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

uh shoot, i deleted the top image (a real life image of my front porch) because i forgot that my real life address is on there. in case it still somehow gets through, please do not sell my real life address to the spam crew

here is a sanitized version https://i.imgur.com/bz66tbA.jpg

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/seinfeld/images/5/54/Seinfeld_kenny_rogers_roasters.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20101004134329

ugh, sorry you have to deal with that km. can you gently suggest he replace the bulbs?

and i really love the painting!!!

uh

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/seinfeld/images/5/54/Seinfeld_kenny_rogers_roasters.jpg

thanks lavator!

yeah, the light thing is funny and impossible. i'm not even going to try to do anything about it. the deal is, one of the tenants (one of those doors) is elderly and all she cares about in life - besides stopping abortion and banning contraception and saving people from the covid vaccine, which she believes makes men impotent - is calling the landlord and complaining about stuff. she moved in on the same day i did, last year. since then i've heard dozens of things that she believes are horrible and insufferable in our apartment. there has never been a time, since the very first day, when she was not on an epic tirade against the property management and waiting for them to call her back, waiting for a maintenance guy, always waiting on something that she was expecting to happen. i mean, of course i respect the endless epic battle against the landlord. i think i'm on my 14th or 15th rental in 20 years. landlords are horrible. but in this case...our house is...fine? maybe my standards are low.

ANYWAY, for months and months she complained about our front porch light. it was too weak, and it starting to flicker. it was kind of annoying, i get it. the problem, though, is that she had bugged them hundreds of other times about other things that were trivial. so around the time the porch light was flickering, she went on another epic quest to get it fixed, and annoyed them so badly that the property management sent out an email to every single tenant asking them to no longer call them with requests, but to put it in email instead, and that "our agents are doing what they can to get your concerns addressed...while constant phone calls actually impedes the process and slows down our response times to and for you." which was kind of bullshit but i 100% get it with this tenant. she asked for my number repeatedly and i never gave it to her because i don't have the willpower to listen to her complain about how everything in life sucks so badly, every single day.

ANYWAY, they finally replaced the light, i'm sure she wanted it as bright as possible, and i'm sure they were like "have at it, here are the airport lights"

i asked if she renewed her lease. she did. "why?", i said, given all the problems. she just shrugged and laughed. hey i get it

i see. obnoxious tenant vs passive aggressive landlord. sorry you're caught in the middle. but maybe those lights protect you from covid so it all fits together

i use the lights to tan my balls to counteract the sperm-destroying character of the covid vaccine

it's a delicate balancing act to be sure

Characteristics of a Railroad-Style Apartment
۞۞
Commonly found in tenement-style, walk-up, multi-family buildings
Long and narrow rectangular floor-through layouts
Rooms flow into one another generally with hallway(s)
Railroad layouts may include one central hallway, room-dividing archways, or in some cases a hallway off to one side with multiple entry points
Bright annoying light in front of building
۞۞

recent gouache paintings

https://i.imgur.com/vi5mjjM.jpg

one of them is a copy of a famous artist, you can probably tell which one

Dégas lower right? Shit man, this is getting really good, very muscular rendering and colour tension. A+

oh thanks! it's actually the one in the middle-bottom, which is a quick version of a toulouse-latrec. the rest are from a workshop i've been taking the last couple months. i've really found some kindred spirits, a pair of teachers, younger than me by quite a bit (i think -- i haven't asked their age) that i really respect a bunch. i've never had the opportunity to have a live model to look at while i paint, and i didn't realize what a big difference it makes.

*lautrec

all of these (except the one at the bottom i copied) are quick - 1 hour poses, 4 15-minute sessions. it's been amazing to work on them, up there with the best experiences of my life, truthfully. it's so hard (for me) to fill it all in, to block it all in, in an hour. there's simply no time. i feel the wrinkles in my brain forming, in real time. it's crazy, i love it <3

wonderful work, really enjoy it

nice work man!

great stuff karl. solid work, good proportions. painting/drawing from life is the best, i miss it. i love how the longer you look at something, slowly you start to see more and more - colours, textures, forms. and yes it can be super intense, when i was doing 15 minute portrait paintings, "i feel the wrinkles in my brain forming, in real time" captures it perfectly!

powerflow state

thanks corrs, forks, and ledge! here's a better photo of the last one i finished:

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

this makes me wanna do some studies and still lifes, my sense of perspective is all fucked

https://i.imgur.com/27by4Nq.png
https://i.imgur.com/Fd40nOq.jpg

i've been doing nothing but figure drawing/paintings the last few months, but did something more abstract tonight on my own, with no reference.
i'm not sure if anything meaningful comes through but i can feel a change in how i see things, compared to a relatively recent time, and in a year or two or five of really despondent times it feels like a bright spot that if nothing else, when i try, i see things differently now

https://i.imgur.com/zNE94nF.jpg

love that plant, something about the lines make it very action packed

thanks corrs! i did that one at my friend's house - she has a wonderful sun room and lots of beautiful plants. my place, in contrast, is very dark and has zero living organisms other than me, my dog, and whatever tiny invisible creatures are crawling around the surfaces.

in the year 2023 i resolve to paint more plants

year 2023, more plants!

https://i.imgur.com/uB8pZIk.jpg

love it!

how big is it?

yeah, that's gorgeous

thanks! it's 11"x14"

one of my favorite things about this workshop i'm taking is the range of ages and experience among our smallish group. there's a young college oil painter who is very skilled, and his mother, who is just a phenomenal watercolorist (and amazing at charcoal as well). there's me, i'm hanging in there. a few others. then there's an 18-year-old who is talented and applying/getting accepted into some well known undergrad art programs, but is also extreeeeemely opinionated, and usually in the negative direction.

that is the context for my favorite quote from today, which was "I hate Mark Rothko", me: "whoa, really? I love Rothko", them: "Rothko is so...passé"

:-o

lol classic 18 year old stuff

there was also the usual "duchamp sucks" thing, but that was the whole room. i am always willing to stand up for Fountain. but total dismissal of a readymade is to be expected, especially among people who are really into figurative art.

they didn't realize he painted nude descending a staircase, though. people seem to be more forgiving of shenanigans if you can paint something cool first

i remember when i could get angry about art

xp Étant Donnés often startles Duchamp skeptics too.

first oil painting in forever (a few months)

https://i.imgur.com/cIyTM7r.jpg

i'd really like to try a figure painting (of a person) in oil, using some of what i've learned recently, but it's tough because i'd have to do it from a photo

it felt satisfying to finish this one though, because i painted on top of an extremely bad figure painting i did last year at this time. i hope to keep improving, but it felt good to literally paint over something that was disappointing!

xp Étant Donnés often startles Duchamp skeptics too.

i'm not sure i've seen that before, thanks! and also, i'm not sure i've seen a composition that is blocked in that way before, so completely black with the bricks...it really does make you feel like you're peeking out of a dwelling dug into the side of a hill, hobbit style

baller painting, that

thank you! i've gotten some good feedback on this one and it was heartening because i was afraid that it was in an uncanny valley between realism and abstraction. not that it resembles any of his work, but i recently picked up a big book of matisse paintings (the '92 moma retrospective book) and was really enjoying all of interiors which featured paintings within paintings. The Red Studio is better known, but i really like The Pink Studio as well

uncanny valley between realism and abstraction

haha, thanks! glad it strikes the right balance for you. there's also the balance between what is more or less 'finished" and what is quickly sketched. i guess those two things map are highly related to realism and abstraction, except that every once in a while a very sketchy flick of the brush creates something that reads as more realistic, while another part that comes off as an abstraction of what should be there takes a bunch of work and color adjusting. it is very confusing and, for me, easy to land in a weird space! haha. ok, time for bed lol

love those colors on the wall to the right, around the lamp

i learned how to do monotypes this weekend! probably a familiar term to most people reading this, but to me it was new. in short, it just means taking a painting that is still wet and pressing it against a dampened piece of paper to transfer the painting. "mono" in this case refers to it only being possible to make one unique print - as you can imagine, after smooshing two pieces of paper together, the original painting is altered and so it wouldn't look the same if you made a second monotype out of it. (if you do make additional monotypes, those are called "ghost prints".) it's also one-of-a-kind/unique in that the transfer of the paint or ink from one surface to another with this method is inherently unpredictable, since it depends on the thickness of the paint, how wet the original painting surface is, how damp the target surface, how you press the two surfaces together, stuff like that.

i wish i would have taken more photos of my original paintings, because after you make a monotype the original is forever altered. but here is one that worked out ok:

https://i.imgur.com/xeutK1u.jpg

and here's what the monotype looked like:

https://i.imgur.com/K8GqRKD.jpg

there was also another version (i didn't take a photo of the original) that produced a very uneven transfer, and i ended up liking that result the best of all:

https://i.imgur.com/oITuC68.png

er oops, the second image was supposed to be this

https://i.imgur.com/g4epoqk.jpg

most confusing post ever, sorry. all of this was with gouache on a fiberglass plate. lemme know if you're reading this and have tried other materials (like ink) or other methods!

interesting!

fun, quick, and a bit experimental too! I’m going to pick up a couple pieces of fiberglass next time I’m at the art store so I can make some at home. I like the dada aspect of having to destroy the original as part of the process

https://i.imgur.com/67rT0BP.jpg

added the figure in later on copying this https://www.famsf.org/artworks/seated-girl-ii-bather

did not mean to make baseball reference

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

https://i.imgur.com/DaKoX4j.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/ZA0YgD4.jpg

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