• Posters: signed print on 11"x17" glossy 100 lb. cardstock, shipped in a plastic bag with cardboard backing.
• Giclées: Signed and numbered (series of 25) high quality archival print on canvas. Finished with a colorfast UV gloss varnish, stretched on 3/4" bars, and shipped with hanging hardware.
Original piece painted live with oil & acrylic markers on masonite (24"x32") at Firefly Gathering & Sonic Bloom Festival 2015 during the music of Warp9, ProJect Aspect, PEGA5U5, Unlimited Aspect, Cirque Roots w/ Jyshua Pcalyps, Deya Dova, Aligning Minds, Nanda, Luminaries, Safi's Lab, Little Giants, Saqi Live Band, Jeremy Sole, Nickodemus, The Trancident, Shpongle, Sonic Bloom Orchestra, Kaminanda feat. Eve Olution, Phutureprimitive, & Random Rab.
A portrait of the roadrunner ( Geococcyx californianus) that lives in the yard of my hypnotherapist friend in Albuquerque. I feel a kinship with these birds. They're fast, alert, decisive creatures, not excellent flyers but agile, charismatic, colorful, and radiate the strange enchantment of their desert home. They're sometimes called "Snake Eaters" because they're quick enough to eat rattlesnakes (and catch dragonflies and hummingbirds from the air) – that alone is amazing, and in fact while I was working on this painting at Sonic Bloom Festival, at the foot of the Spanish Peaks in southern Colorado, a friend of mine found a rattlesnake among the tents and killed it with a hatchet. He showed me the tail tip and the rattle that he kept, the tail still squirming on the hatchet blade.
Something about the esoteric relationship between the bird (transcendent potential) and snake (vital energy) is very much alive in this animal's significance in medicine traditions. The roadrunner appears to help a person navigate a major change, a totem of "forward escape" through transformation, the serpentine libido channeled into swift and brilliant action. Because two toes point forward and two back on each foot, forming an "X" shape, you can't tell whether their tracks are coming or going – much like Hermes, who in the myths walked backwards from the scene of his crime so as to confuse investigators. Thinking faster than the other guy, dancing around the competition – this is my kind of bird.
On the last night of Sonic Bloom, a windstorm picked up and I spent the last five hours of this painting (to Kalya Scintilla, Phutureprimitive, and Random Rab) holding the easel down and gripping the painting in one hand so it wouldn't fly away. The whole thing was taped down with gaffing tape but it was still bucking like a horse, and I was high on the adventure of it all, the other twenty seven painters all packed up, not even trying to paint in these insane conditions. But that is where I thrive – absurdly, in the crisis and the hardship, just like the Greater Roadrunner. I'm glad I finally got around to honoring this creature and its awesome ecosystem with a painting...something tells me it won't be the last.
Browse my art on leggings, iPhone cases, pillows, mugs, and many other items:
https://society6.com/michaelgarfield/
Browse my art on leggings, iPhone cases, pillows, mugs, and many other items:
https://society6.com/michaelgarfield/