Hey, let me drunkenly animate your photos in about 25 to 60 days!

I have learned that I need to be making more paintings of plants

Baldessari said it best ...

https://www.thebroad.org/sites/default/files/art/baldessari_tipsforartists.jpg

haha, yeah i've read that before! and make sense. one of my current sidequests is to hide some extremely morbid props inside of some lovely flowers and bright landscapes :)

4 different people asked to buy this one!

https://i.imgur.com/QziG4wm.jpg

so i let them know i'll have more plants soon :)

I'm guessing you could combine your love of "horticulture" with your art and target a specific audience :)

looool
if i ever do that...i guess...i don't know. that would be a new era for sure!

There are artists who make good money painting bottles of wine, so who knows?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/273773662966

Thomas Arvid, Wine Artist - "Tour de Force", $51,999

Zach TBD, "the whining artist"

might be able to trick some people :p

i did ok last night! i sold about $850 worth of stuff. that's definitely a bit below my living costs for the month, haha, but I'm reminding myself that when i started on this life/art scheme i told myself that it would probably take a least a year or two before i start breaking even each month. i feel pretty good about where i'm at so far!

heh, by chance i happened to see this just now:

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

Haha. Any acknowledgement of Baldessari's work? Or is it considered well-known enough that it's not necessary?

i think the latter, but i'm not sure. i only ran across stuff a few years ago, but i imagine he's probably in the standard art school curriculum? i have no idea what the kids learn

you can lead a horticulture

https://i.imgur.com/CB8APjV.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/lvPP6K3.jpg

about done with this one, i think, though as always i'm looking at it now and i see so much that i want to work on still. i've spent way too much time on it, though, along with its cursed twin, that green one on the right.

this is my first big commission that i started at my new (well, not new now) space, so i'm hoping they'll like it. but either way, it'll probably be the last of its size (40x60") because those are difficult (for me) to sell at the moment.

i will spam this thread with even more of that same damn painting in a few days, when i finish it up and take a photo of it with something better than iphone8

Would you do a photograph commission?

you mean, to take a photograph? i've never thought about it i guess! you have my email right? let me know what you're thinking!

Will do :)

quincie no worries but if you sent anything i didn't get it! i've changed emails a bunch recently but my current preferred address is tbdzach 4t the gm4i1 dort comm

in the next few days i thought i'd try to crank out a few different versions of these plants from different angles

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

i will paint like the wind - quickly, everchanging, floating, fast, invisibly, through porous objects, under the doorcracks, out of the windows, anonymously

but also, like none of those things, and with a brush, getting it all over myself in the process and then accidentally biting my nails and getting paint in my mouth, raving mad, drinking in the studio, smoking, and listening to master of puppets over and over while reminding myself that i don't really approve of this kind of paranoid, drunk raging pointing accusing hetfield persona of the era, but goddamn it's so good

Zach please don’t get paint in your mouth

i will whatever it takes

silby is now the owner and proprietor of conferencecall.biz. i just work here these days

silby, btw, <3 <3 <3

i was having a convo with someone the other day who was like "yeah no one buys digital art", and i was like hell yeah you're fucking right, but then, in my head, i thought "but silby did, and i really appreciate that", and then i said a version of that out loud afterward

i share these early sketches in the same spirit that i shared my earlier gifs in this thread, now lost to the blackhole of tinypic.com

https://i.imgur.com/5yxl3PX.jpg

i will whatever it takes

in my head, i thought "but silby did, and i really appreciate that", and then i said a version of that out loud afterward

and you know what, a priceless thing was that for once i had a counterpoint to the "digital art is worthless" thing, both for myself and form them. that's what really felt good (and also weird!) at that moment <3 <3 <3

is this getting to satanic for a home (jaq not allowed to answer!)

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

no such thing imo

achievement! first larger painting sold to someone i didn't know at all! it's the "It's All Over" one i finished just last week

or excuse me, i forgot that i titled that one "chicken coop at stone ridge" since that what it was before i painted over it

STONER RIDGE

https://i.imgur.com/YxCv8dH.jpg

nice portrait!

thanks forks! it's always weird with pastels because at any second you can just blow off all the excess chalk and powder and it completely changes everything. i took the piece of paper above and blew the biggest chunks off of it, kind of spotted in with a paper towel in some spots, and put it up on the wall. and then it's weird to decide whether or not to spray it with fixativ at that point or keep it like it to keep adding to it

i finally finished my first big commission, one i had been working on since june. and i just realized i fucked up something, at the very beginning, when i bought the canvas. i bought one brand new, first of all - that was a mistake because it's much less expensive to stretch your own. secondly, i accidentally bought a canvas that was "hand-splined", also known as "gallery wrap".

the vast majority of canvases are the normal "stretched canvases" with staples on the back. it's the default. you can easily take these canvases off the stretcher bars for shipping (rolled up in a tube, the easiest/cheapest way), and they are suitable for framing. looks something like this:

https://i.imgur.com/u65xlpc.jpg

instead, i accidentally bought a "hand-splined" canvas, which is to add insult to injury, is more expensive. this method uses a minimum of visible staples and instead the canvas is tucked down into this little gap around the stretcher bars, including a little plastic "spline" tube that goes around the perimeter. looks like this:

https://i.imgur.com/LzCUP2a.jpg

you can't really take these canvases off the stretcher bars. you, can but it's apparently a major pain in the ass. plus, the way they treat the corners (the "gallery fold) means that they made cuts to the fabric in order to get it to lay flat. this means that even if you did manage to get the canvas off the stretcher bars (for shipping or framing), it will be more difficult to re-stretch because it's missing chunks of it that were previously cut out. this is hard to explain.

in short, i finally finished this bigass painting, and now i have to tell them that it can't be framed, that the shipping is going to be really expensive, and that if they want to try to take it off the stretchers it's going to be a pain in the ass.

i just feel destroyed

like, i don't know whether to frame it go about it like "so this painting is actually gallery-wrapped, so no need to frame this one, and it can just go up on the wall as is!", or "so, it turns out that you can't frame this one, due to the way the canvas is wrapped around the stretcher bars (link to stretcher bars, link to gallery-wrap blog from 2015). and, oh yeah, i think i'm going to have to find a big crate to ship this to you in?"

i guess i could offer a discount since i fucked up, but i already spent four times (2 full months) as long on it as i had originally budgeted/planned on (2 weeks!). i have very little to sell for the upcoming month because i've spending my time on this giant piece of unframeable garbage instead :(

my tactic would be to contact the buyer and share all of that information directly and frankly (including how you feel about the situation) and ask how they'd like to move forward. They may not care or they may be willing to pick it up/have it dropped off at a later date.

it's just...SO much information. and in my previous communications i've made the mistake of just being WAY too much like myself, just talking way the fuck too much, too much, too much. i've been trying my best to just shut up and get to my point with them. but now i feel like i just opened up the most complicated situation, one that takes 5-10 minutes to figure out, and doesn't have a clear answer. it's not the end of the world and i'm sure it'll work out, it's just a big commission and i was really hoping they'd love the painting and tell all their friends etc. now i'm 99% sure it's going to be like a "funny story" (at best)

i've been feeling good, despite what i've been saying this. wrote this a couple weeks after my dad died

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

just for context, my dad was named Earl Grey

dumb

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

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

not dumb. i like it. i want to stop thinking "dumb", i know others want that too, to the extent that anyone cares

i am, currently, at my low, at a sustained high, and out of control, and perfectly control. chicago bears fans are screaming down the street. the alienation is near-total, but also i have so many people around that always encourage me, and i feel very lucky. everything at once. arcade fire #whoasongs

Your work is interesting to me!