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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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The first copy of the CLASS Deluxe Edition to be sold was posted off to its new owner in America today. Included in the pack are two small original acrylic paintings on card, a signed and numbered FREE ART FREES ART manifesto and the CD itself in a cardboard sleeve. As a last minute addition, I put in a bonus drawing from a new series of drawings called CLASS SONG LIST. All the songs on the album written in block capital outlines, written over each other to make an abstract pattern. A lot like some of the AESPHONLY series I did during covid lockdown.
Another order was going out to the US today. Someone bought two oil paintings, so I did two quick oil pastel drawings on paper to put in with them. Drawings of the paintings they had just bought. FREE ART FREES ART says don’t think twice about giving away something you can make another of in ten minutes.
One of my band’s videos has been getting more views than usual. Nearly up to a thousand. BLACK IVORY VIRAL. Black Ivory is the art group both members of my band are in, along with @ronthroop Ron Throop. One viewer commented something along the lines of “If the Green Party were a band.” Might be our first review of 2026. The song’s a new one going on the album I’m currently recording demos for. I finished writing a song called Shade yesterday, and was planning on recording one called Plasticine today, but my friend Charles came round and we ended up talking for several hours. Following on from a four hour phone call we had the other day. Charles founded an art group called STUCKISM with his friend Billy, who I’m painting with tomorrow. BLACK IVORY and its affiliates are a tight-knit bunch. Who needs inspiration when you have BLACK IVORY discipline? but these long chats inspired some late night recording sessions where a few new songs got written. The BLACK IVORY PODCAST works in much the same way, a list of four or five almost forgotten about tasks being pushed up the list. Perspective renewed on whatever I’m in the middle of doing. Knowing we have to talk for an hour about our work every Thursday is reason enough to get something done. Here’s the video:
As I’m writing this, the painting below just found a new home. There’s over a hundred of this size painting sitting half done in my studio. Small 7 x 5 inch oil on canvases. Selling multiple paintings every day for next to nothing feels so much more natural than a handful of blockbuster sales each year through an agent or gallery. FREE ART FREES ART is still happening despite THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN being sidelined, in the form of surprise free extra ORIGINAL artworks and literature going in each parcel.
Key to FREE ART FREES ART is the insistence that the artworks concerned are handmade originals. Someone messaged me once claiming to be part of a group that also distributes their art for free. I looked at their site, and they’re doing nothing of the sort. They’re leaving computer printouts of their artworks around their local area. That’s not free art, it’s littering. Original paintings are pieces of confetti to the true FREE ART FREES ARTER. An ADVERTISM’d painting’s an Argos catalogue. On the back of the CLASS album is the FREE ART FREES ART manifesto. Point 2: “The masses have what the elite want.” The elite don’t want flyers. Flyers are for the likes or us, not them. The elite get the real deal in ELITE WORLD. Well, not anymore BUSTER!!!! Point 18: “The pin is mightier than the bubble.”
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Tonight I started recording demos for my forthcoming album. Two versions of a song called Shade. I often use drum machines for demos, as the regular beat makes everything clearer when deciding on song structure and things like, how long should any solos be. It also makes the bass stand out more, and everything being perfectly in time makes any duff notes in guitar solos obvious. When it comes to recording studio albums though, we’ve never used a drum machine or click track. I tried a click track once at Ranscombe Studios on the first day I recorded there. It was a song called “It’s Evening Now”. It’s a slow song with long gaps between the notes, so I thought I’d need the click when putting on the bass and drums later. We recorded two versions, one with a click and one without. We used the one without.
One version of Shade is 120 bpm, the other is 110 bpm. I use a drop pedal for bass, which brings my guitar down an octave, instead of using a real bass. The guitar is a Fender Stratocaster going through a distortion pedal, but I set it to bypass any distortion. The pedal is only used for looping during band practice and gigs, tuning and for the drum machine when practicing or recording demos. The only other pedal I use is a volume boost for solos. The mic is an SM-57 with a sponge. The recorder is a Fostex four track cassette tape recorder. I can’t remember what the mixer is, but it’s a pretty good one. All the mixing is done in the four track, sent through the distortion pedal, bypassing any distortion, then into Audacity. Audacity is free software.
The new album’s going to be called “I MIGHT HAVE PLAYED A BIT OF BASS ON THIS ALBUM”, a reference to something Billy Childish was quoted to have said about the paintings he and I make together, under the name HECKEL’S HORSE. The quote is:
“When they paint together, is Johnstone like the rhythm section and Childish the frontman?”:
Billy: “No, I’m the guitarist, the singer, the drummer – rhythm is very important in painting. Edgeworth might play a bit of bass on it.”I strongly suspect Billy was either misquoted or taken wildly out of context, because what he’s quoted to have said isn’t true. It’s not even nearly true, it’s completely false. Heckel’s Horse is a collaboration between the two of us. Saying I “might play a bit of bass on it” is complete crap, an insult and dismisses thirteen years of my work collaborating with Billy on these paintings. Heckel’s Horse is a perfect synergy of our painting in which both artists make essential and substantial artistic contributions throughout. I’ll write more about this in a future post, as it parallels a lot with what’s going on with Piers Morgan and Earl Spencer’s book. I should post it now, while it’s still topical and relevant to the current news, but I’m too busy doing this album for the foreseeable future, and am waiting to see if the publishers of the book in question “To Ease My Troubled Mind The Authorised Unauthorised History of Billy Childish” by Ted Kessler, at least make a requested change to the paperback edition. If they don’t, I might take a leaf out of Piers’s book and ask that the Billy Childish book be pulped.
Once this album’s done, it’ll be back to loading up my online shops with more paintings, drawings and music. Speaking of which, the first copy of CLASS, my most recent album, sold today. Most of the good feedback I get about my music is from people living in America. Emma, my drummer and I try booking gigs here in London but no one comes. People don’t really like us in England. If we were in America I’m sure our band would do much better. Ron Throop @ronthroop and I spoke about this on the most recent BLACK IVORY PODCAST. Ron, Emma and I make music together when he’s in London in the band FARANGERS.
FARANGERS are one of my jazz improvisation bands. The demos I’m recording now are all pre-written songs, like the ones on the CLASS album. Tomorrow I’ll start on the second song for the new album, and hopefully have it done in a couple of weeks. The final version won’t be published online. It’ll be in my online shops though on CD.
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The Class Album’s now available as a Deluxe Edition CD and art bundle, which I’ll probably write about more in my next post. This evening’s currently being spent starting twelve new oil paintings that’ll be part of my default Edgeworth Johnstone series, so my head’s not in the right frame of mind to be talking about music. There’s loads of flooding in Thailand too, where I’ve recently bought my girlfriend Aon, a motorbike. Hopefully it won’t be floating down the road like the hundreds of others I’ve seen on YouTube today.
Pattaya and Bangkok are virtually underwater, but where we are up in Isaan hasn’t been so bad, but there’s still a lot more rain to come. At least all weekend. I’m due to fly out in a couple of months, when hopefully the rainy season will have ended. Usually it will all be done and recovered by late November and heading into high season, but this year’s seeing exceptional weather. Better to focus on paintings. It’s all about making abstract shapes and lines today, rubbing them down, then leaving them to dry for a week or so before starting the next layer. It’s usually only then that things start getting figurative and somewhat enjoyable. I don’t enjoy this part of the painting process at all. I’m half way through the twelve and only writing this now because I need a break. Here’s a finished painting currently drying on my toilet:
Five 30 x 24 inch canvases were finished yesterday, so went to the shop this morning and bought ten more blanks. Found a couple more lying around the house that weren’t damaged from our ceiling plaster falling in last week. My online shops will be getting filled with this size, all done in oil. It’ll take a while for them to be dry and available and each blank costs £10 each. This is going to be quite an investment getting my shops up to the next target of 300 listings each. If only people were as keen on the paintings I do on cardboard I’d be saving hundreds of pounds every month, and quite a bit on shipping. Storage would also be a lot easier, but no, canvas is what’s most in demand. I’ll try some cardboard of a similar size at a lower price. If the cardboard ones start selling, life will become a lot cheaper and easier. The photos below show how I’m having to store them now, since the storage room ceiling collapsed. Perched on the toilet, in front of the sink. It’s all feeling more and more like now’s the time to be heading off to Thailand. Working in such a restricted studio space, in oil is going to be tough. Acrylic would be a lot easier as it dries quicker, but something’s telling me to stick with oil.
A lady on the bus today got into an argument with a man who objected to her pitbull jumping all over him. No muzzle, it had a lead but she didn’t seem to realise that you’re supposed to hold the other end. The bus was boiling hot, there were kids everywhere. The bus driver stopped the bus because the dog was getting out of control. The lady threatened to set her dog on the man arguing with her because he was loudly accusing her of being a prostitute. She replied by saying that he was ugly, and that his mother was also a prostitute. This was all happening on the top deck, the dog by now was on the bottom deck throwing a child’s toy around and shaking it like they do to break their prey’s neck. I was sure as soon as it spotted my canvases, it would tear them to shreds but the lady pressed the emergency button and they both jumped off.
An idea still left over from the latest BLACK IVORY PODCAST is the album for one listener, which is now the more conventional idea of an album that’s not published online, meaning anyone that wants to hear it has to buy the physical CD. Just like in the good old days, when I was a teenager and you had to wait till you got home to find out if you liked the album you just spent five times your hourly wage on. I haven’t started recording, but have the two meters square of floor space I’ll need for all the instruments and recording equipment. Also in contradiction of what I said to Ron Throop @ronthroop on this weeks podcast, they’ll be new songs. Emma and I have published some new songs that will be on the album, but only as band practice rehearsals. To hear the 4-track recorded BLACK IVORY studio versions with myself of drums and with a bass guitar, those won’t be online for free.
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This oil on stretched canvas painting of two rams sold today. 20 x 16 inches, will be making its way over to America probably tomorrow, as I’ll be getting covered in more oil paint today making some 30 x 24 inches. Painting in batches is the way to go when you’re trying to fill up your online shop before flying out to Thailand in a couple of months. So is clearing the day of all other duties as early as possible.
The studio workflow theory is that if I can fill my studio with wet oil paintings now, by the time I return from Thailand at the end of December, they’ll all be dry and ready to upload early next year. The first target of getting up to 100 listings in each shop didn’t take too long, as Ron Throop @ronthroop and I were talking about on last night’s WEEKLY BLACK IVORY VIDEO PODCAST, the next target is 300, then 1000. When I hit a thousand in each shop, it should leave me free to do THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN every weekend and see it become financially worthwhile. So, the next time I’m in Camden could be as late as summer 2027 but there will be more oil on canvas to go with the paintings on cardboard. There’s a tempting vacant shop next to Maddarings I could rent, but the rates are, in my opinion, extortionate. For scale, here’s £30’s worth of Edgeworth Johnstone painting:
I’ll start writing more about the Black Ivory podcast here soon, as it all ties in with the art and music we’re doing, and the ideas behind FREE ART FREES ART. The free distribution of our paintings to anyone who wants it, in a financially sustainable way will be a dream come true, and should be reality next summer. By then, my girlfriend Aon should be here working with me if we can get the necessary visa. In a couple of years Mooney Ra Ra will be old enough to legally join the workforce part-time. By then, maybe the vacant shop, should it still be so, might make sense. Doesn’t hurt that being also next door to Mooney Ra Ra’s mothers jewellery store. FREE ART FREES ART will be blue chip by 2030. I’m sure you’re all wondering what the back of the painting looks like:
Thank you to the person who bought the Two Rams painting. The £30, plus the £15 they spent on another smaller painting they bought didn’t quite make the £50 threshold for receiving a free bonus TRANSIT COMPENSATION PACK but I’ll throw one in anyway, plus a free 30 x 21 cm Heckel’s Horse Jr pencil drawing on acid free 350gsm card. Another thing Ron and I were discussing last night: filling up parcels with whatever freebies are to hand. The ceiling plaster in the room that stores most of my paintings fell in last week, destroying surprisingly little but incentive enough to ramp up the distribution of my artwork before this house totally collapses, taking all my paintings with it.
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An oil painting I recently uploaded into my online shops of animals jumping over a fence into a flooding river. 30 x 24 inches on stretched canvas. I’ll be painting more this size tomorrow.
If I could find a courier able to transport bigger paintings for cheaper than I have so far, I’d like to sell 40 x 32 inch canvas paintings as well, as this is usually my ideal size to work on. But for now, I’m restricted to parcels under one meter.
As well as signing them on the back, I put a load of links and contact info. Free advertising isn’t something I can afford to turn down. I’m surprised most artists settle for an illegible signature. It’s time we get with the 21st century. I rarely sign paintings on the front. I will if I think it’ll look good, but usually it doesn’t. Feels like the singer shouting the name of the band at the end of the song. Neither the time nor place.
I’m ready for my close-up:
