Michael Garfield's Love Without End Tour Newsletter: Four New Paintings From An Artist-At-Large... Also, Shredding

18 November 2010

Four New Paintings From An Artist-At-Large... Also, Shredding

• Four Live Paintings From Art Outside Festival & Bear Creek Festival

Juggernaut Paisley
2010 10 22 The Parish, 10 23 Art Outside Festival,
11 11 Bear Creek Festival
(Big Gigantic, Alex B, Govinda, Anahata Sound, Ricochet, Toubab Krewe, Alex B, Rebirth Brass Band, Umphrey's McGee)
24"x30" - paint markers on masonite
original for sale - check asking price / email me
11"x17" prints for sale* - email me

Dedicated to journalist and filmmaker Charles Shaw – who, after we struggled through the first three weeks of our Light & Shadow Tour, finally saw me in my element the night I started this painting in Austin. (Not that I don't love playing concerts to empty churches...seriously, I do.) It ain't easy to share the front seat with someone for six freaking weeks, but eventually, our buddy-cop-movie caricature grew into an assuredly lifelong friendship. Intense art-and-activism road trips come highly recommended, if you're looking for your own forty days in the desert.



Together & All Over The Place
2010 11 11, 12 Bear Creek Music Festival
(Umphrey's McGee, Garaj Mahal)
24"x30" - paint markers on masonite
original for sale - check asking price / email me
11"x17" prints for sale* - email me

Dedicated to Fareed Haque, guitarist of Garaj Mahal, with whom I had an excellent conversation while waiting in the dinner line later that night. Fareed's only moonlights as a rockstar; he's a professor of both jazz and classical guitar most of the time, and recently contributed to a book on the neuroscience of guitar. Needless to say, he has a refreshingly unique perspective on the intersections of music, psychology, and biology, and I hope that we're able to continue the conversation in public at some point...



These Things Happen...
2010 11 12 Bear Creek Music Festival
(Eliot Lipp, Everyone Orchestra, Chali 2na, Umphrey's McGee)
24"x30" - paint markers on masonite
original for sale - check asking price / email me
11"x17" prints for sale* - email me

The second mass extinction on an Earth-like planet three stars away, happening right now. Points to anyone who can identify the film from which I pulled the title for this piece. (Hint: The line is in reference to a different extremely rare and disruptive weather phenomenon...)

Dedicated to biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge for their theory of "punctuated equilibrium," which argued that life maintains a kind of business-as-usual stability most of the time, then rockets through periods of rapid and radical transformation...not exclusively gradual or catastrophic. The fractal landscape of evolutionary change, vast and inexplicable.



Chihuly Oyster
2010 11 13 Bear Creek Music Festival
(Dubconscious, DJ Logic, Eliot Lipp, The New Deal, Bonobo)
24"x36" - paint markers on canvas panel
original for sale - check asking price / email me
11"x17" prints for sale* - email me

Keith Haring went on a date with H.R. Giger...

Dedicated to all of the other live painters at Bear Creek, alongside whom I busted my butt all weekend – and to Carrie Curtis and Chris O'Toole, who were hilariously (at least to me) each charged with the responsibility of coordinating the visual arts there. (What kind of festival hires competing art coordinators??) We had multiple visual artists working the main stage for the entire five-day event, and a real family vibe started growing on me by the end of it. I'm already excited about next year, and want to thank everyone involved for making it happen!



• Bear Creek Festival Gallery & MG/Odenedo Collab

Costumes, collaborations, body painting, and over a dozen live artists...this festival was a treat for the eyes. Check it out:


Each stage at Bear Creek had large wooden placards with the band names painted on them. It was arranged that we live painters could go to town on them, ultimately auctioning them off to support the festival's greening program...so admirable artist Kevin Odenedo and I finally went to it on our first, long-awaited collaboration:

2010 11 13 Bear Creek Music Festival
(The New Mastersounds)
collaboration with Kevin Odenedo
24"x48" - paint markers & acrylic on laminate board

I doodled on numerous band placards over the weekend, but this is the only one that ended up looking even slightly coherent. (Having such a plenitude of live painters was kind of a traffic jam, but it was still a blast.)

• "Autocatalysis" Music Video From The Light & Shadow Tour

And lastly, here's a new video for an old (2005) solo acoustic guitar tapping etude from my first studio album, Get Used To Being Everything. I already have one video of this, but I wanted another that didn't have me yammering on about evolution before I start playing (although this take is somewhat slower than that one). Plus, the forests of North Carolina were too beautiful not to film something there. Enjoy...more for you next week!


* 11"x17" UV glossy poster prints (shipping included):
1/$25, 2/$40, 3/$50, 4/$60