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

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/)

you have to imagine the title of this being spoken with a ridiculous popeye accent

https://i.imgur.com/91PZ7PA.jpg

Put A Few Corks In It, 18”x26”, oil and acrylic on canvas

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

Waders, 18"x62"

like that one a lot

Thank you! I wish I had used slightly taller stretcher bars. I would be fun to make a life size person

*it!

if i buy it am i allowed to hang it up horizontally?

If you buy it I encourage you to do whatever you please with it. It does look like a star fighter from one side!

a friend of mine mentioned buying it last night, but I haven’t heard back since then. I’m working on a new one now anyway, much smaller. I’m Feeling extremely productive since i stopped drinking (a month this Wednesday) and tapered off my antidepressants. All of that has just been replaced with absurd quantities of coffee

That is a genuine masterpiece, if I lived in the same continent as you I'd give you all my food money for it, then gift it to the next of my friends to marry just cos I could never deserve such a thing

haha, well, i mean that's very kind of you but I could never accept your food money as my food money, it's not right <3

our money is no good here, by which i mean, we don't have any money

https://i.imgur.com/hCSio86.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/iWcN5jf.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/Vhw9Wg2.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/caF7KlL.gif
https://i.imgur.com/sqF8GXd.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/cdsjqTp.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/EABMJx4.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/R4DEs49.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/cCK0upC.jpg

that top image is a drawing of egon schiele's self portrait (grimacing), 1910, and the second image is my version of Chris Kilip's photo from 1983, (Simon Being taken to sea...)

Nice! Last two look like self portraits loosely in the style of Schiele?

strong process bro

ass kicking detected

these are great

hey, thanks you all!

xp lavator i have definitely been looking at my Schiele books a lot, recently. third from the bottom is the one i'm working on now, and although it's a bit of a mess i have been trying to incorporate elements of his self-portraits, like relatively clean lines, flat washes of color for clothing (sometimes), clearly delineated backgrounds and foregrounds.

i've been drawing a lot more, recently. i need to get back to the store and pickup a broader range of colored pencils because my current set (pack o' 24, prismacolor) is not cutting it

oh and that top one from that post above is just a copy of Schiele's Grimacing Man (self-portrait) from 1910, trying to pick up something from him via osmosis. what's crazy is that the original was made using gouache, watercolor, and charcoal.

schiele is pretty much my very favorite painter, i think. that dang spanish flu took out a real one

a couple more from early summer

https://i.imgur.com/jgYuLP6.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/JDGzc8L.jpg

i actually like that bottom one, despite the sloppiness. that was the last drawing I did using chalk/pastels as the source of color. too fucking messy. but in this case it reminds me of the horrible feeling of robotripping

https://i.imgur.com/OoDi7Vd.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/l6zHaQq.jpg

i'm kind of in the uncanny valley between abstract and a realistic portrait, so apologies if that's just incredibly fucked up looking. i am sick of looking at this guy

(gotta light?)