Michael Garfield's Love Without End Tour Newsletter: New Merchandise Store & CO Paintings

26 August 2009

New Merchandise Store & CO Paintings

First of all, I'm excited to announce that I've been inducted into the roster at ArtsProjekt.com, a super-hip and progressive online artists' collective. Which means that I have a new merchandise shop – now, you can buy my artwork in the form of postage stamps, coffee mugs, postcards, buttons, stickers, skateboards, and soon plenty of other items. I'll be adding new products with some regularity and am happy to take suggestions, so if you have any ideas for sweet art/merchandise pairings let me know! And enjoy your new options...

2009 08 14 Mishawaka Ampthitheatre (EOTO, Vibesquad, Big Gigantic)
16"x24" - paint markers on masonite
Another trip out to the beautiful Mishawaka Amphitheatre yielded this lively number...an attempt to cover "surfaces" with tetrahedral reliefs, a la the Epcot Center's Spaceship Earth and other quasi-geodesic structures. Thanks to the Mish's crazy late-summer weather, I did indeed get to paint while it was raining for a while...right next to me, fellow painter Kenzie Page was having a blast with her drippy acrylics, whereas my pens were impervious to the weather. It worked out for both of us. The show was a blast – I've made it known on every possible occasion how much I enjoy painting for all of those artists. And I got to soak up a lot of Colorado love, lots of friends I haven't seen in ages. This show made it very, very hard to stay away.

2009 08 15 Boulder Theatre (Freq Nasty, Heavyweight Dub Champion, Ana Sia, Jantsen)
20"x30" - paint markers on masonite
The next night was the homegrown SoundQuake Fest at the Boulder Theatre – a real landmark venue, and one I'd never painted in before (although once upon a time I DID get to play Chapman Stick on stage there, for the 2008 Bao Bao Festival, in a fairly ridiculous highlife band). Majestic and spacious, the Boulder Theatre was decked out with fabulous chill spaces and a stage half-filled with busted old TVs displaying static and weird visual noise. My man Ralf put the whole show together himself, a real grassroots achievement...even if the Boulder crew was strangely thin that night, probably still burnt out from Phish tour and STS9's Day Out Of Time. Eva Andreano set up along the opposite wall, painting on board and frame all at once. And I ran the whompy, aggro theme of the night, applying my unique appreciation for heaviness and paradox to the night's work. It feels good to be getting back to more focused, centralized, object-oriented compositions, after a summer of so much play with background layers and fields. This piece goes out to a special woman in my life, who wonders if our feelings for each other are more wings or anchors. Here's your answer, babe.