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Oil on Hand-cut Paper
Purple Book36 x 27 cm Purple Clothes36 x 26 cm Purple Poet33 x 25 cm Man and Goat Blue24 x 25 cm Man and Goat Peach24 x 24 cm Man and Goat Orange24 x 24 cm Chicken and Biscuit32 x 24 cm Chickens Eating32 x 24 Chicken and Sun33 x 25 cm
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Was back out doing The Camden Market Free Art Man today. Two sunny days in a row. The Crypto-Social artworks are starting to go now.
See the interview in the YouTube video that starts around 35mins 52 secs, which I’ll do a dedicated separate video about soon, as it’s the most in depth we’ve gone into what the three crypto-social sites are that I’ve discovered through Ron Throop @ronthroop and am getting to learn about with a lot of help from @offgridlife also. Was a slow start at first, getting rid of this series of paintings but both an Ecency and a Steemit 12 inch LP were taken today. I don’t think any Blurt ones have gone yet, which surprises me as I thought they’d be the most popular. So far the Ecency ones are the most popular. Here’s two photos showing each of the three designs:
A very polite young lad deciding between Ecency and Steemit LP’s:
Spot the Blurt LP on show in THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN display
As Camden gets busier the videos get longer and the number of Blond Cards I’m going to need this year keeps going up. Last week I thought I’d need 2000 to see me through till November, but it’s now looking more like 3000. Next year I won’t have this problem as I’ll paint them in Thailand during the winter months. Today’s suitcase full of, mostly, Blond Cards:
The group of four musicians who each took an artwork 15 minutes into the video asked about my rings. I told them I got all but one of them from Shelley’s shop at Camden Market on Makers Alley, called Maddarings. The problem is, it’s hidden away and difficult to direct to. I have a series planned of paintings with text on saying “I get my rings from Maddarings at Camden Market at 620 Maker’s Alley, near the Amy Winehouse statue, near Cyberdog” and a map showing exactly where to find it. Each painting will be of the rings I wear to Camden each weekend:
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Middle-man cutting out at Camden Market yesterday. Galleries out, FREE ART FREES ART in. Didn’t manage to get the Blond Magnums out but will have them as part of the display today. The Camden videos are a lot longer now as I’m not editing them anymore, or even watching them. Maybe when I get an assistant I’ll delegate it to them, but for now I just get home, copy all the footage into the video editor, put on the titles and theme tune and upload. Raw footage is the foreseeable future.
Stay posted for when the video from today’s Camden Market Free Art Man is out to see the Blond Magnums. They’re like Blond Cards but bigger. Part of my new medium sized range. Although I had a family from Essex yesterday take a few of my big ones, other than that though, large paintings have been hard to shift. Hopefully medium sized will go better.
The last two times I’ve taken the Camden Market canvas text paintings out, they’ve gone on their first day. Big canvases go quick, big cardboard goes slow. I have some 30 x 24 inch blank canvases upstairs I’ll use to add to this series. As Advertism goes they’re the best.
The Blond Cards will have a booklet later this year. Ron Throop and I were comparing the cost of booklet production between the US and UK. I think it was over a dollar each in US, UK is 17p. FREE ART FREES ART is being done differently either side of the Atlantic partially for this reason.
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This video was filmed today at Camden Market in London, where I’ve been doing The Camden Market Free Art Man free art giveaway for about two years now. Original paintings given away en masse to passers by willing to do a one minute interview.
Now I’ve finally decided the days and times I can commit to doing The Camden Market Free Art Man this summer, I need to make signage advertising this. Until November, when I plan to leave the UK for South East Asia for a few months, I’ll be at Camden every Saturday and Sunday 12-3pm, unless rain or sickness stop me. I also need to make some repairs to existing signage and paint some more flags as people are starting to take them.
The trip to South East Asia was initially going to be spent entirely in Thailand with my girlfriend Aon and her family in rural Isaan, but it seems visa conditions will be changing that will only give me 30 days instead of the 60 days it was last year. So the plan now is to spend a month in Thailand, then Aon and I go to Vietnam for a month or two before returning to the UK together.
Recently, I’ve been chopping these Camden videos up into vertical shorts for YouTube. The ones I’ve done so far took too long to make, but I’ve just started learning AI so will hopefully have today’s done a lot quicker. A lot of people took paintings today without doing interviews. I don’t mind as I got nearly an hours worth anyway, and it’s not immediately clear that people are expected to do a YouTube interview, so don’t suspect people are doing anything wrong on purpose. But it means I need a lot more Blond Cards than I currently have in storage. Blond Cards are, by a country mile, the most popular artworks I’ve taken to Camden so far. I’d guess 30-40 went out today. 80 a week, 320 a month, six months till November, around 2000 needed for 2026. If I’d known about Blond Cards last year, I could have made a load last winter in Thailand, but didn’t so spent most of the Thailand time making Heckel’s Horse Jr paintings nobody wants.
I used to edit the Camden videos properly, but now just drag the raw files into my video editor, add the annotations and theme tune, then upload to YouTube without even watching it through. To compensate for this, I’m taking a bit more care to film things in the order they’ll work best in, and making a mental note if something happens that I think will need to be edited out. Making all these time saving changes to my workflow helps but soon gets eaten up by new tasks I didn’t see coming. All the time I save tonight, not video editing is gone working on new Blond Cards. Tomorrow, I’ll be at Billy’s studio meaning 5 hours sat on buses and trains learning AI.
Last year I thought this year will have all the background prep work done, meaning more time painting, making music and doing The Camden Market Free Art Man at least 3 days a week. The prep work was what I thought I was doing in Thailand, but wasn’t. I expect this summer and autumn will be spent figuring out how to do Camden, setting up AI agents, and coming back to the UK in early 2027 with suitcases full of mostly Blond Card paintings. Summer 2027 will hopefully be what I thought summer 2026 was going to be this time last year… FREE ART FREES ART properly moving.
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Offgridlife Clayamation: Main | More | Smoking Cat | Lone Kayaker
The third set of oil transfer drawings based on @offgridlife ‘s Free Art Frees Art Claymation Shorts.
Made and filmed at the studio I work at on Monday’s at Chatham Dockyard in Kent, UK. I live in Muswell Hill, North London so is a two and half hour trip each way. They’ll be glued to cardboard and taken to The Camden Market Free Art Man when ready. I’ll be taking a lot more paintings and drawings this size to Camden as it’s currently only my pocket sized work that most people seem to want. Occasionally someone will take a big painting, but they’re too big for most people.
The Camden Market Free Art Man’s getting too Pop Art recently. Some loose oil paintings and music will be added soon and give more space to other Black Ivory work, especially if Emma starts joining in more. The space I used to display at, on the other side of the road’s still available. It would be handy to have two of us there so we could each take a break for something to eat, or take work to the Maddarings stall on Makers Alley that’s currently selling Blond Cards.
The Maddarings shop will soon be just selling Amy Winehouse Blond Cards as it’s right near her statue and I think has only sold a few in the two months they’ve been on sale.
The board of black oil paint is an ephemeral artwork that changes each time it’s used. At least photographing it keeps some kind of permanent record.
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If the barrier to entry is money, the poor are screwed. If it’s effort, the lazy are screwed. I’d rather screw the lazy than the poor.
Free Art Frees Art is available to anyone who can be bothered to turn up and get it. You don’t need to be rich. You don’t need to be on an “Approved Buyers” list. You want a painting? It’s yours. Just turn up, take one, do a quick interview and take it home. FREE ART FREES ART is the Contemporary Art revolution. See you at Camden:
Keith Haring was told to stop making his art so accessible, to stop being so prolific. Pure poison. The artworld’s stranglehold on Contemporary Art is dependent on everyone believing that their attempts to make it exclusive to their pre-selected clients has any value or consequence. It’s dependent on artists believing that engaging with galleries, agents and buyers is a game they need to play to put food on the table. It’s essentially dependent on lies.
Free Art Frees Art is why Heckel’s Horse Jr roams free while Heckel’s Horse remains locked in his stable being groomed and prepped for showjumping season, purely for the amusement and financial enrichment of its captors. Heckel’s Horse is a prisoner of Contemporary Art. Heckel’s Horse Jr is Free Art Frees Art.
Ron Throop @ronthroop and I are bringing Free Art Frees Art to New York and London, respectively. In the process we’re also burning our bridges with the conventional art business model. No gallery will touch me now. My art is everywhere in large numbers , meaning a secondary market would kill any attempt to make my artwork worth anything, at least financially. No gallery would work with an artist who’s committed to giving his art away for as long as he’s producing it. Scratch the surface of what the Contemporary Art market is and the practices it finances, and it becomes clear as day that it’s a network that needs taking down. Napster did it so why can’t we? Technology caught up with music, now it’s caught up with art. We have crypto social sites like Blurt, Steemit and Ecency that I don’t think have seen a single percentage of their potential materialise yet. The Camden Market Free Art Man offers clear conscience guilt free art to the masses, and now has the tools to do it:
FREE ART FREES ART will fail if we don’t do it properly. Can artists survive independent of the art world without charging money for their work? Not just giving away quick drawings and cheap prints, but taking the paintings they’ve done at home on to the streets and just giving it all away? Can artists do this AND destroy the Contemporary Art business model? FREE ART FREES ART will see. Check out @offgridlife who’s doing his own version of Free Art Frees Art in Canada. I’m setting up Paypal donation pages, publishing free booklets, Etsy and Ebay shops for those unable to make it to my free art giveaway, crypto-social sites to drum up some cash by blogging. If YouTube picks up, maybe some money will come from there. Who knows? Plenty of mistakes ahead, I’m sure. If you’re interested in what Ron and I are doing, we publish a lot online and do a weekly podcast. See Black Ivory for more info.
