FREE ART FREES ART frees art from the Keith Haring getters. I wanted to get the SONG PAINTINGS online earlier as 30 x 24 inch oil on canvas are my top seller, most expensive and high profit item. One of my shops had virtually run out. If I was a cut throat businessman, I’d ditch my other lines and just do 30 x 24’s. Actually, writing this, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll go to THE WORKS in Wood Green tomorrow morning, as they no longer sell online, get a trolley load of 30 x 24 blanks and start making some proper money for a change. The quicker the shops get up to £70 a day, the quicker I’ll be back at Camden. If not, Thailand.
I needed to get the SONG PAINTINGS online fast, but the yellow oil paint was taking ages to dry. All the other colours were bone dry weeks ago. Everything was waiting for the yellow. This morning, the yellow was finally ready so I spent this afternoon photographing and uploading all the SONG PAINTINGS in one hit. There’s five so far: Artery, Spinner Maid, Homicide, Dilated Lines and Find me a Husband. I’m keeping Artery as it was the first, but the other four are all now available.
A lot more gets done, processing as many paintings of the same size and type as possible at the same time. Despite what I just said about being desperate for new 30 x 24’s, I had seven waiting in the attic that I only found this morning. So in total twelve paintings got done today, all but one of which are now in one of my online shops. The tradition is for artists to hire an assistant to do all this for them once they’re making enough money. An assistant would have known what’s in the attic. Now the shops are getting busier, I’m starting to plan for one but it’ll be an administrator, not an assistant. One that has no interest in art and hates my work. Someone who’s going to be happy sticking purely to artless duties like photographing and filming the art and studio, image and video editing, uploading, doing all the social media, finances, updating websites, cooking, driving, running baths and all other domestic duties, art studio stock control, booking trips to Thailand, all shopping, music equipment purchasing and maintenance and all the other crap I have to waste time on instead of getting on with FREE ART FREES ART.
Selling art for money is integral to FREE ART FREES ART, and I’m glad to be incorporating music into it more with these new SONG PAINTINGS. All the songs are from the studio recording part of my recent album, Class. The other part of the album is all home recorded demos added on the end, like bonus tracks. The idea is that my work is so cheap, people won’t mind buying it despite knowing that I also give it away for free. Enough freebies come with the paid work anyway, a YouTube video about which went online this morning racking up twelve views in its first twelve hours.
Most of the work I give away at THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN is on cardboard, not canvas, simply because I can’t afford to give away forty £10 canvases every time I go there. But if the online shops keep getting busier, I’d like to be giving big oil on canvases away at Camden too, and still expect people to be willing to pay £50 each for them online. As an independent artist, I control everything, so if demand goes up I can still keep prices dirt cheap and use my natural prolificness to ensure they stay that way. Keith Haring was told to reign in similarly unacceptable behaviour, and was even accused of selling out when he did his Pop Shop. THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN is London’s Pop Shop. Camden goes against everything I’ve been told and advised to do by those connected to the commercial artworld. The same bods that used to lecture Haring. Both Haring and I are vindicated by Oscar Wilde’s quote about criticism being a mode of autobiography. The elite art community queued up to slander Keith Haring for making his art accessible to everyday people while simultaneously and willfully flushing his reputation with the makers and shakers down the toilet. Haring was doing the opposite of what he was being accused of, by accusers who were only accusing him of doing it because he wasn’t doing what they were accusing him of doing. The sell out’s were the people mocking him for being one. They’ve got Haring now though, but FREE ART FREES ART’s ace up the sleeve is that no one’s interested in what we’re doing. Makes life a lot easier.
