Novelty, Brush Play, & Frolicking At The Last Hurrah

> Music

I can't remember the last time I was so excited about prematurely showing off new material...but my newest tune, "You Don't Have To Move," is in many respects the proof of principle for my fantasy of weaving guitar tapping/percussion, live looping, singing, mystical poetry, and electronic delay effects into a single piece of music. This new video shows a song still slightly wobbly on its feet but – to my knowledge – totally unprecedented in the entire universe of human music. That's right:

You can download the mp3 for free at myspace.com/michaelgarfield.

> Imagery

available - 2009 04 17 Sail Inn (Delta Nove) - 16"x24"

I finally broke down and bought some paint brushes, along with a weird, flexible paint chisel called a Colour Shaper that doesn't hold paint but simply pushes it around. Finally expending my sole can of white spray paint and dabbling with the Colour Shaper, I laid down a verdant background for this piece before Delta Nove's recent show at the Sail Inn. Their manager BJ Cochran was cool enough to hook me up with opening slots for them during their two AZ dates as well, although having me play my music before a garage funk band turned out to be a comically awkward mismatch. The above image is what happens when I drink and paint. Gin and tonic, in case you were wondering.

available - 2009 04 18 Orpheum Theatre (Delta Nove, The Brothers Gow) - 15"x30"

I had the honor of opening the very last concert at this historic and beautiful venue in Flagstaff before painting for "D-No" and local badasses The Brothers Gow. For the first time ever I actually used a foam brush during the actual show to apply deep and luxurious gold columns to either side of this chakra column, then layered new metallic pens on top of that before my teal pen exploded everywhere, ruining my composition. With most of the show already over, I had to totally re-envision the painting and ended up with the spinal column peeking out through the gate of vegetation. It ended up working, I think...I'm all for layers. This piece was especially difficult to photograph because of the multiple different metallic paints...

available - 2009 04 20 Goathead Saloon (Great American Taxi) - 16"x24"

Oh man, Vince Herman and his band were a pretty perfect group to be painting for on 4/20. Their song catalog is one ode to toking after another. In spite of the limited lyrical repertoire, those guys can really jam...which made working on this piece a lot of fun. I had prepped it by laying down the metallic gold and white tentacles first, giving them shape and detail and context over the course of the night. I had originally intended them to be ferns...yes, some ferns are gold. Or at least appear to be. As it came out, though, I like what this painting doesn't show as much as what it does.

available - 2009 04 24 Mondrian Hotel (Pere La Chaise) - 16"x24"

For the first time ever I used the fat-tipped black marker as an eraser early on in the composition of this one, and consequently the bottom half is matte black but the top half is glossy black. Hard to tell from the photo but in person the effect is bizarre. I had the 4/17 Delta Nove painting displayed immediately adjacent to the canvas this night, and this painting records another first: the first time I carried the design of one painting directly into another, like bookends. Of course, after an evening of improvisation the resemblance is a lot looser than it was at the start. There's a strange transformation in the triptych of this piece, in the passage from the rising elements below into the bubbles above. What is happening behind those rows of hexagons? Are we looking at one layer, or several?

> Press
I've been getting a modest amount of positive press recently.

Tyler Groover at Austin music blog TwoGroove.com had some very nice things to say (including that he's trying to rally people to get me to move to Austin).

Trevor Harden selected my electronic track "...And The World Rushes In" for a recent weekly feature on his music and spirituality website, RockOm.net – for which I provided a tidy explanatory blurb that in which I linked nondual philosophy with found sound percussive textures.

Art Nouveau Magazine out of Atlanta gave me a nice little spread in their reader's art section.

And the Scottsdale Chronicle published a very...um, factual feature on me – that diced what I thought was a very engaging 45-minute interview into incomprehensible fragments, but hey. At least now everybody knows I have an imaginary friend (?).

> Links

If I don't tell everybody about this stuff, it's going to drive me crazy. Here are some news items I think everybody should know. Hopefully you agree.

60 Minutes just did a segment on cold fusion entitled "More Than Junk Science." They took a look at this supposedly discredited branch of energy research and found that in fact, there are over a dozen independent research labs all over the world that have succeeded in creating room-temperature tabletop nuclear reactions. I can't stress the importance of this enough...we're talking about not just the end of oil, but the end of ANY energy monopoly, here. Not nuclear reactors. Not hydrogen fuel cells. Once this technology finally gets out in force, everything we know is going to change, completely. Strangely enough, CBS yanked this video soon after posting it...but due to public outrage they got it back online. Goes to show you that the age of trying to hide such important technological progress from the public is (almost) over.

Kamal Meattle of Delhi, pollution capitol of the universe, has found the "Three Essential Houseplants For Clean Indoor Air." Turns out that with just these three easily-acquired species you can seal yourself in a bubble and get by just fine, breathing clean and fresh plant exhaust.

Stuart Brown studies play for a living and has made a great case for "Why Play Is Vital – No Matter What Your Age." If this video doesn't convince you to approach your life differently, you're already as good as dead.

And this is so true it hurts, so thank God it's hilarious: "Everything's Amazing And Nobody's Happy" – Louis CK on Conan O'Brien, bemoaning how kids these days are spoiled by convenience, completely oblivious to the miracles of modern technology.

One Heart, Many Petals...And A Few Eggs

> Imagery

available - 2009 04 03 Mondrian Hotel (DJ Maji) - 20" across

Attempt #2 at using a compass on a circular canvas to explore new territory. This one is a bit more "vegetable" and less "mineral" than the last...a more complex design, intentionally lacking in radial symmetry (numerous different radii with the compass, repeated with rules but somewhat irregularly). Tiny variations in radius due to the dulling pencil on my compass gave it a slight asymmetry, which is ultimately more organic anyway.

2009 04 04 Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre (One Heart Umbrella Campaign Charity Dinner)

I have always wanted to do more charitable work with my art – specifically, to do live painting at a charity dinner. And I finally got my chance when Mesa's Broadway Palm Theatre, under the PR direction of the amazing Gary Kimble, organized a benefit gala for Emma and Taylor Bailey. These girls were born joined at the heart, and that heart is now failing due to the stress of having to pump blood for two bodies. So Gary and company put together OneHeartUmbrellaCampaign.org (a tie-in with the Broadway Palm's production of Singin' In The Rain), where they're auctioning off umbrellas signed by a tremendous array of celebrities (including Debbie Reynolds, William H. Macy, Alice Cooper, Ellen DeGeneres, Josh Groban, Amy Grant, Goldie Hawn, Hugh Jackman, Jim Belushi, Reba McEntire, Geoffrey Rush, JK Simmons, Michael Phelps, Firesign Theatre, Kevin Bacon, and the full casts of every production on Broadway, just for starters) in order to raise money for their post-operation care (their separation and the double heart transplant is being donated by the surgical team). I made it very clear to Gary that I had to be a part of this, that I needed to donate a live painting to the auction. I taped an umbrella to my easel and worked on it off to the side while they put on an awesome variety show and dinner for a packed house.

At the end of the night, the Taylor's priest came up to me and suggested I offer them the umbrella as a memoir – after all, there are a ton of umbrellas already up for auction. And I did, and they took it home. So there it is...like Gary said to the crowd that night, in one sense these girls gave the biggest gift of anyone, because they gave everyone the opportunity to do good with their energies, to contribute to something meaningful. There is now a foundation to fund the medical care of children like Emma and Taylor who were born with such rare complications that no other organization exists to support them. And I finally got to do a live painting for something real.

2009 04 05 XL Men's Urban Pipeline (Community Arts Expo)

I knocked this one out while chilling at a delightful monthly event that transforms one of downtown's empty parking lots into a community art fair. It was as strange as it was charming...but only because I had no idea before coming out that most of the participants were vocal members of the LBGT community (the DJ was pounding the gay disco all Sunday afternoon, much to the chagrin of those such as myself, whose booths were set up right in front of his speakers). There was some lovely work there, though, that made the day just fantastic – my personal favorite being the dichroic glass pendants by Nick & Brent at SweetEarthArt.com.

2008 12 18 & 2009 04 10 & 11 Chipper's Lanes, Mondrian Hotel, & Tempe Beach Part (Zoogma, Pere La Chaise, & My Fest) - 16"24"

As befits my "Phoenix is Purgatory" hypothesis, I've taken the opportunity to circle back around and work on a few old paintings that didn't feel totally finished. You know, burn off some karma. This is one of them, from my Colorado tour with Zoogma last December (original painting here). If it feels a little "rain" themed, it is...my normal outdoor set-up at Mondrian Hotel was compromised by the first Phoenix rains since February. Apparently, rainstorms here are sporadic, and I kept moving my easel back outside, inside, outside...eventually just camping out between the DJ and the front door, while everyone squeezed like clowns into the bar. I finished it the next day at Tempe's gorgeous waterside park, where they were having a huge convention of non-profit organizations to raise awareness of the various programs available to benefit children. I set up next to the stage for my friend Nicole Duran's new project, RaiseTheVibration.org...the music was surprisingly angsty and screamy given the context, but the vibes were indeed high. I even got free reiki from a beautiful woman. :)

available - 2008 12 31 Quixotes (Sporque, Vibesquad) & 2009 04 11 Easter Moon (Tech Itch) - 16"x24"

Be glad I don't have the energy to give the full story of painting at this rave by the Firebird Raceway on the south extremity of town...it was a very long, very interesting night where I was set up between four other painters, some of whom where quite friendly and some of whom were strangely cold (as if that's required of someone in order to be professional). This is another act of closure (original painting here)...I went over the first night's work with a coat of spraypaint, then one of my fat yellow graffiti pens, and ended up with something that reminds me of one of the local desert flora reaching up into the psychedelic architecture of night (Seriously...what makes you think there isn't some vast, transcendental structure webbing our planet's sky? You really think that you, with your primate brain, evolved on the savannah to comprehend distances of a few mere miles, would even notice something a light-year across?)

available - 2009 04 12 Easter Moon (Daedelus, Chali 2NA, Z-Trip, Turner & Heit) - 30"x15"

Same party. The absolute freakin' highlight of my entire musical evening was Daedelus's mashup of Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" and Imogen Heap's "Hide And Seek." Oh my God, it was amazing. I'm still getting chills just thinking about it. Check that dude out if you haven't already.

But anyway, the painting...I swiped a few big masonite panels from the Raise The Vibration's area at My Fest, where they were letting people just go to town on them and paint inspirational slogans or whatever to display around the camp. At the end of the day they had a few left over so I made out like a masonite bandit. But since I went straight from there to the rave, I didn't have time to give them the typical black priming coat, so with this one I started by using my 3" black graffiti marker and giving it my first ever "brush-textured" background. It kind of harkens back to my second-ever live painting, once upon a time in Boulder. You probably can't tell from that tiny picture, but I signed it both ways so it can be hung "upright" either horizontally or vertically.

One of my best-ever live painting stories happened to me while working on this piece. Earlier that night I met the daughter of someone whose work has had a profound influence on me: Drunvalo Melchizedek, the author of The Ancient Secret Of The Flower Of Life. We got to talking and by the time I had started this painting, I had given her one of my extra masonite panels to work on. She wanted to use one of my easels but since it was already being used to display another painting I was trying to sell, I suggested she go find some twine and tie her painting to my back, so we could paint conga-train style. And she did. And we did. It was probably the most ridiculous thing I have ever done in public. Matt Brown of The House Of Flying Paint was working next to me and stopped what he was doing to walk over and give me a very curious look. "I don't know," I told him. "It's a first for me, too!"

Unfortunately, we didn't get any pictures of it.

available - 2009 04 12 Easter Moon (Rabbit In The Moon - Urban Pipeline Men's Medium)

The last act that night was the oh-so-Easter-appropriate Rabbit In The Moon, which is widely regarded as one of the finest shows in rave culture. Admittedly, their costuming was amazing, but given my fondness for live electronica, and since the flyer said "100% live show," I was expecting a little bit more than one guy on a computer and another guy shouting weird kraut-rock stuff like, "I – control you! I – control you!" over and over. That said, almost everyone was at the first stage to see them and from where the painters were set up, between stages one and two, there was very little traffic, so I got to work on this new shirt in almost complete peace.

And about the shirt: I've been thinking a lot recently about the massive global transition that I believe is coming in the next few years...I've done a lot of research into actual hard science about this stuff, astrophysics and geomagnetics, evolutionary biology, and the postmodern science of time. And as far as I can tell, there is a real consensus about something major going down in 2012, not just among the pre-modern indigenous cultures, but from numerous modern methodologies, as well. So the whole "world as egg about to hatch" thing has been preoccupying me, recently. "I'll split this shell" is a line from one of my old songs, "Time Machine Dream". The image came back around on a new octave sometime in the last few weeks, with all of the reading on hyperdimensional intelligences and chaotic bifurcations I've been doing. Plus, it seemed right, for Easter: a visual pun on the resurrection of Christ just as we seem geared up for what some people are likely to interpret as the Second Coming. It's either a happy little shirt or way too damn heavy. I can't tell, these days.

> Writing

Three recent essays from my Visionary Music Blog about the shifting self-other boundaries of contemporary music performance:

The 3-2-1 of Musical Performance

For whatever reasons, our culture has decided that we are not all musicians. Instead, a few trained (or not-so trained) specialists are expected to get up on stage so we can live vicariously through them. There are musicians, and there are spectators. But I don't think the distinction is so clear cut; we're all participants in something larger called a "concert" that requires both artist and audience in the same way that fertilization requires both male and female.

YOU'RE The Musician; YOU Make Some Noise!

I don't want us all relinquishing our creative agency to whomever The Machine decides is going to be The Next Big Thing. In an age when we can all produce our own books/video/music/fine art/theater, I think it's time for us to reclaim our inspiration from centralized corporate governance. At the same time, even as an artist I prefer to let the guy on stage take the reigns for a little while.

Playing The Body Electric, Part 1

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.

Branching Systems, Measuring Instruments, Astonishment

> Imagery

Just Another Desert Party - available (but currently on display) - 2009 03 21 & 22 Just Another Desert Party (feat. DJs Spyder, Chromatest, Psytek, and many more), Queen Valley AZ - 16"x24"

By now, many of you know that I've worked as a scientific illustrator for the Department of Herpetology at the University of Kansas Natural History Museum since 2005 (a few years on-site, and since then by occasional correspondence). Recently, KUNHM has taken to displaying natural-history-themed artwork in their main stairwell, and when I was back in Lawrence last fall I saw an call to artists for their latest exhibition, "Branching Systems." I couldn't pass up the opportunity to display psychedelic live art at my old haunts, especially since my old professors and co-workers have little or no idea of how I've been applying my education. Plus, I have had little experience applying my training in anatomy and realism to my newer profession...so this piece, painted from 7 pm to 5 am at the burner-produced Just Another Desert Party in Queen Valley (a gorgeous desert camping area about an hour east of Phoenix), was a really satisfying cross-pollination between two epochs of my life. Here's the statement I prepared for them to use:

Branching systems are all symptoms of the universe's own tree-like structure. Ancient societies believed that the whole world was a tree - the Axis Mundi - and hundreds of years before science formalized this understanding with chaos math, alchemists had summarized it in their dictum, "As above, so below." The same rules that govern the efficient dissipation of energy play themselves out at all magnitudes: from the branching flows of river systems and electrical discharge, to the arrangement of organic molecules, to the dispersal of nutrients by our cardiovascular system, to the groping splay of the vertebrate limb, to the radiating development of new languages and cultures. A symbolic overview of evolutionary history, this painting was "grown" semi-algorithmically from a visual "genome" – but organized as a collage, to honor the non-linearity of our world's self-organizing principles.

Of course, that was a bit too much of a mouthful for them to use. We ended up with this:

Using symbolism and vibrant color, this work illustrates the ubiquitous and non-linear branching systems of the natural world. Items in this painting - wings, organs, and rivers - have unique structures and processes, yet are also creators or products of tree-like structures. This painting was composed live at the multimedia arts event "Just Another Desert Party," in Queen Valley, Arizona.

A fair compromise. If you're in Lawrence KS at all over the next couple of months, go check out the Natural History Museum and its Branching Systems Exhibit, which features plenty of other awesome art by local artists including my very inspring buddy Yuri Zupancic.

Vacuum Trellis - available - 2009 03 25 Pussycat Lounge (Joe DiPadova, World Famous rani "g," dk.strickler) - 16"x24"

Another in a series of attempts to evoke vacuum/field interactions and how pattern arises out of emptiness by the self-organizing overlay of vibrational patterns. Of course, as unified field theory physicist and total badass Nassim Haramein constantly reiterates to those of us less insightful, the vacuum isn't empty, but infinitely full! This isn't the greatest picture but I started with "wafers" of black on black and built it up from there. My favorite part about this piece - as in much of my work - is how minor imperfections in the symmetries of the first layer feed forward into increasingly significant and obvious asymmetries when I start adding other colors - how those first triangles, not totally equilateral, ended up warping all of the straight lines and windows later in the painting. It's a very organic feeling and a constant challenge to the process, which makes painting without measuring instruments an ongoing experiment, as well as an artistic language for the physics story of how our universe emerged from "broken symmetries in the vacuum."

This club was awesome, by the way - lasers all over the place, and a live trumpet and saxophone playing along to the DJs all night (what a great idea!).

Compass Mandala 01 - available - 2009 03 27 & 28 Mondrian Hotel & The Grizzly Room (DJ Maji & Cameron Martin) - 20" across

So I finally gave in and used a compass for the first time, starting with a symmetrical grid like my friends Kris D and Krystle Smith. While it was on the one hand kind of a pride-swallowing moment and also somewhat dissatisfying in light of my above statements about loving to explore asymmetries, on the other hand I feel like this piece has a psychoactive effect that really obviously and instantly puts it in a class of its own next to the rest of my work. It was a frustrating painting for most of the process, totally uninspiring and mundane. But I'm very pleased with the way it came out, once I started overlaying straight lines and crystalline structures over all of the interlocking circles and shot some warmth and whiteness through the blue to give it a sense of self-illumination. In the name of including and transcending additional techniques, refusing nothing in the name of creative development, I indent to do more circular canvases, more compass work, and to continue to investigate new ways of expressing these subtle orders. Stay posted...

> Writing

Lastly, I'd like to take a moment to thank everyone who's been so damn patient with me, waiting for the author-read audio version of Giving In To Astonishment, my essay on sacred geography, mythology, and shadow work at Burning Man 2008. You can finally listen to and download the "audio book" here:

http://www.archive.org/details/Giving_In_To_Astonishment

In the spirit of Burning Man's gift economy, I highly encourage you to share this with your friends, mix it into DJ sets, whatever.

As usual, thanks for your time. If you have any questions about this work - or about commissions, custom apparel designs, music, evolutionary dynamics, or anything, email me. And have a beautiful day!

love
Michael

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.