Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Zack Weaver. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Zack thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?

Life as a creative is one gigantic risk comprised of an infinite number of small risks. Personally, you risk your health. You risk your safety. You put at risk the relationships you have with people that love you. You risk it all because you are driven to create. You are driven toward magic. Magic doesn’t come from safety and consistency.

I believe the difference between an unfinished and finished piece is essentially risk. You can bring a canvas or clay or what have you to a point of technically being completed. Someone may even be willing to display or even purchase it.

A true piece of art, however, requires at some point in it’s creation one big, bold move. You must at some point channel chaos in such a way that you might not be able to reign in. Take your painting or whatever it may be to a point where you know it could pass as done. Technically, you’ve hit all your marks. That may be two hours it may be two hundred hours. You know it’s passable but you also secretly know you’re holding back. Now take a big fat brush covered in a purple you’ve never even seen before and swipe it right across the whole damn thing. Now the art has actually started. At the point of risk.

Zack, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I reference painting more often as not, as that I consider the backbone of myself as a creative. It’s the source, the heart and the old one. However film is my life, my trade, my industry and profession. Where passion lies between the two is fluid and confusing. I’ve been a drawer since first grade. That’s always felt more like a tick than anything. Movie became an obsession around middle school, and I went to Full Sail in Orlando for film at 18. All the while continuing to draw progressively but passively on my own time.
After graduating film school I moved to Wilmington NC and started working in set decoration on One Tree Hill. I spent the last 5 seasons of that series learning from masters of what would become my professional craft. While this was the education I needed it wasn’t necessarily the creative satisfaction I was searching for.
I started to fall in with other artists. Mixed eccentrics with mixed focuses. Performers. Poets. Painters. Wild people.
So I rented a studio space and immersed myself. Painted around painters. Started framing things and attaching value. Started doing shows. Along with a subculture within this subculture at this time, grew a real passion for live painting. Started doing weekend bar shows and painting at festivals through the summer. Expanded my mind and community. Fell in love. slept outside. Experienced everything I could in every way I could to feed the machine.
These days I do more movies than festivals, but I approach both the same. Once I stopped separating the two worlds I became more successful in both. Regardless the project you’re hiring me for, it’s understood I will approach the work as an artist because that is the best form of me.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Something I feel like I had to relearn that I would instill on younger creatives is what the idea of success as an artist looks like.

There are magazine covers, there are gigantic contracts, there’s fame and fortune. There isn’t anything wrong with that, if that’s what drives you. However there is also paying your rent on time with nothing but what you make from the things you love.
There are the friendships you grown with artists you respect because of what you put into your work and the person you are.
There are the weird gatherings of creatives that nobody else is privy to.
There are quiet nights on the couch with a sketchbook that nobody can take away from you.

There is the contentment that comes from quietly knowing you can make something from nothing.

Never let anyone tell you what successfully using your talents looks like. Thats for you to decide, evolve, discover etc.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I want to create something so intensely developed, so immensely beautiful and horrible and emotionally confusing, so time consuming and pointlessly detailed that an average person looks at it, looses their grasp of what a human is capable of pulling from the universe, and the literally vomits on the spot.

No metaphor. I want them to puke.

Contact Info:

• Website: zweaverart.com
• Instagram: @zweavz
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/zachariah.weaver/