In case you missed it on Twitter (what? You don’t already loyally follow my inane ramblings?), I got a new easel this weekend. It’s aluminum, and it wouldn’t have been worth the $100 Michael’s wanted except for their awesome 40% off coupon. That made it a worthwhile impulse buy, I feel.

And now it’s had its inaugural painting session. There’s paint on the metal now, and that means it’s real. Much like my return to the land of applying oil and pigment to pieces of board and canvas.

This one’s basically for Max.

Grump #1

I’ve added four new paintings to the site: Grump #1, Face #1, Albert Speer, and Memories From My Life As A Bird #1. All of which will be showing at Holiday Rawk next Thursday, if you’d like to get up close and personal. Especially Albert Speer, since the dozens of layers of stand-oil glazing make it a very different piece to see in person than in photograph.

See them in the Oil section here: http://zedmartinez.com/paint/oil

These are made on hardboard left over from building my Oranje booth last year, btw, and I expect to do maybe a dozen or so in the series. I have enough board for it, at any rate.

I have a studio full of paint. Paint never sells. That’s the truth. But, it was never about the money. Paint is always for its own sake. I do design for money, and photo, and that lets me keep the paint for me.

I think I’m calling this one done. Anyone remember when art was fun, and you could just do a piece and not labor over every aspect of it and wonder what people were going to think of it and whether or not you’re just a two-bit hack pushing some pigment around to no avail?

Yeah, me either. I’m trying, though. I don’t remember getting into this for it to seem like work. There’s work for that.

So, I’ve had an idea for a while to start doing portraits based off the 30 second sketches I used to do of classmates in university, and which I might start doing again down on the circle or at Starbucks. The sketches are very quick, and crude, with mostly angular representations of real features. So far the result is looking a bit like fauvism and cubism had a fucked-up-flipper-baby, but, I like the experience of working in a slightly different style, you know?

Yes, her eyes are too big. I’ll be fixing them once they dry enough for me to do so. Also, her dress will be white. That’ll get fixed when the eyes do.

I know, I know. I finished writing another novel, and I’m back to painting. It is clearly the end of the world, or something.

By the way, I still paint. In Theory.