Angels, Dragons, & My Live Painting From AURA 2013

"It is high time to ask whether it is really any scandal, any deplorable inconsistency,
for a human being to be both angel and animal with equal devotion."

– Alan Watts

Seraphim

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Painted with opaque markers on 24"x36" stretched canvas at:

2013 02 15, 16, 17 AURA Festival at Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park

(Consider The Source, Break Science, Kung Fu, Perpetual Groove, 

Greenhouse Lounge, Papadosio x2, Infinite Geometry)

02 23 Cirque de L'Amour at Austin Music Hall (Vibesquad, Quixotic, Tipper)

02 28 The Parish (The Digital Connection, ONE4ALL, Chris B.)

03 01, 02 Head For The Hills at Quiet Valley Ranch (Eliot Lipp, A Live One)

Click below to check out the whole process of this piece:

How many different animals can you see in this painting?  I obviously meant to put snakes in there, but was surprised to find forms that remind me of an owl, an octopus, and a tiger (or crocodile)...and someone surprised me with "elephant," as well.

The chimeric nature of this piece makes sense, since it's a remix of several of my earlier paintings.  There are many different visual references to my other work collected here and alloyed, sublimated.  Taken together you can see my work as a kind of evolutionary progression – not a linear march but a melody, returning time and again to weave through certain themes...

Painting is a process of discovery for me, a kind of intuitive listening, and this painting connected more dots for me than most – namely, the relationship between angels and dragons.  The Old Testament word for the highest angels, "seraphim," literally means "the burning ones," and is used throughout the Bible as a synonym for "snakes."  Flaming snakes with wings?  Gosh, that sounds familiar...

I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me – even after years of savoring the connection between "Archangel Michael & The Serpent" and "St. George & The Dragon" (and "Lord Garuda & The Naga," further East...birds versus snakes, world round).  The snake – which as many of you know shows up in the yogic traditions as a symbol for the wriggling, electric life force called "kundalini," sprouts wings when our animal nature reaches its crescendo and sprouts from the crown of the head, fully integrated with subtler, perceptibly "feathery" celestial energies.

Following that rabbit down (or up?) its hole, I remembered that to the Chinese, the dragon is an occulted natural force, a terrible mystery that reveals itself through what insurance companies call "Acts of God" – lightning, wildfires, and floods.  In other words, the dragon appears worldwide as a kind of mythological shorthand for the terribly transcendent, especially in what author Erik Davis calls "the electromagnetic imaginary" – our collective mystical experience of electricity and magnetism, whose awesome power has captured social imagination for thousands of years.

In a blog post describing his vision of the coming alchemical, musical paradigm he believes will replace materialism, cultural historian and former MIT professor William Irwin Thompson draws a straight line through angels, aliens, and electromagnetism:

"Since [our experience of] space would no longer be empty and separating, space itself would be a plenum of vibrating streams of energy that in the medieval lore of the Jewish Zohar in Spain and of the Muslim Sufis in Andalusia were known as angels. At the end of industrial civilization, through the popularity of science fiction, these beings were often re-presented as high-tech extra-terrestrials."

In other words, aliens = electricity = dragons = angels.  Chew on that for a minute.

(Then watch this documentary, Thunderbolts of the Gods, which argues that enormous electrical storms in space were responsible for much of our ancient mythos...)

It's no wonder that all of these things captivate me, and so many other people.  Whatever else they are, angels and dragons and aliens (as well as flames and lightning, the concrete natural phenomena in which these symbols are experientially anchored) are all wrapped up in one big ball of myth together, implicated as the various faces of the transcendentally Big-Loud-And-Scary.  Their popularity persists because they help us discuss the Mysterium Tremendum – that truth greater than our own, before which we quake as children...

Speaking of which:

Definitive New Live Recordings

Listen/Download

Definitive live recordings of nine incendiary guitar tapping etudes and space-hued transpersonal love songs, performed to an intimate listening room audience at Flipnotics in Austin, TX, 30 January 2013. 

A return from improvised electronic guitar work to my roots as an instrumental composer and singer-songwriter, this album features my "nice guitar," a 2001 Martin D35, and its new LR Baggs Anthem amplification system - the first pickup capable of reproducing the gorgeous tone of this instrument.

Seriously, these songs have never sounded this good.

You can get the album free for buying a print of the cover painting.  It's $3.33 or more if you just want clear, brilliant live recordings of my most dazzling solo guitar work, without the art.  (And if you like my music but not enough to support it, here are some decent live recordings you can have for free.)

"Michael Garfield has some absolutely amazing chops...
the musicianship on this album is truly wonderful."

- Marquee Magazine (on Alive With You, 2010)

"Esoteric and intricate, I found myself struggling to describe his sound and style...
some surprisingly pleasurable heartbreak."

- Mousike Magazine (on Double-Edged Sword, 2008)

(More reviews here if you need convincing.)

That's all for now.  Thank you for reading!  In the next update I'll share pics of my Barton Springs Salamander painting!  I'm super excited to show you that – but in the meantime be well and have a beautiful day!

Helices, Spraypaint, & Custom Shirts

> Imagery

(You can get a better look at each painting - and all of my previous work - at myspace.com/michaelgarfield or my Visionary Art Gallery at Photobucket.)

available - 2009 02 28 & 03 01, 08 Grizzly Room & Sail Inn (A Meaning To Memorize, Indigo Children & The Noodles) - 16x24

This one happened in two very different places. I worked on the first layer of clear hexagonal plates at the same bumping house concert I mentioned in my last newsletter, and the second layer of tentacles at an outdoor Grateful Dead Tribute down by the canal. The two extra layers of spraypaint between and after the other layers were the result of me sitting at home looking at this bizarre painting for minutes at a time, trying to figure out how to give it more depth. The three different types of embellishments on the tentacles adds an extra veneer of weird, since they must not all be coming from the same thing...and are those eyes all over them? Plants have gotten in the habit of growing down for me, recently. Even ferns, apparently.

available - 2009 03 06 & 07 Mondrian Hotel & The Firehouse (Pere La Chaise & Leaf) - 16x24

I love my new gig at the Mondrian Hotel in Scottsdale. It's outdoors, for one - and I set up my easel along a low white wall next to a beautiful flowery tree and the back gate of the building, which opens to a deep, wide lawn way off the street. And it's "Pere La Chaise" themed (that's the French graveyard where Jim Morrison is buried), so that means 1960's bohemia. I'm there as a performer, and it feels more like an acting gig than the more familiar pseudo- lighting/video vibe. I feel like I'm getting away with something criminally good - like I'm getting paid to pretend to be an artist?

available - 2009 03 11 Rogue Bar (Michna, Eliot Lipp, Jared Alan, Living Humans Being) - 16x24

This would have been a packed house in Boulder, but here in Arizona it was an audience of about sixty people in an almost impossible-to-find (but charming) dive bar duplexed with a liquor store, parking lot capacity = eight cars. Eliot Lipp was great as always, but I was really pleased to hear the other acts, especially Jared Alan and Living Humans Being who are local talent and really worthy. This show was put on by Thru The Wires, which is just about the most passionate garage-production company I've ever met. And the painting: I decided to lay down a field of spraypaint stars first, which tipped my whole endeavor toward what feels to me like a Phil Dick vibe (he wrote VALIS and Radio Free Albemuth after an extended and vivid communication with some transcendent space intelligence). Quite satisfied with the pink and blue part, which reminds me of oceanic jasper.

available - 2009 03 13 Mondrian Hotel (Pere LaChaise) - 16x24

Hard to tell from this picture, but the background is entirely filled with a field of the Flower of Life, gloss black on matte black, and it was from that matrix that I extracted patterns for the rest of the piece. Kris D and Krystle Smith do something similar with their paintings, but Kris lays it out in advance and Krystle often throws the grid on top. Both of them use measuring tools to do this - but I enjoy the challenge of trying to freehand ideal geometries, and I'm more fascinated by the irregularities that I have to build into each subsequent layer. The whole theme here is biological form arising from the Logos, or quantum plenum, or whatever you want to call it: the hidden order that shapes "the world of ten thousand things." Consequently it should come as no surprise that while working on this, I got into an extended conversation with a math student from Carnegie Mellon about whether mathematics are eternal archetypes or created by the human mind... :)

taken - 2009 03 13 (Sonoma Ladies' Medium)

My first custom order, filled. I'm so happy to be doing something people can wear. Paintings are wonderful on a wall but art means something totally different when it's carried around on your person. I consider custom designs like this a consecration practice, blessing the body.

available - 2009 03 14 Mondrian Hotel 1 (Merona Men's Small)

The creative director at Pere La Chaise wanted me to try painting on other things beside masonite, so last Saturday I brought some shirts to work on. I enjoyed myself thoroughly but noticed that working on two shirts in one night rather than one big painting seemed less interesting to the night club crowd. First of all, it takes a lot longer to work on fabric because I have to go over everything two or three times for decent opacity. And secondly, the designs just aren't as extensive or grandiose. Nonetheless, a fun experiment.

available - 2009 03 14 Mondrian Hotel 2 (Converse Men's Medium)

Same night, second project. If nobody buys this shirt, I have half a mind to keep working on it indefinitely.

> Writing
Playing The Body Electric, Part 1 (Visionary Music Blog @ Colorado Music Board):
I believe that we as a species are currently witnessing the evolution of a new relationship between the inner and outer worlds, renegotiating that tricky self/other boundary...and in the process we might ultimately reach a new platform of musical development at which the individual has internalized not just the other players, but the instruments themselves.

Phil Keaggy Struts All The Tricks (Fretbase):
If you’ve ever wanted a single nine-minute demonstration of every acoustic guitar technique imaginable, Phil Keaggy delivers. On my regular YouTube shred-trawl, I recently discovered a gem of a performance by Keaggy in which he demonstrates the perfect execution of everything from standard fingerpicking to slapping, looping, mid-song retuning, and body percussion.

Adrian Belew's Out-Of-This-Word Signature Parker Fly (Fretbase):
Getting your own signature guitar is the rockstar version of a Lifetime Achievement Award - the opportunity to have an entire corporate skunkworks at your disposal to implement the craziest, most mind-blowing customizations ever. In my opinion, though, most people totally blow this opportunity…but Adrian Belew sure didn’t.

Finally! Clock Your Riffs With The "Shred-O-Meter" (Fretbase):
I can’t decide whether this is a legitimate rehearsal implement, or a ridiculous novelty, but either way it exists: the Shred-O-Meter, a speedometer for your guitar. Coupling an analog needle-based display with a “super-metronome” that goes up to (brace yourselves) 1300 bpm!, this device finally allows guitarists to know when they’re playing fast enough to travel backward through time.