Michael Garfield's Love Without End Tour Newsletter: collaboration
Showing posts with label collaboration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label collaboration. Show all posts

26 February 2019

Waterloo Festival Team Mural | Listening To Plants | Psychonautics | New Coloring Pages & Timelapse | Future Fossils Book Club

Okay, it's been too long. So much is happening and it's all just getting faster all the time (unless you're software). My partner and I are about to have a kid. We moved to Santa Fe. I work for these insane(ly) brilliant people now. I'm almost out of paintings, and I can't make them fast enough with all the other things I'm doing at the moment...

That said, here's tons of stuff, as usual. I'm always here if you write back, and hope the upgrades' going smoothly for you – meaning easily, which probably means a river-bending, highly corrugated kind of way, like brains (they're better at computing when they're dense, so take it as a compliment).

I love you all and feel a thing about this taking so damn long to make it to you. Anyway!


The Waterloo Music Festival Collaboration Mural


A painting made in the craziest environment, at the most complete and awesome festival installation I have ever proposed, with a team of artists I can't believe I mustered into such intense collaboration.

A giant piece – nine-plus feet wide and four high – that spilled over into months of meetings and late sessions, seven of us focusing on areas and balanced coverage, and arguing a lot, and learning...all the while the looming focus of my living room, for months, and detailed in this photojournal.

This piece is in a private collection in Austin, now, but we finally can make some prints for everyone who cheered us on through this foolishly ambitious project.  Thank you!

Artist Instagram Accounts:


New Music: Listening to Plants at Starseed Gardens



Recorded in maybe the most magical place I have ever been, late on a sweaty summer night, surrounded by an acres-wide nursery of medicine plants growing from the black earth of a dead volcano, a short walk from a giant ancient fig tree and a slightly longer walk from the easternmost point of the continent and white sharks. 

Starseed Gardens was a standout moment in my tour Down Under and a precious, moving place. This is the music that emerged in ritual there, a song to the intelligence around us. 

Performed on acoustic guitar and hardware electronic effects. 

In memory of Dan Schreiber. 


I'm In This Movie (Speaking & Music)


If you don't already know, Shane Mauss is one of the smartest comedians on the beat right now; he hosts Here We Are, a science interview podcast that's really cool; and he's been candid (on Duncan Trussell's show, as well as on Future Fossils Episode 58) about how his psychonautic adventures helped push him over the brink into a delusional mania and temporary institutionalization (although, I think he needs to emphasize that he also quit alcoholism stone cold at that time, which may have had some tiny thing to do with it). 

This is his documentary of those adventures, and I'm in it cross-cut with the legendary James Fadiman, talking about Richard Doyle's writing on human-plant co-evolution and its role in the emergence of language...I also have a music credit, and a handful of great queues throughout, along with awesome animations by Ramin Nazer and the most paradoxically sober reflection you could expect from a documentary about psychedelic self-experimentation.

But for many other reasons that will make sense in retrospect, I highly encourage you to preorder it. One of those reasons is to help it up the charts. (I don't get a cut; I just want this conversation on the front page.)


This New Time-Lapse Video with John David Ebert (Future Fossils #65)


These New Future Fossils Coloring Book Pages



Five new coloring book pages for a total of 25 so far. I add new ones as often as I can!


These New Podcast Episodes & Special Features

 
   
 

In addition to the six latest episodes of Future Fossils Podcast, which span the gamut from the most confessional and bizarre episodes I've ever released to the most professional and discrete, here are two special offerings – one public and one for Patreon supporters only. 

We've started Future Fossils Book Club with an awesome conversation on the even-more-awesome Blindsight by Peter Watts, a truly important and unsettling work. And I also compiled dozens of my favorite excerpts from the show's 2018 run to make The Sediment of Sentiments, a kind of meta-fossil for everybody to enjoy:


  


These Two Silly Interviews:


Voyage Dallas • Voyage Houston

Origin stories, if you're bored. Weirdly got asked to do the same interview by the same magazine in two different cities where I don't live, but hey. It was an opportunity to play. :)


This Isn't New, But Still:

Patreon supporters get 10-20% off all my prints and merchandise at michaelgarfieldart.com:

16 September 2018

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"


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

07 March 2013

Too Much Great New Stuff - But What Else Is New?

"We have to continue to learn. We have to be open. And we have to be ready to release our knowledge in order to come to a higher understanding of reality."

The waters are really flowing, these days, aren't they?  So much to catch up on, and so little time to share it or even read it.  Thank you for sharing your time with me so I can share with you.

(Full as it is, this newsletter came late so I'll send out another next week, on schedule – with new music, my talk and live painting from AURA Festival, and news on my amazingly great gigs this spring!  You can sneak a peek on my web calendar...anyone here into Papadosio or Stuart Davis?)

Let's start with some small, largely studio, paintings my friend Chaeli and I just conjured up.  This year has already fruited so many fantastic collaborations and there are even more to share real soon!

Lioness (Collab w/ Chaeli Cardenas)

This piece, like most of our work together, involves layer after layer of working over each other, literally filling in the missing pieces of each other's styles.  Chaeli has a way with cats, obviously – and her brushwork grew so naturally out of her way with pens.  Victory.

"Even though alone in a dark room, be as if you were facing a noble guest. Express your feelings, but become no more expressive than your true nature."
– Zengetsu (T'ang dynasty master)



Chibi Kirin (Collab w/ Chaeli Cardenas)

"The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware."
If You Are A Hat, I Will Tattoo You

Here are some of the pay-what-you-want personalized panels I've been painting for the people who tip me when they order my latest embroidered design with Grassroots California:


I still have some in most sizes – if you'd like one, here are some pretty pictures of the hat as well as how to order yours at less than retail price (plus whatever you might spend to customize it).

Meanwhile the painted hat game is going so well that I have to cut down on them to make time for everything else!  I apologize for limiting my availability but in order to work on my music I have to ask that you please only inquire about orders of $130 or greater.  If I haven't put you off, feel free to drop me a line with your ideas...




Somewhat more affordably, I made these hats below for my friends at The Headspace – they have a lot of great work from my friends on their site as well, so go browse around and be impressed if you've got a minute.  I believe some of these are still available even if they're not pictured on the website, so you might want to write them and ask...







Mind-Blowing Ideas

I have told many of you in person that I believe one of the main functions of art is to draw each other into inspired and inspiring conversation.  As I see it, I'm just one warp in the global fabric of the planetary bioplasm, exchanging quanta of selfhood with other/selves like how our Last Universal Common Ancestor was basically one giant genetic orgy without any true species boundaries.  Even today it's pretty hard to argue for the concrete reality or temporal continuity of the self with any scientific credibility.  

Now that I have just over 6200 (!) of you getting these emails (supreme gratitude!), I need to make sure I'm not just showing off but showing up and sharing some of my most profound inspirations.  SO:

• Thunderbolts of the Gods - a film about the Electric Universe Theory

This is the most important science link I have ever shared with you all.  Please, just find the time to watch it as soon as you can (if you haven't already).  Seriously.  There's an amazing stream of comments about this film in my the thread on my Facebook profile.  Please feel free to follow my profile and join in with your own science links, crazy space news, etc.

• Last and First Men - the most influential Sci Fi novel of all time

Written in 1930 by the British Olaf Stapledon, this visionary flyover of the next two billion years of human evolution prompted both Arthur C. Clarke to proclaim that, "No other book had a greater influence on my life," and H.P. Lovecraft to call it "the greatest in all the field" of science fiction.  His version of the distant future is uncanny, familiar, prescient:

Each of us is mentally a distinct individual, though his ordinary means of communication with others is 'telepathic.' But frequently he wakes up to be a group-mind. When this communal awakening occurs, each individual experiences all the bodies of the group as 'his own multiple body,' and perceives the world equally from all those bodies. But over and above this simple enlargement of the experienced field, is the awakening into new kinds of experience. Of this obviously, I can tell you nothing, save that it differs from the lowlier state more radically than the infant mind differs from the mind of the individual adult, and that it consists of insight into many unsuspected and previously inconceivable features of the familiar world of men and things.


...And that's it.  Thanks again for your precious time and attention.  May this newsletter serve all beings!  You know how to get ahold of me if you want to.

14 February 2013

MG Music on PBS! | Winning Skateboard | New Collab Painting | On The Road To AURA

"Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood."
– Henry Miller

"Some things, though right, were considered wrong for generations. Since the value of righteousness may be recognized after centuries, there is no need to crave an immediate appreciation."
– Zengetsu


Good advice for navigating an increasingly novel universe, don't you agree?  At any rate, here are my latest creative (or possibly not) offerings, for you to evaluate now and then again in a few hundred years:

MG music featured in KLRU's Arts in Context: Sky Candy

A milestone moment came for me last week when I watched the PBS documentary on my friends Austin aerial dance troupe Sky Candy and our show together last fall...and found my music woven into most of the 26-minute film.

I have film scoring fantasies, and am super honored that the producers at Arts In Context went with the music I offered them – which is now available to you for free, my first soundtrack, taken from four albums from the last two years:


You can watch the KLRU documentary at this link.  And do, because it rocks.  I have a few quick appearances on screen around 7:25 and 20:00, during rehearsal and performance for the amazing Land Without Evil.

Creation Skateboards Contest -- We Won!


Thanks to everyone's help, my entry into the Creation Skateboards skateboard design contest won with over 1,300 votes – the most "likes" I've ever gotten on anything, ever.  Y'all rock, I am so grateful for my frands!  This board will join the fall lineup and live forever alongside boards by some of my favorite visionary artists.

Creation Skateboards interviewed me about my inspiration for this painting and more:

This is a year for both more light and darkness, but that dragon has a buddha riding in its brow, and that’s the Master we each have in us that knows how to abide and ride this out. We all have many voices in our heads, many neural subroutines, but we can develop the Master self-pattern that organizes and integrates the rest. That’s the best way to make it through an age of crazy transitions…

Read the whole interview here and then cruise around their site, it's pretty cool.

HeARTs Aware Collaboration Painting
Like/Share/Comment on FB
painted live by 
Chaeli Cardenas, Chance Roberts, Molly Gardner, 
Michael Garfield, Randi Southard, Nathan Jones
(...did I leave anyone out?)
on 2012 February 9 - 10 at La Zona Rosa, Austin, TX
for HeARTs Aware, a benefit for The Amala Foundation

I don't know if I can say anything authoritative about what was essentially a transpersonal effort.  Live art collabs are a very special kind of special...some kind of greater vision emerges silently from the interaction of our partialities.  Our techniques complement one another, our rhythms playing across one another sometimes intimately.  This piece is just wow, for me.  Just...wow.  It's raw, because I told everyone to just leave it be after a weekend of attention.  Time for us to move on to the next more perfectly visioned landscape....

Nonetheless, we were all still itching to touch it up.  I had to remind my friends of our half a dozen other unfinished collaborations.  Get a hefty serving of integrity with your rainbow cat!



Playing, Painting, & Speaking at AURA This Weekend!

I'm excited about this.  Beautiful locale, fabulous musicians, world-class artists in the gallery.  Stretch your body and mind together while I play live music for yoga with Kelly Searcy...or download those yoga sets and listen later, because I record so many of my sets, after all.

There will be so much cool stuff going down in the Tribal Council dome alone, not to mention the rest of this event...really, truly, I hope I'll see you there.  Florida in February.

You Know, "Hats"

The latest custom numbers for adventurous heads:



A note on hats for the invested reader:  I'm honestly swamped with hat orders, so unless you want something ambitious and pricey, then I hope you're willing to wait.  It's a meditative, patient task, not exactly lucrative, more of a way to pray and play and practice and make money all at the same time while living in what my grandmother calls "holy poverty."  Which I enjoy...but it's not scalable – hence my renewed focus on licensing and merchandising.  If you have any ideas for how my art could be applied to something useful, let me know.  I'm open to and appreciative for your suggestions.

And with that, I must disappear into a smoke bomb to rest my fingers.  Love you.  Stay in touch if you want to.  And live amazed, because it's good for you, and all of us...