensions (Are the minicubes inside the bigger ones, or attached to their faces? Are the bubbles emerging from the golden void within each cube, or resting on their golden lids? Are the cubes actually receding into the distance, or just getting smaller?). Ambiguity and liminality were kind of themes for the night, but I can't claim total intentionality.


18x24, reserved until February - 2009 01 02 Rock N Roll Grill (Project Aspect, Motion Montage, Jeff The Box)
I wanted the ribbons in this piece to obviously organize the orbs, sweeping them up into a coil rather than just interacting idly - not a caress, but a grab - thus the contrast between free-floating and "wrapped" elements. Hexagons give a "trellis" style backdrop, and I finally attempted some kind of patterning on the ribbon itself. Lots of silver outlining. The artists at this show are all local basement projects that merit your attention - I can easily see this same line-up selling out The Fox in a year, so take notice!


18x24, available for sale - 2009 01 03 The Fox Theatre (Bonobo, Big Gigantic, Future Simple Project)
Varying states of completion in two interlocking elements (the flowers and orb clusters) made for a quick background that still gives the sense of approaching/receding and various depths; "plants" and jellyfish in the foreground rooted the image in something recognizable and took the flow off the sides of the board. Simple foreground coloration didn't confound the already-intricate backdrop. Modularity was emphasized. After a year of people telling me I draw deep-sea stuff, this is the first one to put representational and nonrepresentational elements together in the same painting in a way that unequivocally shouts "aquarium!" Expect more stuff like this, probably integrated with the ribbons and helices, in the months to come.