New Paintings + Light & Shadow: Unplugged Across America

"The nature of infinity is this: That everything has its own vortex, and when once a traveler through Eternity has pass'd that Vortex, he perceives it roll backward behind his path, into a globe itself unfolding like a sun..."
- William Blake

• Light & Shadow: Unplugged Across America

My six-week, thirty city tour with journalist and film-maker Charles Shaw is well underway (full program & itinerary here)...and with all the time we're spending on America's scenic highways, I've decided to take some moments out to record a series of spontaneous unplugged music videos at a few of the most beautiful places we encounter. Here's the first in an ongoing series, delivered as-live-as-possible to all of you wondrous people at home:

(Be sure to watch it in HD – lyrics, info, & embed code are all on the video page)

You'll be able to download the music for all of these videos free here:
http://michaelgarfield.bandcamp.com/album/light-shadow

Want to spend more time exploring our beautiful travails? Check out my regularly-updated tour photo gallery and enjoy how I've abused the macro mode on my new tour camera!

Our next dates are in Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Invite your friends – it's going to be a profound few evenings of conversation and live music!

• New Paintings

Chandelier

2010 09 17 & 18 Granada & Mike's Westsider

(Sub Swara, Quixotic, Sagiquintarius, Mindzeye)

24"x30" - paint markers on masonite

email me for $25 11"x17" prints or to inquire about the original

Zoom in by clicking on the image, and you'll see the myriad tiny rainbows that glisten all over this piece...a further development of my attempts to render crystalline and glassy transparent forms with the limited medium of paint markers. Plenty of glossy goodness, but I made a minor mistake in perspective (email me if you can find it and I'll give you an electronic high-five). This painting is dedicated to my dear friends Tommy and Ruth Carter, at whose going away party (commemorating their move from Kansas City to live with me in Boulder) this was completed.

Temple Burn

2010 09 24 Hodi's Half Note

(Random Rab, D.V.S*, Untied Laces)

18"x24" - paint markers on masonite

email me for $25 11"x17" prints or to inquire about the original

When I got back from Burning Man Festival this year, Boulder's typically bold mountain skyline was shrouded by smoke from a huge forest fire. The Four Mile Canyon fire destroyed over 169 homes, including the new home of my friend Josh Davis and his pregnant star goddess. This was painted at a benefit concert for victims of the fire...I asked another friend of mine what symbol most well-represented the healing potential of this disaster, and she responded, "Don't some pine cones have to burn in order to release their seeds?" Yes, they do. And just like the memorializing Temple Burn every year at Black Rock City, the Four Mile Canyon fire was a sacrament offered up to serve the vision of a new life.

Juliana's Jaguar

2010 08, 09 Rootwire Festival & Studio

16"x20" - paint markers on masonite

email me for $25 11"x17" prints

This portrait of the Water Lily Jaguar is dedicated to my underworld-journeying friend Juliana Willars for her ongoing dedication to reconnaissance on the Other Side...as always with commissioned work I'm glad to have been challenged by the unusual subject, although giving my own touch to the traditional Mayan iconography was surprisingly difficult.

(You can check out some of my other contract pieces here...)

• Press

In related news (insofar as I have made it my career to educate people about their embeddedness in a living intelligence utterly beyond the scale of human drama)...

The lecture I posted last week, "Self As City, City As Self," was transcribed by a gracious friend and is now up online for reading at Reality Sandwich, an excellent change-focused community news site.

The lecture also got a shoutout in TheCoolTV's recent article, "Could Festivals Pave The Way To A More Advanced Society?" (My answer is, of course, "Yes!") And the soundtrack was just reviewed by the Denver Westword's Cory Casciato, who seems unusually susceptible to my music's psychedelic influence...

More new music, art, and assorted multimedia inspiration soon. In the meantime, thanks for reading and have a beautiful week!

(FINALLY) Whole Earth Fest Timelapse Video + Burning Man Lecture + Ambient EP

"When we try to pick out anything by itself,

we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

- John Muir

"Sometimes the questions are complicated

and the answers are simple."

- Dr. Seuss

• New Video, Lecture, & Ambient EP

Once, deep in the misty recesses of time (back in May), I promised everyone I'd have a timelapse video of this painting out "next week." Well, thankfully, I'm on Biblical time here (in which the world is made in six days and your average dude lives to be nine hundred – it's kind of like "dog years"), because that fabled movie is just now ready for your enjoyment.

I had to take care of a few things, first – like recording a new EP of "electronic improvisations on acoustic guitar" in Arcata, California (available here, for free) to use for the soundtrack, and spicing it up with excerpts from my lecture at Burning Man 2010 (available here, for free – and here's the event page, if you want to join the discussion about it, or share with your friends.).

Every once in a while, I like to bust my butt to put together something truly demonstrative of the hypertextual, synchronistic consciousness I'm trying to perform with the rest of my work. Something that challenges me to live even more transparently, even more consistently, to the organic divine mind I try so tirelessly to evoke through description.

So here it is. I suggest watching it full-size if you have the bandwidth...

(Bear in mind, I edited the audio and video separately and was as surprised as anyone to see how the timing came together.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3t80mM2858

Enjoy! Share. Discuss. And email me if you have any feedback, comments, questions, critiques...I wouldn't be putting this out there if I didn't hope it sparks something in you and gets you talking about these things with your friends. Here are links to the other faces of this media crystal:

• Interviewed by Guitar International Magazine

To rev you up for my (also prematurely promised) forthcoming double-disc live album, here are two heady articles from Guitar International Magazine, in which I help you learn to fold the entire universe into a steel-strung wooden box.

This republished mash-up of evolutionary biology and creativity coaching: http://bit.ly/aJEuVT

"Whether it evolved in this generation or the millionth generation before it, every single novelty is born again in every moment without ultimate reason or utility. Even if the feather appears to be used for the same thing in fledge after fledge of birds, each bird rediscovers what to do with its body uniquely, originally, for the first time. Every adapation is a hypothesis, the projection of meaning onto whatever we’re given. When I pick up my guitar and play, I’m agreeing that this is an instrument, that this is a guitar, that I play the guitar, and that I play the guitar in some specific way. That this is what it’s 'for.' But there are an infinite number of ways for the universe to express itself through the functional relationship between a human being and a guitar."

And this rambling, philosophical interview I gave on everything from songwriting to gift economies to my coyote-like relationship with the Boulder music scene: http://bit.ly/cO4dm5

"Human language raised several octaves sounds exactly like birdsong; there’s a fractal structure to communication from the electromagnetic emissions of DNA on up. So I like to write as if the words are music, but I also like playing guitar as if the guitar is actually saying something. As I give more attention to reproducing the cadences and rhythms of speech, a new dimension opens up in my playing. The guitar literally sings."

• Light & Shadow Tour: Exploring Personal & Cultural Transformation

My first-ever national tour, alongside author and director Charles Shaw, starts in Boulder this Friday. I hope you can make it out to at least one of our nearly thirty stops together as we engage audiences in conversation about social and spiritual transformation (and I shred love songs) across the US, Mexico, and Canada...

Next week: new live paintings and studio commissions, and a music video from my upcoming live album.

Until then – thank you, and keep shining, everyone.

Three New Paintings From The Desert & A Few Words About Music

"This is the first thing you learn about the festival: to get there, you must leave here. You must, in other words, cross over, out of the ordinary world. Maybe you haul your tent to a glade in the middle of nowhere, and maybe you just hand some guy your ticket. But either way, you must cross a threshold... Though the festival rarely marks its participants with the obvious cuts and tattoos of a puberty rite, it does hold out the potential for real change, and this potential lies in the liminal: the deeply felt sense that the normal rules are suspended or warped, that a possible world is emerging, and that a new self can rise to greet it."

- Erik Davis, from the introduction to Tribal Revival: West Coast Festival Culture

First, the art. Then, the articles. Thank you deeply for your time and attention...stay in touch and have a marvelous day!

• Images

Tunnel To The Sun

2010 08 21, 22 3SidedWhole

(Rev, Totem, Lunar Fire, Buddha Bomb, Lil Sum'n Sum'n)

24"x36" - paint markers on canvas

email me about $20 poster prints or the original painting

Every time I go back, 3SidedWhole is more and more amazing, more and more a home away from home. An incredible community brimming with love and talent...

This painting, started on a ceremonial all-nighter of legend, is dedicated to the entire 3SidedWhole community – Dr. Blue, Chance, Ron, Maurice, Ben, Issac, Issa, and everyone else who keeps that place humming year round and maintains the vortex of synchronistic potency out there in the New Mexico desert.

Painted as a counterpoint and complement to July's "Tunnel To The Moon," this one emphasizes brilliance over depth, capturing the desert's fiery, spiky radiance. I don't normally work on canvas, so it was cool to get on the other side of the easel from time to time and see the painting from behind, light shining through:

What you can just barely tell from these photos is that the entire piece shimmers with a translucent red, only visible at low angles...with all these shiny touches, this one has two distinctly different characters, depending on where you stand.

Heart/Space

2010 09 01 Entheon Village

(Audiafauna, Kai, Pyronauts Drum Troupe, Govinda, Heyoka, Vibesquad, Opiuo, Antennae)

24"x30" - paint markers on masonite

email me about $20 poster prints or the original painting

Last year, my painting from the Wednesday night dance party at Burning Man's Entheon Village got me on a thematic roll that lasted the better part of a year and still flares up with a vengeance from time to time...so one year later, when the sun rose after a gruelingly awesome evening of nonstop art and love and music, I took a step back and appreciated predictively what a wonderful year of exploration this painting is about to ignite.

This one feels very much like The Fountain's mycelial microscopy shots simulating the Orion Nebula. My dear friend Nicole Taylor – who accompanied me to and around the burn this year and to whom I dedicate this painting - pointed out how this one is reminiscent of those distant dusty stellar nurseries in the Hubble photographs...a place where hearts are born. (Does it sound like Burning Man is a nebula to anyone else?) Which is of course perfect, because the temporary structure in which all of this occurred is called the Heart Space. And those ("heart" and "space") are kind of synonyms, the longer I think about it...as within, so without.

Endlessness

2010 09 02 Portal Patch

(Lynx, Vibesquad, Future Simple Project)

18"x24" - paint markers on masonite

email me about $20 poster prints or the original painting

A variation on the original design I did for Entheon's Heart Space patch last year. After such an epic experience the night before, this one was also an attempt to downstep it a bit and lean into the comfortably familiar, returning to "old" octagonal themes and simple repeating patterns. I love this one for its simplicity, and even if it doesn't capture the same depth as some it has a cool "official currency of space" feel to it. This one is dedicated to Cameron Grace and all the other kids at Portal Patch for putting together such a killer soundcamp year after year.

For those of you who want a better idea of how insanely inspiring Burning Man is, or who are already getting homesick and want to wade around in sentiment for a little while, my photographs from Burning Man 2010 are now online and visible to friends of friends on Facebook. I wrestled with whether or not to hand these over to those rights-grabbing jerks (Facebook, not my friends' friends), but ultimately it was the easiest way to share. So enjoy


• Words

Guitar International Magazine just republished a few of my finer pieces of music writing. As much as I enjoy visual art, part of me is more deeply connected to the ways that language - messy, imprecise, and frustratingly linear – can so clearly and compellingly communicate an idea in ways that sound and symbol cannot. And however much people see me as a painter, I identify at least as much as a poet. So I'm delighted to share these articles with you – many of them are from a few years ago, but odds are that they're new to you:

"The 3-2-1 of Musical Performance" – Taking multiple perspectives on the artist-audience relationship (impersonal other, personal other, and self), and how that changes the dynamics of a concert. One of my friends just wrote to tell me what a difference it made to read this before playing his first solo show at Burning Man's Center Camp Café:

"It was my first time being the only person on stage [as] the connection point to the audience. And having that awareness of playing with the audience turned it into this beautiful experience of oneness, being connected on such a deep level that there was no me and them. That experience has opened me up to realizing that I'm ready to go out in the world and share that with all those who are open to it."

Best review I've ever had?

"You're the Musician; YOU Make Some Noise!" – Who is actually responsible for the creative act of the live music experience? Further explorations in breaking down that artist-audience barrier...except when it belongs there.

"An Ode to the Chapman Stick" - Waxing (very) poetic about one of my favorite instruments and its sacred significance.

"Best & Worst New Musical Instruments of the 2000s" - Part of a writer's poll for H+ Magazine, in which I stick it to Guitar Hero with one hand and exalt the Reactable with the other.

Lastly, I recently gave a brief interview about my music to Colorado's Mousike Magazine: "Esoteric and intricate, I found myself struggling to describe his sound and style..."

Next newsletter: The musical highlights of this summer's Love Without End Tour; audio from my lecture, "Self as City, City as Self" at Entheon Village 2010; and probably, yeah, some new artwork.