zach's old animations and new visual art, updated every 25 to 60 days

it's pronounced "Centorgs"

i think before we go any further with this, we need to think about the origin story of the centaurs. and i'm talking about a human having sex with a horse, the real deal, and how their relationship affected other humans and horses that knew them at the time

zoophile mad scientist and her cybernetically augmented offspring, their dynasty controlling the grim near future with iron hooves. literal iron hooves!

just checked, preview track still slaps

thanks cat! you are very encouraging :)

i calls ‘em like i sees ‘em, bub 🕶

i am hoping that we can sell 33 tapes. that's my breakeven point with cassette tape costs, and plus i want a good excuse to put out another release and do more recording with carrie.

carrie is a funny person, and would be amazing on ilx. i'm in a low-key long-term campaign to get her to join

https://twitter.com/TheGnarrator/status/1466511663151079424

alright, the horse puns are out for real today! no more bullshit!

https://softerdrive.bandcamp.com/album/four-of-horses

i saw your message cat, thank you so much! i hope you are ZONIN now

https://c.tenor.com/kuSoD0BPiMIAAAAC/meow-trance.gif

i'm starting the first of 2 small sales on my instagram (@Zach_TBD, in a few minutes. the first will be 10 drawings, all pencil on paper, most on 9"x12", each $50

first positive music review of my life i think?

I really hoped to have time to write about this album before the end of the year, but ran out of time (maybe in January!), but this Softer Drive (@TheGnarrator & @weinventyou) is excellent. I've been listening to it quite a bit the last couple weeks. https://t.co/7tfsJ0GWWa

— Foxy Digitalis (@foxydigitalis) December 17, 2021

Sometimes I try to put myself in a state,
call it Loose Control, for now,
where expressive results are bent into javelined roads,
thin and slivering lines which get all covered up
and forgotten under relentless waves of new stuff.

Imagine automatic writing but more visual,
thin and slivering lines instead of language,
the brush’s residuals replacing the text.

When I Loosely Control my hand starts to move
on its own, independently,
thickened water sloshingly flying
up and around the edges of a bucket
which is swirling in elliptical orbits,
the inverse of my motions,
the effects of my causes becoming
untethered from their origins,
and yet I know that I am part of it all.
It is from me and yet it doesn’t see me.

A forgotten mark gets scattered up,
reforms as a ladder and tips
in new directions,
one of many landing strips,
loud movement then stillness,
a flood and then a covenant.

I make my bed and then I sleep on top of it.
My heart beats uninterrupted.
It makes me live so I listen,
five liters of blood in a circuit,
all sustained without a rhythm.
I don’t understand but I trust that I will wake up safe.

safe at the end, whoops

or actually, i'll replace the last line with

I don’t understand but I still wake up.

https://i.imgur.com/edNHfhP.jpg

fuck, i accidentally left in "thin and slivering line" twice. how embarrassing.

thin and slivering lines which get all covered up
temporary paths getting covered up

it's important to me OK

https://i.imgur.com/DR4ctnf.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/apQ6dlg.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/mfU6VaC.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/ZFksfnt.jpg

Karl <3 if i weren't drowning in a bucket of shit right now i could maybe offer more substantial appreciation, but i can at least say that's a beautiful poem and your art is evolving fascinatingly

cat, the fact that you would say that even when you're in a bucket of shit says a lot. thank you <3

4 dayo:

https://i.imgur.com/JrtN1k4.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/3R4PYKq.jpg

those are pretty great

Thanks! The one on the bottom is just a detail from the one on top. I should probably have more detail shots, in general. Usually I just post the full zoomed out version but there’s more going on close up

https://i.imgur.com/Ov9KNQu.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/KZzHKVR.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/2O1esnH.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/oNGMATo.jpg

cassettes are finally done!

https://www.discogs.com/release/21231103-Softer-Drive-Four-of-Horses

COVETING

speaking of, i'm FINALLY mailing them out today! I just got the final supplies on Christmas Eve so I've been busy assembling and waiting for the post office to reopen :)

out of this tape hiss comes some light

my wanderings have dropped me off here,
old train running on a fresh sea,
with fingertips all cut up and worn down from
constant use, my newer skin turns rough

I wanted someone to talk to but instead I had a beer
or two and I wrote. it’s only more water pushing against my barricades.
we build ourselves back up and see each other off at the door.
I wonder who is watching who.
I wonder how long I can keep this up.
I think about what it would be like to see you stop.

I broke your locks but fixed your door sweep.
Your car was fine but I brought it to the shop.
I made your day easier and that was enough.

Tough love, that’s kid stuff.
I’ll clean the dirt off, don’t worry.
Your hands are blistered.
Mine are sweating. My glasses fogged up.
I drop off the kids at school.

Two-step around the room.
The drums and the singing
and I’m feeling warm again.
I’m stretched out and dry.
crushed in, drawn tight
I haven’t touched skin so soft in years,
my knuckles pop like firecrackers,
My hands are stupid bricks.
My WPM is 96.
The words pile up and I keep writing.

There’s a ship that sails back.
1I can still see it.
I think about my humanity.
I think about my spirit
Dancing with the one thought
brought me out of town and sideways,
a long nap in the evening
unwarned
unearned
walking on air, enchanted.

That’s beautiful, KM. Love it.

thank you lavator! sorry for delayed response!

should have stopped here, maybe?

https://i.imgur.com/YCcGOzk.jpg

but instead finished here

https://i.imgur.com/23SEwF1.jpg

pastel and charcoal and pencil, not paint, just to be clear!

although i am trying to finish a small oil commission ("clouds") tonight as well

https://i.imgur.com/H0P9FlZ.gif

i finally finished this last night. the commission was for "clouds"

https://i.imgur.com/Ef7hWNU.jpg

also i finally finished making my basic-ass website at zachtbd.xyz, so that's a better permanent spot with my own full-resolution and thumbnail images and all that

your work has been fun to watch explore and evolve!

thanks forks! it has been a pretty great day. i just finished giving a drum lesson, one of my first times doing that, and first time getting paid. it's a friend of mine so that made things much more relaxing. the beginner song was billie jean. so much fun to really sink into that with her today and watch her pick it up. it's weird because when you're doing something like that it seems like it has nothing to do with painting, but then i got home and just wanted to go go go. i'm rehabbing an older one from last summer that i never finished, now

freal this thread is like sedimentary layers of artistic evolution/exploration, and the interspersed link rot is evocative of the lacunae between sappho’s fragments. in 30 yrs this entire sucker should be in a museum somewhere.

https://i.imgur.com/k985bHC.jpg

that's beautiful, how big is it?

thank you. i'm still changing it a bit, starting to feel that horrible feeling in the stomach though, so i am going to stop today no matter what.

it's a very plain 24"x24" (oil, acrylic, oil pastels on canvas)

i like it, it seems kind of gentle but with a busy little hum to it, like a honeybee

i am shit at reading visual art tho, could as easily be a genocide

Great work.

thank you jimbeaux and cat! it looks a lot different now. i went too far, again. but i'm trying to embrace the total mistakes and turn it into something else.

i keep going "too far", and i know the reasonable thing to do is just stop when it starts to seem like it feels done. but, honestly, i aspire to be a very good painter someday, and part of that is i want to be able to "keep going" and actually pull it off. i would to be able to take some big risks and have them occasionally work out. so i'm trying not to beat myself up over ruining paintings like this now, because that's like a training point toward a future painting where i go for it and don't fuck it up

also, one benefits of the low/no-stakes life is that it truly doesn't matter

https://i.imgur.com/djpV0vZ.jpg

welp, i definitely took things too far and it went away from where it was earlier, but also i didn't think i'd be drawing leopardskin underwear so i'm gonna call it even

also, just because that painting probably does not suggest the following anecdote, i have not drank in 12 days and that is definitely a personal record for me going back to before this thread started

let me non-drunkenly non-animate your non-photos on my own time

(many xps to Lavator Shemmelpennick: thank you! meant to say that back then!)

all good km - love your presence on the board and watching your artistic sensibilities develop across media

and good for you for laying off the alcohol!

thank you Lavator!

it hasn't been nearly as hard as I thought it would be, to stop, although i have definitely struggled a few times. relevant to painting, especially, i settled into a habit of having a bottle of wine open as i painted, from the very beginning. it doesn't help that a lot of artists i look up to were heavily dependent as well. i finally got my copy of 9th St Women (wonderful book) back, so i've been finishing up the last half of it. it's sad, around 1950/1, to see willem de kooning finally succumb to full alcoholism, by which i mean, he reached the point where he fused it with his creative drive, which was unstoppable, and they went hand in hand from then on

(until the near end, apparently. https://www.myrecovery.com/willem-de-kooning-his-alcoholism-and-art/)