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.

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.

Dinosaurs, Depth, & Dinner Theatre

[As usual, 11"x17" signed prints of these (and all other) paintings are available for $15/each (discounts for larger orders), and I still have plenty of original artwork for sale via my gallery, here: Visionary Art

If interested, just drop me a line.]

available - 2008 10 31 & 2009 02 14 The Bottleneck (EOTO, EZ Brothers) & studio, 18x24

Glass flowers in ghost light, breaking open with molten sparks, empty at the heart. Technically, not a new painting...somebody slipped me a party favor on Halloween and that, combined with a boiling cauldron of crazy sweaty people, made this one extremely hard to finish. (For those of you who have asked whether I'm "enlisting the help of medicines" - or, less tastefully, "on drugs" - when I paint, the answer is: rarely, and it's usually more hindering than anything.) I sat around looking at it in puzzlement for a few months before I decided that yes, it needed more work...so when my girl and I stayed in on Valentine's Day to work on art projects together (or rather, in parallel), I made this one a priority. Pretty pleased with it, finally, after another hour or two's worth of work/play.

taken - 2009 02 14 Studio, 16x24

Impossible spheres and ribbons. Through no brilliance on my part (largely error, as is often the case, at least at first), I managed to turn what I had originally intended to be a straightforward exercise in a single threaded ribbon into a series of impossible relationships. There are a few places, if you look closely, where the spheres' interactions with the ribbon don't make any sense (at least, if the ribbon and spheres are in fact what they appear to be). But more generally, this was a lengthy studio investigation of depth and dimension, layering and texture, starting with a field of blue and gold stars, and ending with row after row of "heat lines" at the bottom of the painting. The ribbon in particular looks to me like the semi-transparent body of some bioluminescent deep sea creature...so I'll have to study that and try to drop some crazy see-through pelagic beasts in future work.

available - 2009 02 18 Vintage Lounge (Triple Shot, Midnight Aurora, Lucky Raven), 16x24

I probably won't be returning to Tempe's lovely new upstairs club, the Vintage Lounge. My stint there was actually pretty cool: the doorman was an awesome guy, and the photographer (named "Roadrunner") made my evening - think Sam Elliott in The Big Lebowski, only with a camera. "I studied all religions," he told me, "settled on none." His business card reads "Story Telling, Photo Tours, Desert Survival." ...But I'm not a cover band guy. No offense to Midnight Aurora, the only people I've ever seen who had the nerve AND the ability to pull off tributes to both Tool AND The Mars Volta. They definitely made that Stegosaurus a little easier to express. But almost nobody seemed interested in getting on the mailing list, and I had to wait fifteen minutes for the bartenders to refill my glass of water while they goofed off in front of paying patrons...and that's how I know not to come back. Life in Phoenix, so far, has been an experiment in painting at unlikely venues. For example:

available - 2009 02 20 Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre, 16x24

This mysterious affair is what happens when you lure a live painter in from his natural habitat of two- to four-hour concerts and trap him in a chair all day to paint in front of the mostly-elderly patrons of a suburban dinner theatre on their way in and out of Singin' In The Rain. The Broadway Palm's first-ever local arts fair was actually a pretty cool deal (free lunch, interesting fellow vendors, good conversation, and plenty of time to work on my paintings in front of people), although by the end of my first nine-hour day I was ready for fewer compliments on my "good eyesight" and "steady hand," and more new friends who considered what I do to be something more than an amusing parlor trick. I'm totally in love with paradox, so don't get me wrong - I very much enjoyed (if in a somewhat bizarre way) putting my youthful self on display like that. That I need to be working with textile designers was reinforced about a dozen times in one afternoon. And I got to experiment with this intricate affair - what was originally going to be a fairly straightforward painting but got complicated by an unexpected marker explosion within the first ten minutes. By the end of the day, I had a seething, misty, Pteranodon-infested psychedelic dreamscape. Which pretty much described the day, I guess.

taken - 2009 02 21 Broadway Palm Dinner Theatre & Sail Inn (Endoplasmic), 16x24

Take two! Only this time, I rushed off at the end of my day at the Broadway Palm to paint at Tempe's once-and-future king of venues, the recently-resurrected Sail Inn, where Kevin Gordon's improvisational music collective Endoplasmic (myspace.com/endoplasmicband) was playing to my kind of crowd. Speaking of paradox, the Sail Inn is a nautical-themed venue down by the water, yes, in Arizona. It surprised me, too. But there's a canal through Tempe, and a cool almost-sea-breeze blows through the streets there, making it one of the most wonderful places I've found since moving to Phoenix. Endoplasmic is a rotating cast of a dozen great musicians who all take turns rocking everyone non-stop for three hours...a pretty amazing find, here. Although I'd like to say that working on this at the Broadway Palm was pretty cool, too: there was a little girl who kept stopping by during intermission, bathroom breaks, etc. to gape wide-eyed in smiling wonder at this painting...it was a wonderful thing, to make such an impression on somebody. Anyway, this is the first painting I started by laying down a speckling of white spray paint first, which textured the surface in a refreshing way. Not the best example of depth and dimensionality in my work, but a lot of fun while I was working on it.