Artists always paint the world around them. But since today’s generation of young artist have grown up living partly inside virtual, video-game worlds, I’ve long looked forward to owning some oil paintings done of scenes from games.

Looks like my chance is finally here! A young artist named Jeremiah Palecek in Prague has begun selling painting he’s done of in-game scenes, including ones from Super Mario Bros., Joust, Counterstrike, and the racing game Road Rash (pictured above). As he notes:

I believe it is important to create permanent replicas of digital media because it is something that so many of us experience.

Precisely my point: Games are places we live in as deeply, or in the case of some really hardcore online-world gamers, more deeply than the physical world. We need some art that wrestles with our psychic and visual relationship to these places!

Another artist working in this area is my friend El Rey, who has been painting a series of gorgeous, impressionistic scenes from Half Life 2. You can see a few of his works in progress here; this is a portrait of Alyx Vance, one of the game’s protagonists (Wikipedia entry on her here):

That’s just gorgeous.