New Art Galore from Wakarusa, Desert Rocks, Impulse, & Sonic Bloom

First, A Message From The Future

Uploading yourself into a computer will NOT grant you immortality. There is no such thing as a stable medium. Servers crash, solar storms wipe hard drives and knock out satellites, and noisy electronic infrastructure degrades any signal over time.

Even if a million copies of yourself proliferate into the "un-erase-able" personal version of a viral youtube video, they won't remain static, unchanging objects, but will probably – and very swiftly – decide that their body memories are no longer relevant in the digital environment, and transform into something unrecognizable as "you."

The acceleration is just that: a quickening of the change that characterizes reality. The faster our world changes, the faster WE change. Our religious conviction about persistent identity is getting lost in the wash. "Shapeshifter" is the new "human." Immortality requires that we die to ourselves – not just once, but over, and over, and over...

Our age is when Science-as-exploration-of-transcendent-mystery and Religion-as-meaning-making-in-a-complex-world approach and kiss one another at the asymptote. Paradigms become transparently provisional. Self-concepts become art-forms offered hypothetically into the blossoming ecology of mind – worn like clothes, and changed just as easily.

Visit my facebook profile to read and join in the inspired group discussion this riff provoked...

Next, Help Yourself To Some Free Tunes!

Download at Noisetrade (192 kbps mp3) or Bandcamp (most audio formats)

I'm supremely grateful to be able to live by people's support of my art and music, but it's only really just started to happen.  My coyote heart is still animated by the spirit of street musicians and festival renegade sets, and I still get excited by handing off demos to artists I admire...

To that end, I created this compilation of my favorite concert recordings from the last twelve months.  I needed a "get to know you" mix to share with new friends and colleagues, so here it is:  forty-three minutes of the shimmering, fleet, and organic murmurations that have come to characterize my sound as an improvisational acoustic-electronic looping guitarist.

It won't be long before I drop the follow-up to Golden Hour: A Cyberacoustic Summer Daydream – recordings culled from all of the amazing festival sets I've played this year – but in the meantime, enjoy!

And Now, The Paintings

I am pleased and honored to share with you the fruits of my busiest June so far.  I have so much more to share from this summer – videos, musical recordings, new essays – but for now it can wait, so we can give these paintings their due.  I decided to focus on only one piece per festival this summer, and the extra time investment really shows.  Click on any picture for a closer look...

(In addition to my poster prints, I've decided to start making new pieces available as skins and cases in my Artsprojekt design shop to glam out everyone's proliferating electronic toy-scape – I make about 10% on each sale, which is small but worth it.  If you have some contraption-plus-artwork combo idea you don't see available, let me know and I'll be happy to post it for you.)

I Know It Means Something...

(Kingfisher & Code)

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40"x30", paint markers on stretched canvas

Original painting available (email for price)

11"x17" poster prints – $20 or 2 for $30 (+ $5 s/h) – email me

Decals: iPhone 4/4S Skin | iPad 3 Skin | Laptop Skin (most sizes)

Painted live at Wakarusa Festival 2012 during:

Bob Weir Acoustic Trio, Pretty Lights, Monophonics, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, The Avett Brothers, Umphrey's McGee, Primus, Big Gigantic, Toubab Krewe, Tinariwen, Matisyahu, EOTO, The Floozies

"Words can be communicative only between those who share similar experiences."

– Alan Watts

"Love and courtship call forth poetry and song because of the importance of ambiguity as well as communication in creating a relationship."

– Rich Doyle (amazing interview link)

Petroglyphs

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40"x30", paint markers on stretched canvas

Original painting available (email for price)

11"x17" poster prints – $20 or 2 for $30 (+ $5 s/h) – email me

Decals: iPhone 4/4S Skin | iPad 3 Skin | Laptop Skin (most sizes)

Painted live at Desert Rocks Festival 2012 during:

Bird of Prey, SORNE, Phadroid, Octopus Nebula, Beats Antique, Lucent Dossier, The Wailers, Hot Buttered Rum

"A thing, until it is everything, is noise, and once it is everything it is silence."

– Antonio Porchia

"A billion stars go spinning through the night,

Blazing high above your head.

But in you is the presence that

Will be, when all the stars are dead."

– Ranier Maria Rilke 

Biomechanical Tide

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36"x24", paint markers on stretched canvas

Original painting available (email for price)

11"x17" poster prints – $20 or 2 for $30 (+ $5 s/h) – email me

Decals: iPhone 4/4S Skin | iPad 3 Skin | Laptop Skin (most sizes)

Painted live at Impulse Festival 2012 during:

Govinda, Boombox, Papadosio, Zoogma, Minnesota, Emancipator, EOTO

"Most microscopists have a streak of artist in them. It's hard not to. You're looking at things through a microscope that most people don't see. The nascent artist in you sort of peeks its head up."

– James Hayden (cool NYTimes article link)

"Let the mind be enlarged...to the grandeur of the mysteries, and not the mysteries contracted to the narrowness of the mind."
– Francis Bacon

Going Backward To Go Forward

(As Awesome As Three Unicorns)

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36"x24", paint markers on stretched canvas

Original painting sold to the father of a four year old dino-maniac

11"x17" poster prints – $20 or 2 for $30 (+ $5 s/h) – email me

Decals: iPhone 4/4S Skin | >iPad 3 Skin | Laptop Skin (most sizes)

Painted live at Sonic Bloom Festival 2012 during:

ESKMO, Papadosio, Ana Sia, PANTyRAID, Zilla, Emancipator, ProJect Aspect, Tipper (uptempo), Octopus Nebula, Ilya From Russia, Tipper (downtempo), Phadroid, Sonic Bloom Orchestra, EOTO

"Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock."

– Ben Hecht

“At last I look to the moon; it hangs fixed and full in the east, enormously scrubbed and simple. It must have been a wonderful sight from there, when the olive continents cracked and spread, and the white ice rolled down and up like a window blind.”

– Annie Dillard (great author website)

"No human thing is of serious importance."

– Plato

Upcoming Gigs

It's great to get a little downtime, but this summer's not over yet!  I'll be playing music and painting live at all of these lovely events, as well as more intimate shows in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, Indiana, and more soon to be announced.  You can find the complete calendar on my website and on facebook, updated every few days...

Thank you so much for your time, interest, and ongoing support.  Have a magnificent day!

My First Painted Skateboard, Festival Photos, and What Inspires Me

"The truth, from my perspective, is that the world, indeed, is ending – and is also being reborn.  It's been doing that all day, every day, forever.  Each time we exhale, the world ends; when we inhale, there can be, if we allow it, rebirth and spiritual renewal.  It all transpires inside of us.  In our consciousness, in our hearts.  All the time."

- Tom Robbins

So!  Craziest summer of our lives so far?  I'm only twenty-eight but this year's cross between the energies of 1929 and 1969 has me singing the changes; regardless of what futures you imagine are on their way, everyone I talk to is feeling a massive shift in our understanding of social norms, relationships, and personal beliefs at the same time that rapid technological changes are reshaping our very definition of "human."  What a perfect time to be on tour working to inspire everyone to ground themselves in loving participation through these transformations!

On that note, my intense schedule has kept me from posting all of the new art and music as quickly as I'd like, but here are my photographs from Wakarusa, Desert Rocks, and Impulse Festivals over the last few weeks.  I'll continue to add to this album as the summer continues – for now this is the best way to get behind my eyes and see festival season as I do (minus the rain- and dust-storms).  Enjoy!

View the entire album on FB

Oh, and I painted a skateboard!  Picked up a couple of blank decks in Wichita during my move to Austin last fall, and this is the first of them – dedicated to my awesome skateboarding brother John Garfield, who wows all with his legendary skillz.  Click the pictures for a closer view:

 

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Yes, it's for sale.  I'm not sure for how much but if you want it, drop me a line.  This is a concept piece, not meant for skating – but the hope is that I can show this to a skateboard company and convince them to collaborate on something.  (Know anybody who'd be into that?)

On Creativity, Evolution, & Inspiration at SXSW:

Riffing at the New Basics Poetry Series

Watch on Youtube

For anyone who wonders what inspires me – or wants to see me at my jazziest, my friends at New Basics Poetry in Austin set up this cool speaking opportunity on their bus (aka guerrilla venue) downtown during South By Southwest.  I winged this forty-five minute talk about creativity, evolution, aliens – oh yeah, and my work – with musical accompaniment by my favorite cyberguitar recordings.  It's a DIY multimedia philosophy performance, as lively and spark-throwing as I could make it.

Upcoming Gigs

I'll be playing cyberacoustic guitar improvisations (folktronic prayerformances honoring the sacredness of each here and now) as well as making live art at all of these amazing events this summer.  These are just the festivals, though – I have more dates all over the country on my full calendar, here on facebook and here on my website.  Hope to see you out there!

- "A Million Anniversaries," My Sleek New CyberAcoustic Guitar LP -

"Fortunately, most people still believe in love, and love, after all, is God's secret name.

The inevitable consequence of love is the building of temples."

– Alex Grey

“When we win it’s with small things, and the triumph itself makes us small. If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm, we would become strong too, and not need names.”

– Rainier Maria Rilke

This spring, I was blessed enough to perform my evolving "cyberacoustic" guitar music for audiences across Colorado, Texas, Oregon, Arkansas, and New Mexico. These improvised instrumental pieces soaked up the energies of each location – places with history and holiness that I can't even describe, except through music. From the sacred deserts of the Southwest to the rain forests of the Northwest...playing along with aerial fabric dancers in Denver and to dinosaur skeletons in Dallas...I gathered the most evocative and inspiring numbers into a new double-disc LP that takes my experiments in acoustic-electronic integration to a whole new level.

An all-terrain album if there ever were one, A Million Anniversaries: CyberAcoustic Guitar for Lovemaking journeys through anthemic electro-grooves into hypnotic tribal ambience, cinematic instrumental rock and tender romantic interludes. It's a testament to the orchestra hidden in an acoustic guitar, pushing the envelope of this traditional instrument into an age of digital angels and mycelial technology – and after months of preparation it's finally available:

A Million Anniversaries: CyberAcoustic Guitar for Lovemaking

The entire ninety-four minute, two-disc album (along with liner notes and exclusive high-resolution fractal zoom poster art) is yours for supporting my tireless tour schedule with your donations.

I'm also offering six of my favorite tracks together as a free EP for people who dig this music but can't purchase the whole album...just head over to the download page and turn yourself on to the freshest, deepest, grooviest, most intelligent music I have to offer!

Please blog about this, share it on Facebook and Twitter, and turn on your friends in the live music scene. Word of mouth is really important and anything you do to spread the word about this work makes an incalculable difference. Playing for you is my passion and I deeply appreciate your support!

Beyond the music itself, this album is a milestone in another important way: it marks my first physical release and a new style of hybrid freehand/digital illustration. The music is free when you buy a package of the ayahuasca-inspired fractal zoom stickers I designed while on retreat at Shimbre Shamanic Center with Papadosio & Kurt Redeker back in March:

A Million Anniversaries stickers!

Two each of all three fractal zoom designs

3.5" across, printed on die-cut glossy sticker paper

$15 for the set - free shipping & digital download of A Million Anniversaries with purchase

The first video showing how I layer all of these tracks live is now online – a romantic clip from The Manifestation Celebration with Alex & Allyson Grey, The Nadis Warriors, Govinda, Phutureprimitive, D.V.S*, and many other amazing talents at the Dallas Natural History Museum (!):

Watch it in full HD!

"Extinct" is one of the six free tracks from A Million Anniversaries. Go grab it and join the celebration – the new era of cybernetic instrumental folk music is here!

For anyone curious to learn more about the story behind this new work, Matthew Warnock of Guitar International Magazine recently interviewed me about making a career out of improvisation:

GI: Improvising that much on an album seems to offer up a lot of freedom...but there is also a lot of other pressure due to the fact that no one, including you, knows what’s coming next. Do you think that this is why more artists don’t attempt this sort of thing, that they’ve weighed the options and the risks outweigh the rewards?

MG: I think it’s a more common thing these days. I’m basically following the lead of live electronic acts like EOTO, who are very vocal in their publicity about how they improvise everything. On the other hand, you find out very quickly the result is that you end up flying in small tight circles, improvising similar patterns over and over, precisely because you don’t want to explode in flaming wreckage by taking it too far out of your zone. At some point I started wondering just how adventurous it really is, if you’re not writing anything but you’re not really putting yourself out on a limb, either.

(Read the whole interview here.)

...And while we're on the topic of interviews, I just published a fabulously far-ranging interview with Shannon Clay of Evergreen State College on SolPurpose.com. It's my most articulate attempt yet to explain how I see art & science as two wings on the same bird, and to offer a unifying paradigm in which everything can be seen as both art & science:

SC: What are the benefits of reconnecting the two and how can we combine them? Talk about how we can do this in the scientific world…a lot of people in academia are very sincere about keeping science and the metaphysical separate.

MG: It’s like having two separate personae and you can’t show your friends one, and you can’t show your parents the other. You know you’re both, but those two lives can’t meet. It’s an awful place to be. Science and art are interwoven so profoundly that to speak of them as NEEDING to be bridged belies a horrible rift in the modern mind. [We are] getting to a place where there isn’t “a dialogue between art and science,” but rather both are recognized as specific strategies that we may choose to adopt in order to frame our experience in a particular fashion appropriate to the place and time.

It’s not about building a bridge between art and science, any more than we can build a bridge between your left and right arm. That’s ridiculous. It’s about recognizing the larger context in which both of these methodologies emerge to answer specific needs in human culture and psychology. It’s about moving into an “integral” perspective, within which all of our various methods of inquiry – art and science being only two of many – precipitate as adaptive responses.

(Read the whole interview here.)

Last but not least, I just edited the HD video I took of our amazing live art team at Wakarusa Festival. I am so incredibly proud of everyone involved and look forward to doing it again in just a few days at Sonic Bloom!

(If you happen to be in Colorado this weekend, you'd be silly to miss this one – in addition to 78 of the world's finest electronic acts on three stages, workshops, aerial and fire dancers, and gorgeous installations, I'm also coordinating an eleven-person live painting team and our new Unified Field Gallery in Grassroots California's 30-foot dome! More info here.)

Watch it in full HD!

Next Week: tasty new custom fedoras, another live music video from A Million Anniversaries, and the recording of my talk at The Manifestation Celebration on "Evolution, Astrology, & The Science of 2012"...

- 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!

...in which I organize a benefit for Sasha Shulgin, paint with Alex Grey, talk to NASA, and rock the Nelson Ledges

"We are all completely dependent on everyone else. The point is to live freely, in the present, freely giving and freely taking, which is the way of nature. The idea is to give up control of credit and debt, and just trust the cycle of nature."

- David Suelo

"We have been hypnotized into this scarcity-based thinking. At every corner of our society, there is a conversation revolving around how much there is not enough to go around. If you can, not in a cheesy and unauthentic way, but in a truly heartfelt way embrace the world, and engage the world with that faith, and that conviction of the ultimate abundance of life, you will change the world. You will, and you will not be trying to change it, and you'll be having fun."

- John Marshall Roberts

Hi everyone. ♥ I am still love-drunk from organizing Wakarusa Festival's first-ever Live Art Team & Gallery, but it'll be a little while before I can get all of that online. Besides, there's still a lot to catch up on! Firstly, and most proudly, I coordinated this:

L.A.B. Tracks: A Benefit Compilation For Sasha Shulgin

In Partnership With MAPS, Reality Sandwich, SSDP, & The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors...

Alexander "Sasha" Shulgin is probably the most important chemist alive. In addition to rediscovering MDMA and popularizing its therapeutic use, he also synthesized hundreds of new psychoactive chemicals and – with his wife and companion Ann – chronicled their effects in the extraordinary detail of two legendary volumes, PIKHAL & TIKHAL.

At the age of 85, Sasha recently suffered a stroke and now requires full-time medical care. This benefit compilation is the response from an international network of musicians whose work and lives have been enriched and inspired by the work of these two pioneers and their courageous exploration of nonordinary consciousness.

The L.A.B., or "Large Animal Bioassay," was the pet name given to visionary chemist Sasha Shulgin's small group of friend-volunteers who spent years exploring the effects of his newly-discovered molecules on their consciousness. This heroic team of psychonauts were the first to experience hundreds of novel states of consciousness, and it is in their honor that we name this compilation of eclectic tracks.

Just as their own journeys took them into realms of both the profound and profane, pleasure and anxiety, these two hours of music – spread over two discs, one danceable and one ambient – are the perfect accompaniment for an adventure to the human mind's furthest horizons...

Support the Shulgins in their hour of need by purchasing this epic 27-track album for at least $5!

"Can't Shut Us Down" by McDonough, Garfield, Uzzardi

Watch this in full HD - Download this track for free

A couple of weeks ago Jeremy McDonough, Renee Uzzardi, and I burned across country from Denver to eastern Ohio to play at the legendary Nelson Ledges Quarry Park. We rocked the festival's closing set, facing an enormous lake made from a filled-in forest gravel quarry...beautiful red pebbles everywhere, bats flying around, the woods full of revelers... Visuals provided by my nearly completed painting (see below) and Jeremy's glow-in-the-dark laser-reactive shirt. This improvised number was the festival's final moment.

Simmer on that for a while until I'm done readying the next album of acoustic-electronic guitar loops...

River To The Source

2011 04 29, 30 Cervantes (Nadis Warriors, Octopus Nebula, ESKMO)

2011 05 20, 21 Nelson Ledges Quarry Park

(Elemental Groove Theory, Boogie Matrix Mechanism, UV Hippo, The Werks, Broccoli Samurai)

2011 05 22 The Church (Jazzam)

32"x24" - opaque pens on masonite

signed 11"x17" poster prints - $20 or two for $30 (plus $5 s/h)

(click to view in hi-res)

Well, I'm in it. You are too. I'm not always proposing we view time as linear and goal-oriented, but even in an endless field there are divots - in an endless ocean there are whirlpools - and we are rolling into one. And as we whip around the margin of this strange attractor, the feeling of inevitably increases, but it's important to remember that there's no such thing as capital The capital End...

I started this piece at the Denver Alex & Allyson Grey shows in April, but was so busy body painting that weekend I had to wait around until my trip to Ohio and Pennsylvania to complete it. The final touches were laid on during an overnight in Pittsburg when my bandmate, lunatic keyboardist Jeremy McDonough, lost his keys after a reunion gig with his old band Jazzam back home. (Turns out the keys accidentally made it home with someone else in order that the universe might keep him around an extra night with his friends. Sneaky freakin' universe!)

While at the Nelson Ledges (and big thanks to The Werks for throwing that one and inviting us!), I managed to body paint a few people...it turned out pretty well. Check out pictures in my ongoing gallery:

Body Art @ Mayflowers Springdance Festival 2011!

Also, lastly – until next week, when I'll share all of the awesomeness that came out of our art team's work at Wakarusa – here's a video made by NASA, interviewing me at Yuri's Night 2010 at Moffett Air Force Base during one of the more unlikely concerts I've ever painted. To this day, I'm still the only person ever allowed to paint in an Air Force hanger. I had just driven nineteen straight hours to make it there on time to set up and then painted for twelve straight hours, so please excuse my rambling for being slightly more incoherent than ordinary. This might be the most honest NASA video you ever see:

More soon, with love.

Wakarusa Festival = Art Explosion!

First the "bad" news: Editing this next timelapse video from my Whole Earth Festival painting is taking longer than I thought. I have abhorrently high standards and want it to be at least as good as the last multimedia blitzkrieg, so thanks for your patience as I work to make it (and my new live album of cyberballadry from the spring Love Without End Tour) as awesome as possible. Can't rush the kiln...

Now, the "good" news: My second year as Wakarusa Festival's resident live painter was a spectacle of awesomeness and here's the proof: one new concert poster; three new live paintings; and my sweetest gallery of body art so far (including some pics of my first foray into live body painting on stage with the Nadis Warriors)...

• Imagery (full gallery & price list here)

Click the images for a better view...

Interstellar Meltdown 2010 Poster

2010 05 21, 22 & 06 01 Art Party!, Evolution Party, & Studio

(Stardust Output & many other Arkansas sound wizards)

16"x20" - paint markers on canvas panel

series of 100 - some poster prints still available

It only seemed appropriate that this painting, which started live at some deliciously underground Arkansas art parties, end up rep'ing the now-in-Arkansas Wakarusa Festival and its quasi-guerrilla party-within-a-party, Interstellar Meltdown. I dedicate it to Johnny Gallup and Jason Sterling, who are responsible for the still-burning flame of electronic music in Lawrence KS and Fayetteville AR, respectively – and without whom I would probably still be sending unrequited emails to Wakarusa's mainstage production team.

Time Spiral

2010 06 03 Wakarusa Festival
(Somasphere, The Heavy Pets, Earl Greyhound,
Resident Anti-Hero, Lotus, Kraak & Smaak, Mimosa)
24"x36" - paint markers on masonite
original painting, poster prints, and full-size giclees available

Don't tell anyone who thinks I'm cool that I named this painting after a Magic: The Gathering card. One of my friends remarked that he sees several of my previous paintings in this one – that it "transcends and includes" my prior work, enveloping it into a new and higher order. Well, alright! Subsuming the old by putting it to work in richer and more intricate structures is "what I'm all about."

Other people pointed out it looks like a top-down view of everyone's favorite medicinal angiosperm. What can I say? Good ideas like the logarithmic spiral show up everywhere.

This painting is dedicated to Richard J. Bird, ex-president of The Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology & The Life Sciences, and author of one of my favorite books.

Reverence

2010 06 04, 05, 06 Wakarusa Festival
(Spoonfed Tribe, Big Gigantic, Future Rock, EOTO, Sub Swara,
Nadis Warriors, BoomBox, Two Fresh DJ set)
24"x36" - paint markers on stretched canvas
original painting, poster prints, and full-size giclees available

I found an old canvas at Goodwill last year, painted with a crude mountainscape that its original owner clearly didn't care much for. This is the best way to pick up cheap canvases that I've found so far – FYI to all you other thrifty artists. Not quite painting on driftwood, but equally attentive to reclamation and re-use. The canvas sat in a closet until I had a gig epic enough to warrant something of this size, so here we are.

SOOOOO much gold on this one – perhaps due to the intense shininess of working inside the Outpost Stage's ludicrous lightshow of a tent. The last night of the festival, working at the unofficial stage set up on the vending avenue, the waning crescent rose behind the painting and begged for inclusion. This one is dedicated to Polly Babcock, whose finger pointed to that moon, and who gave me the most awesome little piece of hematite (which has been riding around in my pocket ever since).

That's What's Up

2010 06 05 Wakarusa Festival
(BoomBox, James Zabiela, Dub Tribe Soundsystem,
Ott, Mark Farina, Bluetech)
16"x20" - paint markers on canvas panel
poster prints and full-size giclees available

A tiny custom piece for a friend of mine...it oscillates between wings, hands, and whales, in that order (a personal perception confirmed by strangers, which is always equal parts cool and weird). Named by a random fellow near dawn; when it comes to nomenclature, I frequently go with fun suggestions. This one's dedicated to Nikita Kern, whom I suspect is an alien from the same planet I am.

Wakarusa 2010 Body Art Gallery @ Facebook

• Upcoming (full calendar here)

Click event titles for more info...

• Sonic Bloom Festival – 25, 26, 27 June 2010

Mishawaka Amphitheatre – Bellvue, CO

I'm reprising my live art residency at Colorado's premier electronic music festival, presented by unified-field-theory-preachin', hammer-dulcimer-shreddin' mad genius Jamie Janover. This year, I'll be painting alongside visionary art legends Robert Venosa & Martina Hoffmann, who on their own are worth the price of the ticket.

• Ramble on the River Festival – 3 July 2010

Mishawaka Amphitheatre – Bellvue, CO

I'll be playing an afternoon set of my unique cyberacoustic balladry before painting for a full day and night of amazing music from the likes of Whitewater Ramble, Holden Young Trio, and many other Colorado legends including members of The Motet and the Kyle Hollingsworth Band...fifty cents of every ticket sold go to support the Larimer County Food Bank.

• Mile-High Meltdown v.2 – 7 July 2010

Cervantes Masterpiece Ballroom – Denver, CO

Another guaranteed rage-a-thon with my homies in Denver's Mile High Sound Movement, at which I'll be dropping improvised cyberacoustic setbreaks and rocking easel in rapid succession all night. Come on out if you want a taste of some of the finest emerging electronic music and hip-hop in the Denver scene...

• Convergence: Painting With Music – ongoing through 28 August 2010

Arvada Center – Arvada, CO

An amazing ongoing exhibit from both locally- and nationally-renowned performance painters, organized by movement leader Scramble Campbell – to my knowledge, the first of its kind in the United States. This exhibit is paired with a retrospective on the late great Denny Dent, who with multiple brushes in each hand showed us all what it means to paint as a performance. If you're in Colorado at all this summer, don't miss this free exhibit!

I'm headed down to New Mexico this weekend to play, paint, and sermonize at a summer solstice party at one of the most beautiful, sacred places I've ever seen, so plenty more soon. In the meantime...love you all, stay in touch, and have a beautiful day!