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Billy Childish Quoted as Blowing Smoke – Painting 1
A series of paintings I’m making in response to a quote in the book To Ease My Troubled Mind – the Authorised Unauthorised History of Billy Childish by Ted Kessler. Eventually this series of paintings will be part of a display at The Camden Market Free Art Man dedicated to my response to the following text in…
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The last three weekends have been too hot to do The Camden Market Free Art Man, allowing some time to upgrade its signage. Alan, the Camden Market Town Crier, has been advising me on my display for months and so far, all his suggestions have worked. He says a yellow background theme works well for our patch at the Camden Lock bridge. Kozmic Records, the local record fair Alan and I promote do black letters on a yellow background, so hopefully my new signage will look good alongside John’s Kozmic Records posters. Here are the placards half finished:
These were all done with cheap paint, so took up to four coats of each colour. PVA glued for a gloss finish. Double primed the thick cardboard first. The idea is to make my display compete with both Alan and Zombie, the punk rocker who sits all day on the other side of the bridge. People come to Camden just to see Zombie and have their photo taken with him. People are constantly asking Alan to pose for a photo with them, all dressed up in his town crier’s uniform. Unlike Alan and Zombie, I dress in normal clothes at Camden so am rarely asked for a photo, but I’d like more people to find The Camden Market Free Art Man display worth a picture. I can understand why most don’t. My old signage is scrappy and half-arsed. I still don’t think I’ve done enough, but these new ones are a step in the right direction.
I’ll be making more text art using these colours. There’s a lot of info I want to get out into the public domain that no one will read in any other format. Not least, the recent hoo-ha over Ted Kessler’s Billy Childish biography that has a completely untrue and misleading quote about the paintings Billy and I do together under the alias Heckel’s Horse. Here’s me moaning about it at the time:
Who knows how many copies of this book are out there in circulation? I’ll have to get this series underway soon. It’s old news now, but another series of text paintings I’d like to do will be about the suspected plagiarism of my work in the 2024 Turner Prize. The press, pretty much, universally ignored the story at the time. So, here are the finished versions:
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HHJ Home | Etsy | Ebay | Release Heckel’s Horse | Donate
You can buy my Heckels Horse Jr. paintings in my Etsy and Ebay shops. On stretched canvas so arrive ready to hang. Free postage to UK and Europe. They are based on the Heckel’s Horse paintings I make in collaboration with Billy Childish. I started making Heckel’s Horse Jr. paintings in 2022, around nine years after Billy and I started Heckel’s Horse.
THIS WEEKS 99p Ebay Auction Painting is
GIRL & DOG:
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Three a Day: Home | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
The three paintings of day four’s Three a Day series are: Palm Leaf Waving Cattle Standing on Chimneys in Cloaks, Flower Field Man and Woman by a Window. The leftover paint finished three of the seven Heckel’s Horse Jr paintings I started with the leftover paint from yesterday’s three a day. Today and next week will be lots of paperwork and admin. Like figuring out how to sell to the US with the tariffs and the EU with the red tape, offering customizable Blond Cards and other pop art for premium FREE ART FREES ART supporters. Replicating these perks for my Bandcamper and Substacker’s. Now The Camden Market Free Art Man is starting to grow a bit, the only thing missing from FREE ART FREES ART is cash flow.
I need a well executed cash flow plan that allows FREE ART FREES ART to go public as the bona fide revolution the current system has been as good as asking to destroy it. More admin: Visa documents for my girlfriend and fellow Pattaya Collabs creator, Aon, typed up, photocopied and sent over to her in Thailand. The initial plan was for her to stay there this year, and me fly over to Bangkok in November, but November’s taking too long. If she comes to London now, problem solved, but means postponing going to Thailand till early 2027. All dependent on her getting the six month UK visa but she’s got it twice before. Aon hates art so much that when she was at school, she used to pay her friends to do her drawings for her.
Every seven days I’ll put together the video footage, other than the live painting footage, into one YouTube video and call the playlist “Twenty-one a Week”. Numbered in the same way the Three a Day videos are. With Ron Throop @ronthroop doing his three paintings a day in New York, I can see this leading to another intertwined presentation of our work, like we did when Ron last visited the UK and we did FREE ART FREES ART on opposite sides of the road at Camden Market. Or like the Illustrating Throop series of woodcuts I made to illustrate some short stories Billy had written, but ended up using for Ron’s book “Monsieur Tourette Awakens in Mid-Tic: a retaliatory fiction”. This reminds me, I need to get the illustrations done for the forthcoming deluxe edition of Shin Detonator. Another thing climbing its way up the to-do list, but not before admin, paperwork and cashflow. FREE ART FREES ART wants your money!
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Three a Day: Home | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
The three paintings of today’s Three a Day series are: Music Room, Stag in a River and Dog Watching Fires. I had so much leftover paint after these three paintings that despite finishing way past my bedtime at 3 am, I sat on the floor and quickly did some Heckel’s Horse Jr paintings on 12 inch vinyl sleeves. Ron Throop @ronthroop won’t be having this problem with his Three a Day’s as his are in oil. Acrylic dries fast, oil can be left out for days and still be usable. Sometimes longer.
It’s Saturday today but I’m not doing The Camden Market Free Art Man. Like a restaurant going through a major refurb, I need to stay closed this weekend to finish the badges, T-shirts, 12inch vinyl sleeves, artwork and CD’s for the Owl Studious double album and upgraded signage. The new signage is half finished and already looking so much better.
I need to wean customers off Blond Cards and on to other ranges. As discussed on this week’s Black Ivory Podcast (Catch us live on either mine or Ron’s Substack every Thursday 7pm UK time for 1hr+ cross-Atlantic video discussion about our art and music.) my results at Camden in some respects are getting better but YouTube and online sales are massively down. Einstein says madness is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, so Camden needs big change. For online sales, I’ll try raising prices to offer free shipping and non-UK sales. The recent US tariffs and EU extra red tape might be a good thing if they put other UK sellers off selling there.
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Three a Day: Home | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
The three paintings of today’s Three a Day series are: Climbing Dog, Garden Pianist and Two People by a River.
The Garden Pianist painting’s a lot like a Heckel’s Horse painting Billy and I collaborated on around 2013. I can’t remember if the outdoor pianist theme was my idea or Billy’s. The way I’m painting for the “Three a Day” series is starting off with some abstract marks then making it more figurative as shapes become apparent. Like carving on autopilot and resisting the urge to fill the white spaces too early with colour.
I was going to aim for one post a day, but if I’m keeping up this “Three a Day” painting series and write a post for each one, I’ll either have to increase the number of posts or write about nothing else. Or, combine everything from one day into one post. Like today, Emma Pugmire, Ron Throop @ronthroop and I broadcast our weekly episode of The Black Ivory Podcast and I finished the first six of the 12 inch record sleeve Heckel’s Horse Jr paintings. I think separate posts for each.
Edgeworth Johnstone 