Rob Zombie on painting: “I just do it to do it.”

“Drawing and painting are always one of my first loves — that’s what I have always done,” Halloween II (release date August 28) director Rob Zombie, a onetime painting student at Parsons School of Design, says. “That’s always been the thing that’s fallen away. Now it’s something I’ve gotten back into. And I love it….Movies, music — I love all that, but it plays on a different scale,” he says. “It’s millions of dollars, you’re expected to make back millions of dollars. You have millions of people come see it. Painting is much purer. I’m not doing it to set up a show and sell things. I just do it to do it.” According to an interview with Nicholas White in the LA Times, Zombie has no plans for another comic book or graphic novel like The Haunted World Of El Superbeasto (Volume 1), which was published by Image Comics in 2007, but he is painting “gigantic figure-study” paintings of people at his house. “Kind of classic stuff.” At the same time, he admits that “the reality of the business now is that if you have an idea for a movie and if you have done it first as a graphic novel, it really makes trying to sell that idea to somebody much easier.”