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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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Three a Day: Home | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
Painting three paintings a day. Here’s the live painting video and results of my first day. The series is called “Three a Day” and follows Ron Throop @ronthroop who’s been doing this recently too. Ron intends to keep this up for twenty years, averaging 3 per day, and therefore having over 20,000 paintings to show for it. I’m also copying Ron’s idea of sticking to the same format. Ron’s going oil on 24 x 18 inch, I’m going acrylic on A2 size paper 170gsm. Ron and I are both members of Black Ivory, have made collaboration paintings together under the name Jonron and are working on FREE ART FREES ART. Ron in New York USA, me in London UK. Join us on our weekly video podcast: The Black Ivory Podcast, every Thursday 7pm UK time on both Ron’s Substack and on my Substack If you miss the live version, we upload them all on to YouTube afterwards. There’s a playlist of all episodes on the front page of the Black Ivory website. The three paintings for day 1 are called Woman by a Fence, Woman Grabbing a Cloud and Sailor and Birds:
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Blond: Bridge | Canvas | Cards | Crypto Social | Magnums | Posters | Twine
Tina asked me to do a painting of Camden Lock bridge. These six acrylic paintings on cardboard I got from the boxes my local supermarket uses for the fruit and veg are the result. Numbered on the back and covered in Advertism. Portraits of Alan, Zombie and me at the bottom. Future ones in the same format planned for each of the three crypto social platforms I publish on, and one of Black Ivory.
The Irish flags free commission is underway and I’ve just finished the first of the new Jonthom paintings.Yesterday’s all day clearout is already starting to pay off. There’s clear floorspace to work in and while cleaning up I found a few half done batches of work that had got forgotten about and will now get finished and out to The Camden Market Free Art Man. The first Jonthom painting took less than an hour, so the remaining seven or so should be finished by the end of next week. All in acrylic so will be dry and fit to store away almost immediately after painting. Then, it’s music recording time. Emma Pugmire and I do the Black Ivory Podcast on Thursday’s with Ron Throop @ronthroop so we’ll need to fix an extra day for Emma to come up and rehearse the new Edgeworth Band songs in a couple of weeks. In the meantime I’ll be uploading demos to my Bandcamp. The other major benefit of yesterday is the calorie burn from walking up and down the stairs carrying boxes. My girlfriend and her mum saw me shirtless on videophone yesterday and were laughing at how much weight I’ve put on. Too much bread and sitting on the Camden bridge instead of standing.
The next post will be about this morning’s new Jonthom painting. Here’s how it turned out:
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Six old but unprocessed paintings I suspect were finished just before my last trip to Pattaya in Thailand.
This is the problem I have when going abroad. If I don’t finish everything I’m working on before I leave, any half done projects get lost because when I return there’s a whole new batch of work to start on. Here’s a photo of them before they were mounted on cardboard.
As they were done at Billy’s they would have been part of the Chatham Dockyard Video Diary series. The playlist is on this link, but the latest episode on show is misleading, as it’s of me at home complaining about some nonsense written about me in a biography about Billy. Saying I make virtually no artistic contribution to the Heckel’s Horse paintings. This still bothers me now, but I have a series of work in the pipeline that will help expose the truth. I was thinking about this the other day. The book’s To Ease My Troubled Mind – The Authorised Unauthorised History of Billy Childish. If I remember rightly, the book says that I’m in the studio, but it’s only after I leave that the subject of Heckel’s Horse comes up. Pretty convenient. You’d think if there was any interest in talking about the collaboration paintings Billy and I do together, it would be mentioned while I’m there. Not, wait for me to leave the room then start talking about us. Passing strange, I think. But who knows? As was made sure, I wasn’t there. The episode with the six paintings in the photo below will probably be episode 38.
The attic clearing is part of a general house tidy up as my sister and nephew are visiting tomorrow to celebrate what would have been my mum’s 85th birthday. She had the same birthday as Henry VIII. I remember her 50th being the same day as his 500th in 1991. The attic’s looking much better now and it means I can move all the junk in my studio up there and finally get round to finishing the next batch of Jonthom paintings and set up the music gear for the new Edgeworth Band songs that currently only exist on my phone. The Jonthom paintings are collaborations I make with Charles Thomson. The Heckel’s Horse paintings, just mentioned, are collaborations I make with Billy Childish. Charles and Billy founded Stuckism in 1999. Jonron paintings are collaborations I make with Ron Throop. Ron and I are currently founding Free Art Frees Art although are yet to demonstrate one of its key tasks, being financially sustainable for the artist.
Tonight’s post though is about five paintings of cats and one of candles. Acrylic paintings I did at Billy’s studio on A3 size sketchbook paper. PVA glued onto cardboard rescued from the streets. Individually hand stamped red lettering. Advertism on the cardboard frame I painted black and tied together with jute string. On the backs are pages cut out from the booklet I give out at The Camden Market Free Art Man.
Ron Throop @ronthroop and I are doing a three painting a day stint. I’ll get started on mine Tuesday as this weekend’s fully booked and I’m at Billy’s on Monday, as has been the case virtually every Monday for the last thirteen years, apart from a one year enforced break during covid. I won’t count the paintings I do at Billy’s in the three I’m doing alongside Ron. I want the daily three to be regular Edgeworth Johnstone paintings. Not Heckel’s Horse Jr, not my recent Camden Market Free Art Man flat colour cartoony pop art, not the @offgridlife inspired Offgridlife Claymation series I’m in the middle of, but like these six paintings I discovered today. Loosely painted compositions off the top of my head that aren’t aimed at any existing series or preconceived themes. It’s been a while since I’ve made any paintings like this.
Ron’s sticking to a set size, 24 x 18inch. I’ll stick to 12 inch square double primed LP record sleeves. Some other old work surfaced today during the clear up. These four Gridismjr prints…
and a hundred or so half done paintings of the Nirvana Nevermind cover. The baby swimming after the dollar bill, but in my paintings the dollar bill is replaced with a QR code to my blog. The Advertism never stops. The stencils I cut for the Nirvana pocket size paintings turned up, which has all moved this work further up my to do list now everything needed is easily to hand. The Nirvana work was so popular at Camden I did a couple of days dedicated to just this theme.
I have similar plans for the crypto social sites I use, but don’t have enough work yet.
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Blond: Bridge | Canvas | Cards | Crypto Social | Magnums | Posters | Twine
The Blond Magnums info is now, finally, up on my website. They’re like big Blond Card pocket size paintings. There’s no talking in this video. Just video footage and music from my Ethereom album of maybe initially cacophonic jazz improvisation.
Original acrylic paintings on A4 size paper. PVA glued onto cardboard I rescued from the streets. Individually hand stamped red lettering. Advertism as always. I’ve recently started taking them to The Camden Market Free Art Man as people were almost only taking my small paintings. The big ones are too big to carry, fit in tourists’ suitcases or on their walls. Blond Magnums are medium size so I thought would be more popular. For once I was right, they’re shifting pretty well so I’ll be making more soon. There’s currently 56. Enough for the next month or two. The video above is the forgery foiling blockchain ledger of every inch of every Blond Magnum.
In other news, I’ve decided to join Ron Throop in making three paintings a day, as this coincides with my plan to paint on 12 inch record sleeves for the Camden Market goers to flick through as they’re walking over the bridge. I’ll need a stable table as the pavement is cobbled and uneven. It’s also a wind trap, so will need proper planning. My paintings are already getting blown into the road and nearby people, and I imagine if the record sleeves are sitting loose on a table on the bridge, some could get blown into the canal below. They’ll need to be in open top boxes to be flickable through, and flat pack so I can carry it all on the bus. I think it’s worth the effort, as I was saying on last weeks Black Ivory podcast how The Camden Market Free Art Man needs something to make it more popular but I didn’t know what. I think record sleeve paintings will work and will connect my display more to the rest of the market. Especially as Kozmic Records record fair is nearby. I already have a load of Kozmic Records themed paintings which I’ll also paint on some of the record sleeves.
A lot of the record sleeves, at least the first batch will be in the looser style of my Heckel’s Horse Jr. paintings. Then there’s the Nirvana ones.I’ll do some record sleeves for the upcoming release of the Owl and Studious double album by my band, Edgeworth Band. Fellow Black Ivory member Emma Pugmire plays drums on most of the Owl songs, I think. Zombie has a stereo playing mostly punk rock music across the road and my posters of him could send people his way. This could all join up really well.
The new series of Blond Posters. Posters and records are often sold together in the same shops, so if I can find a way to display them well in the limited space I have on the bridge it’ll look really good. An outdoor record shop with no records. One way or another, I have to make my display more photogenic. There are three regulars at the bridge: Alan the town crier, Zombie the punk, and more recently, me. I’ve only been there on and off for the last couple of years, so Zombie and Alan are much better known and photographed. But still, they get photographed and filmed a lot more than my display, which is quite shameful for the one who’s supposed to be the visual artist. If either or Alan or Zombie aren’t there, people often come up to me and ask where they are. My goal is for people to ask Alan and Zombie where I am on days I’m not there.
If it’s the case that I don’t have space to display the posters well, the other option’s to have two locations on the go simultaneously. This would mean flying my girlfriend over from Thailand, which she has said she would like, to supervise the second location. It would be under the train bridge, which is only 30 yards from where I am, and in plain sight. It’s so close and visible, I could almost supervise them both myself.
Edgeworth Johnstone 