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

18 November 2020

1.Buy House 2. Sell Art 3. Paint House + Stuart Davis + Mantis Aliens + Complex Systems Conversation

✨🎊 BIG ANNOUNCEMENT & MOVING SALE  🎊✨


We bought a home in Santa Fe (!!!) and so I am putting all of my remaining original paintings and canvas prints up for sale at a negotiable discount in order to help my family afford the once-in-a-lifetime costs.

We love it here in New Mexico and after a very tumultuous life of move after move after move, I'm so grateful for the chance to make a steady and secure and lasting Nest of Peace and Creativity where I can host friends and family and make as much beauty, truth, and goodness as possible in all available media. But this is a daunting endeavor and it's taking all we have and more to make it work. We live as frugally as possible but still need to secure some basic amenities to make this transition comfortable. 

In short: 

If you would like to bring some color/love/deepweirdness into your own life, now is the best time ever!
Please drop me a line if you want to talk about acquiring any of my work

There are, of course, much easier ways to show support - like Patreon, Bandcamp, or Substack subscriptions, or Venmo transfers, or grabbing paper prints. I am immensely thankful to anyone who offers anything, and everyone who has, and I promise to show it by living up to my potential (like, for example, finally lighting up that laser cutter I have not had space to use since I acquired it! Oh yes, I have PLANS.).

That's all. Thanks for reading this. My love and blessings to you and you all. πŸ’œπŸ₯³πŸŽ‰



Epic New Podcast About Aliens


I’m not going to waste your time trying to explain Stuart Davis. He’s been a guiding star for me and presumably many other irrepressibly nondisciplinary artists for over a decade, one of the founding figures of my adult psyche in its pluriform contortionism. Musician, painter, poet, talk show host, stand-up comic, film-maker, and depth psychologist, the man knows no bounds and it’s all I can do to follow closely and listen carefully, which I have since I first encountered his work in 2004.

Stuart is long overdue to be on the show, but the timing is perfect, because we’re here to talk about ALIENS. Not the admittedly excellent film, but the living reality of them and their astonishingly intimate relationship to us, as disclosed by the growing archive of guests on his show, Aliens and Artists.

We discuss the ethics of withholding advanced technologies like zero-point energy from the general public; Rick Strassman getting kicked out of his zendo for psychedelic research; circadian rhythms, sleep disruption for dream yoga, and parenting sleep deprivation psychosis; when Psyche argues with the Mantis; the self is a choir; daily banishings and welcomings; and why we implore you to only work with the visitors that respect human sovereignty.

I’ll stop now. Just listen and be amazed.

PS – My two-part interview is up on Aliens and Artists now as well. I haven't heard the final product yet because of all the things, but word is it's a banger. πŸ“£πŸ”₯πŸŽΆπŸ™

~ Man Meets Mantis ~


Since we're having fun being weird,


This is my first ever collaboration painting with Ada Taylor Garfield, my daughter:


It's dedicated to Stuart, obviously, and available for sale, I suppose, but honestly I'll be surprised (albeit delighted) if anyone bites. Who are you? People who learn the intimate weirdo stories of my paintings sometimes get all "but I can't take your holy object" on me. Ultimately, though, I let them go and if they stay it's meant to be. But this one's definitely special: Ada drew the grass with the blue marker.

Know someone who might benefit from an awkwardly intense mantis reminder? Prints are all yours.

And One More (Awesome) Thing


Last month as part of the latest Complexity Weekend hackathon, I hosted a live panel discussion with four unique and fascinating minds — complex systems researchers Tom CarterJenn HuffPietro Michelucci, and Richard James MacCowan— and discussed archaeoacoustic design as a form of extended cognition, the continuity between the ancient and postmodern worlds, biomimicry, and many more interesting threads at the intersection of complex systems research and creative innovation.

It was awesome. I hope you enjoy listening to it half as much as I enjoyed participating.

Ironic Reminder: You Don't Have To Move


13 April 2020

Cooped-Up Creativity: New Music • Psychedelic Eggs Galore • Future Fossils Episodes with Erik Davis & Nora Bateson

“The way we discuss what needs to be done now will shape what it is possible to do. This is not a moment to fix a machine, this is a moment to compose new cultures.”

Hey friends,

If you're feeling lonely, cooped up, or just in need of some smart conversations, I hope you'll join some of my friends and I for the weekly casual video hangouts we've been having every Sunday.  We've been talking about all kinds of things in light of our unprecedented situation: philosophy, economics, personal creative process, family life... We're having two more of these open discussions on 19 & 26 April at 2 pm Mountain. If it'd help you, I hope you'll join us. Details here.

And now, here's all of the new creative work I've bled into lately, for the benefit of everyone.

My love to all of you. Stay safe and happy, and don't forget to ask for help.

best,
Michael
New Single: Always Catching Up

My next album continues to ooze forth at approximately one song per four months. Songwriting and production is the one place in my life where I can create art selfishly, uncompromisingly, obsessed, and etch away at lovingly-crafted intricate and living works for months or years, feeling all the while as if I'm swept up in The Great Work.

The first two songs of this as-yet-unnamed, long overdue LP are here, along with their backstories.

Here's the latest tune, on time and mind, as well as lyrics and the story of its very psychedelic origins.

Walking, according to physiologists, is a controlled fall forwards.
Toddling to tottering, all of us are always one step from and one step toward.
But life's just like that. Languages grow at the rhythm of walking pace,
and every idea you inhabit is seconds behind your Original Face...

Four New Spring Paintings

Here are four smaller (12") paintings I've cooked up in the last couple cooped-up weeks. No names for any of these. Top two on stretched canvas, bottom two on cradled artboard. Check my Instagram for different angles/lighting/context. Each one is up for grabs; I won't make prints.

Commercial break: now is a great time to buy art, because the artists need support and deals abound. If you have ever wanted to own a piece of mine, drop me a line. I will be glad to show you what I've got and give you a post-apocalyptic (half or more off) discount...

 
 

And now, two awesome conversations that I hope will help you make good sense of life right now:

Future Fossils Podcast Episode 140

Listen & Subscribe anywhere you go for podcasts.

We’re extra lucky to have not one but three amazing guests this week: culture critic and religious scholar Erik Davis, philosopher and author Tony Blake, and trickster historian Mitch Mignano. A deep dive into the mythic and mystical dimensions of our moment — including nonhuman agency, the virus as teacher, Pan and panic and pandemics, solutionism isn’t the solution, the danger of efficiency logic, and a media diet for meditation on the darkness of nature.

Future Fossils Podcast Episode 141

This week’s guest is Nora Bateson, Director of the International Bateson Institute, author, film-maker, and founder of the Warm Data Lab. Nora is a magician when it comes to getting people to live the relational and dynamic, the embodied and incompressible. I’m honored that we got to sit down for a US-Sweden Zoom call and talk about how current world events touch down in the messy and beautiful everyday.

On Coronavirus, Complex Systems,
and Creative Opportunity

A transcript of Episode 139 in which I rant about our situation from the POV of an armchair systems thinker and weird artist, invoking everyone from Alan Moore to Charles Eisenstein:

"The best possible outcome I can imagine from this is to witness all of the creative and intelligent people who have been shackled to pointless, stupid, undignified work for our entire lives rise up and create something new and beautiful together. Emergencies often elicit the best of our humanity, a concern for the true priorities of our existence. These are moments when we are called to act on what really matters, and to contribute to our communities and to the legacy that we pass on, at a time when good ideas are unusually quick to spread."

ICYMI: Free Coloring Book!

No strings attached at all, but I do hope I'd get to see your pages when you color them!  (Pictured: my friend's kid going ham on some trippy doodles.)

And that's that.  Thank you for digging in.  I hope that you and yours are safe and happy...

02 March 2020

Back on Tour, BioHorror, DeepFakes, Cosmic Evolution, Psychedelic Therapy, World Travel & Space Exploration

I'll keep this brief.

In summer 2017 I wrote a story about how AI would change the very nature of reality. I shared it with some friends and read it as an episode of Future Fossils, but I never tried to get it published. Then it started coming true, and I knew that I had to get it out there while we still live in a world in which the categories "real" and "fake" still make some sense.

Now folks are sharing it on Twitter. I heard today that it's effective horror. I hope it helps prepare you.

Here it is:

(Artwork licensed by Giacomo Carmagnola.)

If you find non-fiction easier, here is an essay about our accelerating evolutionary arms race with deep learning AI fakery, and why it matters that we start to take these matters seriously:


(This is not actually a conversation between Jeff Goldblum, Tom Cruise, Ewan McGregor, Robert Downey, Jr., and George Lucas. Allow me to explain.)

–––––   New Artwork   –––––

Since most of you signed up to see new paintings and an artless update might be mild betrayal, here are the collaborations that I'm working on with friends across the country, after baby goes to sleep.

None of these are done, but they're all getting close. If you want any of them, let me know...

This first one is a 24" canvas with Gregory Pettit that we started just before I moved to Santa Fe:



These next two are small (16") collabs with Jamie Gaviola

She began them both and shipped them to me to complete:



I feel extremely lucky to be working with these artists, both of whom are not just masters of their craft but awesome people. Check out their other work!

(And, obviously, follow me on Instagram to see more updates as we finish these and other pieces.)

–––––   New Podcasts   –––––

I know I always say this, but it's true: Future Fossils just keeps getting better, and I am convinced these latest episodes are some of the best yet. Here's what you've probably been missing:

 
 

The Future Fossils Book Club just had an AWESOME conversation about Borne, Jeff VanderMeer's amazing postapocalyptic biohorror novel, which remixes "cute" and "weapon," "enemy" and "family," and makes us ask important questions about personhood and love and beauty.

Next up we're discussing VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts, so get in here and join us!

(Artwork licensed by Pat Hughes.)

–––––   Upcoming Gigs   –––––

I haven't traveled much since I became a father, but if you're in Austin or Phoenix this month maybe we will see each other! I'll be playing music and giving a talk at Cosmic Music Festival in Mesa, Arizona on March 28th and speaking on complex systems and society at the SXSW Interactive party for EFF-Austin (March 14th) and hosting a live Future Fossils Podcast at The Technodelic Temple for Andromeda Entertainment (March 17th).

More info at the links below:




17 June 2019

Velociraptor Painting + New Tunes + Ten Amazing Conversations

Whew, okay!  This "biweekly" newsletter I've been keeping since 2009 went three whole months without an update...
but it's because I just became a dad!  I hope you'll understand and stay on board.  Thank you for tuning in!

Here are some of the new things I've created for you (and for the sheer fun of it):
Four new paintings, one new live album and a 360ΒΊ video "single," and an entire treasure box of awesome conversations.  Enjoy, and drop me a line anytime if you're inspired!

gratefully yours,

Michael

"Our Lady of the Late Cretaceous"
24"x36"• acrylic and oil paint pens on canvas

 
"Xenoscaping III & IV"
2x 12"x24" • acrylic and oil paint pens on canvas

"Fire Jelly Fronds"
12"x24" • acrylic and oil paint pens on canvas

Live at the Apothecary
(Santa Fe, NM • 2019.05.11)
Bandcamp • Patreon • Spotify

My first concert as a father, and my first concert as a Santa Fean, this show was warm, intimate, and magical. Dear friends were in from out of town, and new friends were won over from the dinner crowd. My old friend Sydney Wright from Austin, Texas – one of the regulars at my two-year Austin residency, Loopers' Night – joined me while starting off her tour of the Western States, and captivated all of us. (Her songs were not recorded at this show, but I encourage all of you to check her out.)

Big thanks to Mya Kass & Cheryl Casden for inviting us to play this show at the Santa Fe Oxygen Bar Apothecary Restaurant – and even more for buying an entirely new PA system so Sydney and I could have the best possible sound for this. And thanks to Andee Jean Ostara for her concert photography – you can and should follow her new professional instagram account.

Here's one of my favorite moments from the show:


"Indecision" (Ukulele Arrangement) in 360ΒΊ

In the moment before acting lies a void 
where every future gleams, 
reflecting every other 
every moment a uniquely blooming world. 
In the space between two thoughts 
where every other instant grows 
expanding now into infinity 
and every possibility unfurls... 

How do you choose your next life? 
It may seem your heart has stopped between two beats. 
It's not the universe that's ended 
but that you're already dead,
remembering everything at once 
seeing past the limits of your head. 

In the seconds it would take to drain 
the oxygen from your exquisite brain 
a few mere seconds, all your life replays 
an intimate refrain. 
It isn't just the fireworks of dying neurons firing. 
You are slipping from the grip 
of that which kept you in the slow procession. 
Now your feathered eyelids open to behold the whole terrain...

 

I'm especially excited about the Future Fossils Book Club on Patreon and the amazing video calls we've been having about the most mind-blowing books I can find.  Our first call on the science fiction horror masterpiece Blindsight by Peter Watts was great, and our second call on Diana Slattery's psychedelic science and philosophy opus Xenolinguistics was (for me, anyway) even better.

We're doing a call for Cixin Liu's Hugo-winning The Three Body Problem sometime next month.  
I'd love to hear you chime in on our next group call!

And since it's been so long since my last update, here are NINE new episodes of Future Fossils.
There's something here for everyone: Nadja Oertelt teaches scientists to speak to non-scientists; Bruce Damer's team might have figured out the origins of life; Erick Godsey has the most inspiring stance on personal mythology; Android Jones and I discuss what being visionary artist dads is like; Mitsuaki Chi leads therapeutic mushroom groups in Amsterdam; Sean EsbjΓΆrn-Hargens is about to teach a course about the philosophy of science through the lens of UFOs; Bernie Taylor has a powerful new angle on some of the oldest cave art in the world; Eliot Peper offers his empowering and sober view of history and tech; and Kevin Wohlmut offers up the first guest episode with essays on the next ten billion years.  Enjoy!

        

“All that is becomes connected even in its difference, as being and becoming share the same confused territory of ‘feathery incandescence’; ontology itself becomes not only dynamic but synesthetic.” 
– Richard Doyle, Darwin's Pharmacy