Greetings, friends! I hope this update finds you well...
Before we get into it, I just want to let you know this weekend's romp at Cosmic Flux in Arkansas is going to be my last live painting gig for quite some time.
Live art has been awesomely inspiring, adventurous, and brought me friendships that will last a lifetime...but it's not sustainable. Time and experience invested do not translate into job security or better pay, and the systems aren't in place to support painters without regular collectors. Ten years is long enough to know I'm not going to get a raise, and that I could be serving better in some other way.
Not going to give up art entirely – just going to sink my roots in deeper, travel less, get more done, and align to the most valuable work I can be doing.
Right now that is Future Fossils Podcast (huge thanks to all 101 of you supporting me on Patreon!); my work as resident philosopher for the Crypto Crew cryptocurrency web learning community; writing How To Live in the Future; and finally delivering that studio LP of psych-futurist acoustic-electronic love-songs I've been promising for years.
But in the meantime, see you in Arkansas this weekend!
I'm also totally excited to attend this seminar in Iceland with my graduate advisor, integralist Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, where I'll learn how to expand our ideas of "capital" and "impact" to perform magical and meaningful tweaks to organizations and their cultures.
Tuning companies and governments to the accelerating transformations of our century feels like The Good Work and I'm honored that I have this chance to forge ahead and bring back vital insights to you from this seminar:
The overall mood this spring is "immense transition" – and hopefully I can inspire you by letting go of some of who I used to be to make more room for who I can be. As always, I'm committed to a constant process of growth, learning, and discovery so I can bring it back to you...
I'm selling a handful of paintings at unprecedented discounts to afford this trip. If you've wanted a piece from me but didn't think you had the funds, let's pleasantly surprise each other! Drop me a line and I'll send you a list of what I still have.
That's all for now. I love you. Thank you and may all your work this week go smoothly...
Michael
"Living Fossil"
2018 • acrylic/canvas • 40"x30"
(Available – make me an offer! I'm raising money for to participate in this.)
Around this time last year I painted a giant rooster in the southern hemisphere to commemorate the "year of the fire rooster". I feel like I don't really control what comes through when - because I had it in my mind that I was going to paint a monitor lizard when I got to Australia and that so did not happen. So last summer, visiting my painter friends in Colorado, I thought I would double back and catch up with that lizard...and then I hated the painting I'd started and left it in the garage for 6 months.
Never one to simply walk away from something, though, I figured I might shine some love on this one at the Llano Earth Art Festival, an awesome little yearly gathering in Central Texas. It's gone on for the last 4 years but this year I got to invite four other painter friends to join the team. Live art is a team sport. Their warmth and friendship made it easier for me to love this piece again.
Shortly after I had the thought that a Komodo dragon, while not technically an Australian animal, is sort of like "the dog of lizards' and therefore may be appropriate as a "year of the earth dog" painting, someone came up to me and said it looked like a dog. So: vindicated.
Thanks to every one of my artist friends whose friendship made it into this lizard: Randal Roberts, Morgan Manley, Andrew Thompson, Martin Cash, Will Ross, Chance Roberts, Elliot Rogers, Dixon Stovall, y'all alright. :)
"Crystalline Rows (aka Dippin Dot Singularity)"
2018 • acrylic/canvas • 18"x24"
(Available – make me an offer! I'm raising money for to participate in this.)
The dots were organizing along invisible manifolds of influence, gathering at nodes and junctures of a gauzy floral sculpture that sang as it flowed together and apart, harmonics of the network chatter and evolving anatomy of a billion streaming balls of cream-based computronium. Dippin knew his work was then complete, and he surrendered his flesh into the vanilla-and-chocolate goo to be reborn as a submodule of the new metamorphic god-mind as it grew - so long as the time travel didn't damage its internal architecture somehow, so long as its impulses wouldn't be scrambled in the risky transit, rendering the baby god just senseless, mindless ice cream on the other side of time...
Garden Underground: Live at SquareRüt Kava Bar, 13 Jan 2018
I've been exploring the acoustic guitar as an electronic instrument for ten years...this is some of what's grown out of that. (Some other fan favorite releases are here, here, here, and here.)
