made an account 4 years ago then forgot about it and never posted -_- but im back and here's a few random bits ive done in the last couple years. loads more to share! anyone else out there a painter?

You have to be true to yourself! If this is the kind of art you enjoy making and it satisfies that creative itch, you for sure have to keep at it. Just looking at this painting, it really looks like something that YOU wanted to paint, and in my opinion, that has a lot of weight. You're leaning towards those surrealist/cubist aesthetics, and as Steve said, that stuff is so subjective that it's kind of hard to give feedback. But I do like it a lot, it looks cool and unique, It's definitely interesting. There's always stuff to learn from making artwork in different ways, and maybe it can be useful for you to study from life on the side, but don't let it ever get in the way of 'making art with a capital A' as Steve Huston likes to put it.

I think the way you're using them you shouldn't worry about it. From my little understanding, copyright law is very unspecific and muddled but in theory as long as your works are transformative enough they are considered to be 'fair use' of copyrighted material... but to clarify I'm no lawyer haha. I'm a big fan of the painting btw!

Humm... as far as I'm concerned, I personally would not consider the art piece in the first image may have any "copyright" issue to do with the second one. One can easily argue it's copied/referenced the same way as saying it's not. I think you don't need to worry about it this much. And even if you set out to copy a photograph, you will end up with drastically different result. Commercial stuff "reference" other imagery every day. If you are worried, maybe consciously credit the reference you used. Take these two images below as an example, the concept artist does not mention Andrew Wyeth, but it's more than obvious this is certainly a direct reference. (you can see it on artstation /artwork/28xw8B , proko seems to block links)

The reason its hard to give feedback on this kind of painting is because it is so, so subjective. Its hard to tell what you meant to do, or not. If I was going to say anything, it's that the figure is sitting on these heads, but the heads are not being affected by his weight. The thing is, I don't know if you did that on purpose or not. Other then that, I think the pose is really unique and cool.