New Paintings + Light & Shadow: Unplugged Across America

"The nature of infinity is this: That everything has its own vortex, and when once a traveler through Eternity has pass'd that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind his path, into a globe itself unfolding like a sun..."
- William Blake

• Light & Shadow: Unplugged Across America

My six-week, thirty city tour with journalist and film-maker Charles Shaw is well underway (full program & itinerary here)...and with all the time we're spending on America's scenic highways, I've decided to take some moments out to record a series of spontaneous unplugged music videos at a few of the most beautiful places we encounter. Here's the first in an ongoing series, delivered as-live-as-possible to all of you wondrous people at home:

(Be sure to watch it in HD – lyrics, info, & embed code are all on the video page)

You'll be able to download the music for all of these videos free here:
http://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/light-shadow

Want to spend more time exploring our beautiful travails? Check out my regularly-updated tour photo gallery and enjoy how I've abused the macro mode on my new tour camera!

Our next dates are in Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Invite your friends – it's going to be a profound few evenings of conversation and live music!

• New Paintings

Chandelier

2010 09 17 & 18 Granada & Mike's Westsider

(Sub Swara, Quixotic, Sagiquintarius, Mindzeye)

24"x30" - paint markers on masonite

email me for $25 11"x17" prints or to inquire about the original

Zoom in by clicking on the image, and you'll see the myriad tiny rainbows that glisten all over this piece...a further development of my attempts to render crystalline and glassy transparent forms with the limited medium of paint markers. Plenty of glossy goodness, but I made a minor mistake in perspective (email me if you can find it and I'll give you an electronic high-five). This painting is dedicated to my dear friends Tommy and Ruth Carter, at whose going away party (commemorating their move from Kansas City to live with me in Boulder) this was completed.

Temple Burn

2010 09 24 Hodi's Half Note

(Random Rab, D.V.S*, Untied Laces)

18"x24" - paint markers on masonite

email me for $25 11"x17" prints or to inquire about the original

When I got back from Burning Man Festival this year, Boulder's typically bold mountain skyline was shrouded by smoke from a huge forest fire. The Four Mile Canyon fire destroyed over 169 homes, including the new home of my friend Josh Davis and his pregnant star goddess. This was painted at a benefit concert for victims of the fire...I asked another friend of mine what symbol most well-represented the healing potential of this disaster, and she responded, "Don't some pine cones have to burn in order to release their seeds?" Yes, they do. And just like the memorializing Temple Burn every year at Black Rock City, the Four Mile Canyon fire was a sacrament offered up to serve the vision of a new life.

Juliana's Jaguar

2010 08, 09 Rootwire Festival & Studio

16"x20" - paint markers on masonite

email me for $25 11"x17" prints

This portrait of the Water Lily Jaguar is dedicated to my underworld-journeying friend Juliana Willars for her ongoing dedication to reconnaissance on the Other Side...as always with commissioned work I'm glad to have been challenged by the unusual subject, although giving my own touch to the traditional Mayan iconography was surprisingly difficult.

(You can check out some of my other contract pieces here...)

• Press

In related news (insofar as I have made it my career to educate people about their embeddedness in a living intelligence utterly beyond the scale of human drama)...

The lecture I posted last week, "Self As City, City As Self," was transcribed by a gracious friend and is now up online for reading at Reality Sandwich, an excellent change-focused community news site.

The lecture also got a shoutout in TheCoolTV's recent article, "Could Festivals Pave The Way To A More Advanced Society?" (My answer is, of course, "Yes!") And the soundtrack was just reviewed by the Denver Westword's Cory Casciato, who seems unusually susceptible to my music's psychedelic influence...

More new music, art, and assorted multimedia inspiration soon. In the meantime, thanks for reading and have a beautiful week!

Sonic Bloom, Ramble On The River, Field Guide To Live Artists

"The way you stretch the envelope of culture is by creating language...Culture cannot evolve any faster than its language, because what cannot be said cannot be done. What cannot be said cannot be put in place."

- Terence McKenna

I am so, so committed to language creation. McKenna imagined a post-verbal world where we all broadcast our intricate messages on our skin like octopi, "as though the project of communication becomes high-speed sculpture in a conceptual dimension made of light and intentionality." Others have pursued the same posthuman xenolinguistics in myriad interesting ways.

So let's take a low value for the exponent here and assume that a picture is worth merely a thousand words. I have no choice but to try a new approach: less rambling and more imagery. I want to show you where I've been painting...detailed close-ups...strange angles that show the diversity of sheens and textures in each piece. I want us to paint the skin of each other's minds with the living rippling of our heart's tongues, a bright and noisy quiet in intimate explosion, like chatty squid with a direct line to the Beloved. So here's to that.

But first, preening.

• Press

Just a couple of delightful recent snippets about my art and music culled from the infowebs that I am honored to share with you. I got a wonderful shout-out in one of the more thorough write-ups on this year's Wakarusa Festival:

"[Michael's] work is multi-dimensional ethereal reflection; like peering into a vortex. His channel to the divine is wide open and clear, much like Alex Grey, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he achieves the same kind of world-renowned respect and affection."

- Caeli La, Lost In Sound

Less hyperbolic but equally exciting, my latest (free) instrumental EP, Daylighting: Electronic Improvisations on Acoustic Guitar, was somehow picked up by one of Colorado's most highly-regarded reviewers:

"Don't jump to conclusions based on 'acoustic guitar improv'...this sounds more like some of the sonic explorations that came out of the Robert Fripp/Brian Eno collaborations than some hippie 'jamming' on an acoustic in a park somewhere. [It's] full of odd timbres and textures, but the occasional splash of melody erupts and there's a strange, sci-fi psycho-Western feel to a lot of it – let's just say if they'd ever done a psychedelic drug sequence on Firefly, this would have worked perfectly as the accompaniment. It's occasionally beautiful, frequently evocative and never less than interesting."

- Cory Casciato, Denver Westword

• Illustration

Stun Flower

2010 06 23, 25, 26 Ogden Theatre & Sonic Bloom

(Hamsa Lila, Tinariwen, David Starfire, Eminence Ensemble,

Michal Menert, Signal Path, Merton, Octopus Nebula, Bluetech,

Zilla, Big Gigantic, ill Gates, Project Aspect, The Acidophiles, Deru,

Rena Jones, Vibesquad, Lynx & Janover)

24"x24" – paint pens on masonite

• email me to inquire about or make offer for the original

• email me to order $20 poster prints (11"x17")

Dedicated to the work of Dan Winter, one hell of a physicist and the man whose research so emphasizes the phi rosette phase-conjugate love fields emanating from the heart of someone in love.

Click to enlarge and see the painting in various states of completion:

Detail of the flower's heart, as the galactic arms spiral inward to sweet completion:

I had the color-shifting LED flashlight aimed at this thing almost all weekend. People kept bringing their friends back to me to ask me to show them, too... No promises that I'll actually paint something with one of those lights in mind – one of those ten-in-one pictures that distributes various scenes across the spectrum, coming together in a weird cluster of superimposed notions under full white light – but I'm thinking about it.

UFO Jellyfish Gnosis

2010 06 26, 27, 30 & 07 03 Mishawaka Ampthitheatre

(EOTO, Eskmo, Karsh Kale, Sonic Bloom Orchestra, D.V.S*, Jantsen,

Future Simple Project, Heyoka, Beats Antique, Post Paradise,

Holden Young Trio, Futaba, Dave Watts, P'Nut Daniels, Michal Menert)

24"x24" – paint pens on masonite

• email me to inquire about or make offer for the original

• email me to order $20 poster prints (11"x17")

Yet another reason I want to share more angles on what I do is because I get to paint in beautiful places – like the riverside idyll that is The Mish:

This one, dedicated to my friend Brandon Watson for letting me steal the title from his religious views (and facebook group – population: 2), has all kinds of shininess going on. Mmm:

Gem Chains

2010 06 Studio Commission

16"x20" – paint pens on canvas panel

• email me to order $20 poster prints (11"x17")

As my live paintings have gotten larger in the last few months, the smaller end of things has opened up for more accessible custom work. That means modest canvas panels like the one above, and also hats, guitar cases, tattoo designs...I'm eager to get creative with venue as you and I all work together to think of cool places this could go.

And as increasingly the case, body painting figured hugely into my weekend at Sonic Bloom Festival. You can check out the gallery on my Facebook visual art page, here:

Body Painting @ Sonic Bloom Festival 2010

• Writing

Lastly (for now, with much cooking for the next newsletter), enjoy these two latest entries from my Field Guide To Live Artists at Examiner.com – an ongoing interview series with anyone and everyone who sets up their art studio at public events and works in front of an audience. This go, we have new interviews from two live painters active in the Denver scene...

Interview w/ Eliza Ross

Interview w/ Brian Holmes

If anyone you know is a live artist, invite them on board! The goal is to create the most comprehensive directory available, to give everyone free press and opportunities for cross-promotion, and ultimately to publish it all in a beautiful full-color coffee-table album. So join in!