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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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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.
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Vertical clips and sketch paintings to go with the full song videos. These are some sketch paintings I just did of one of our recent band practices, September 3rd at Black Ivory in London. Emma Pugmire has been my drummer for the last 11 years. Pencil sketches painted over in acrylic paint, on 400gsm acid free card, slightly larger than A4 size (12 x 9 inches). The hand cut one with only me in it was the only reject. I looked okay but I messed up Emma. Seven out of eight is an 87.5% hit rate for the evening. Better than earlier today, where I spent a good four hours packing five paintings being sent to America. Custom forms were the main problem. I now know to make a list of what’s in each parcel before wrapping it up, rather than trying to remember retrospectively what I put in. A problem with including so many impulsive freebies.
It was from this band practice that I’ve started uploading YouTube shorts. Putting these minute long vertical clips online was inspired by @offgridlife uploading multiple series of his AI claymation videos, which themselves inspired a series of oil paintings on cardboard earlier this year. I thought they turned out well, but the online buying public don’t agree yet. The crowd at THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN like them though, so I guess it’s an issue with my photos or SEO. So far I’ve scheduled one video to upload every day for the next ten days. All are clips of a new song we’re rehearsing called Electric Virus. If they get enough interest, I’ll keep the daily band practice videos going.
I tried the same schedule for videos of the interviews I do at Camden, but they fell flat. I still have a load of those videos scheduled to run until at least November. What a waste of time editing and uploading those was. Although Thomas Edison said “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”. Electric Virus might be our electric lightbulb. I’d like to record this song at Ranscombe Studios next year, where we did the Class album.
We used to be called “Edgeworth” but when that name wasn’t available for our Facebook page I changed it to “Edgeworth Band”. Recently, I changed it again to “The Camden Market Free Art Man”, as I want to have a dedicated section in THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN just for art themed on my music. It needs to be obvious to passers by that it’s not a friends band, but that the art and music is all by me. For this reason, I won’t take any art or music themed on any of my other bands yet, until I can make the signage clear that the other bands are all The Camden Market Free Art Man bands too.
This was a problem when I started the new-look Camden display, after I saw how successful Ron Throop @ronthroop was, doing his version of FREE ART FREES ART when he flew over to London from New York, and we went out and did Camden together. Him on one side of Camden Lock bridge with his wide range of original art and books, and me the other with my virtually Jompiy G series-only selection. From seeing how well he did that day, the next time I went out, I recreated his display but with my work. Then, as I built from there and started taking more and more paintings, people would think they were by different artists because of the different styles I paint in. An oil painting that looks like it belongs with the Surrealist wing of the German Expressionist movement doesn’t look like it’s by the same artist who did the flat-colour cartoon pop art glossy acrylic painting of silver robot. ADVERTISM helped give them more of a connected look, but it still took a couple of months of switching things around to find a way of displaying them as obviously all by me. Once this was done, things got more busy and the display got its own identity going.
My first proper band 2 out of 3 Rule were mostly gentle indie pop. Elbow Sisters did a lot of shoegaze. Farangers are the three BLACK IVORY members, one of which is Ron Throop, where we all play unrepeatable improvisations. As do Strawberry Cake and Heckel’s Horse Jr. when Mooney Ra Ra comes round a fancies playing some violin and singing. They’ll all have to get squeezed into THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN display eventually, but not before they’re all represented in my online shops. The shops have to be running first. Trying to do Camden before the shops were ready was one of the most painful of the 10,000 positive discoveries of failure I’ve made so far. Looking back, it should have been obvious. I don’t think Andy Warhol would have made such a mistake, at least not twice. I made it several times a week for nearly two years, not including my frequent jollies to Thailand. If I don’t sharpen things up soon, FREE ART FREES ART’s going nowhere. At least my attempt at it. Here’s the real motivation. Not the idea of my attempt failing, but the nightmare scenario of someone else taking the idea and succeeding. FREE ART FREES ART just needs doing right. If I’m finally on the right track with it, it’s just a case of being patient enough to dilligently go through the motions. Fill the shops, collect the money, pay the taxes, get back out to Camden, promote our band to the point we can book gigs without the promoter refusing to work with us again, record and publish everything. Once all this is up and running, the franchise will start itself. Then the FREE ART FREES ART dot com becomes its own site promoting each franchisee. Then we move completely off fat cat social media and exclusively publish on crypto-social blogging sites, becoming the greatest and most effective global anti-establishment art movement in history. Get in early. FREE ART FREES ART!
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Oil paintings on paper from c.2013. My fellow Black Ivory member Ron Throop @ronthroop recently discovered that many of his recent oil paintings were done on paper not considered suitable for this type of paint. Oil rots paper fibres, so it’s often recommended to prime the paper first. I’m no professional, so wouldn’t advise anyone to ignore conventional advice, but just to give my experience, I’ve been painting oil onto raw unprotected paper for over twenty years. It may be that they start to deteriorate eventually, but none have fallen apart yet. For example, all the paintings in this post were done around 13 years ago, and to me, they still look the same as I remember them on day one:
Some would say the above artwork is a drawing, rather than a painting, as it’s made by laying a blank sheet of paper on top of a board painted in oil, then drawing in pencil on the back. You repeat this process for each colour. Some would call it a drawing. Some would call it a monoprint. I’m comfortable calling any original, one-off, directly handmade image done in paint, a painting, irrespective of whether it’s done with a brush or not. I don’t like the term monoprint, as when I hear the syllable “print” it conjures up images of machinery and hands-off mass-production. In the case of these artworks, they have much more in common with traditional painting. Here’s another:
Ephemeral art guaranteed to just about outlive its initial owner isn’t a bad place to be if, like me, you’re keen to avoid any increase in the financial value of your work, regardless of any increase in exposure and reputation. My last post considered the difficulty in doing THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN if my art was to suddenly become financially worth anything. Hopefully saturating the market every weekend at Camden with at least fifty new paintings, the refusal to make limited editions, and now knowing the works are all going to fall apart anyway, will do the trick. FREE ART FREES ART!
All the paintings in this post are based on the Kipling story “How the Whale got his Throat”. I illustrated other Kipling stories, and there was a plan at the time with a London book publisher for me to do the full set of Just So Stories, and combine them into one publication. But I got tired of doing them, so the plan petered out. It’s a recurring thing with my work, that as soon as there’s an obligation to fulfill, the enthusiasm tanks and the whole thing turns into a chore that never gets finished. The same thing happened with some woodcuts I did to illustrate some short stories Billy Childish wrote. There was a plan, with the same publishers, the work subsequently felt like a job, and it all never got done. It didn’t end up too bad though, because years later I read a book by the aforementioned Ron Throop and realised that the illustrations I did for Billy’s stories were also a fit for Ron’s. Maybe because, by this point, virtually all the work had already been done, this publication went ahead like clockwork. I’ll write about it in a future post, but for now, here’s another whale painting:
All these paintings are on A4 size paper, roughly 30 x 21 cm. I’m putting them in my online shops and will probably reserve the ones I did for the other Kipling stories for the Transit Compensation Packs. I’ll need to make a load of these packs as the first eighteen I made last week are nearly all allocated. Customers in my online shops get one per £50 they spend (not including shipping charges). One order alone was for over £250 so they’re quickly running out. I won’t be at Billy’s this week (this is three weeks in a row I’ve missed) as the ceiling plaster in my painting storage room collapsed this weekend, so all day Monday will be spent sorting that out, and making Transit Compensation Packs. I don’t think any of my paintings were damaged by the falling ceiling plaster, but I think one by my friend Charles was, slightly. A portrait he did of the Medway artist, musician and poet Wolf Howard. It’s a great painting, and even if it is damaged, I won’t like it any less. I wouldn’t even call it damage. The damage is biographical texture and in no way detrimental.
The other thing to get done tomorrow is packing the most recent of the online sales. Opening up to America’s paying off, especially in Etsy. My Etsy was a ghost town before America. It’s definitely the larger paintings on canvas that are in demand. Works out well for me, as I have ten half finished ones waiting to get painted and uploaded. It won’t be long before winter’s here, when the drying time for oil seems to double. Doing everything in the right order in these last weeks before Thailand will make a big difference. I’m about to leave to take my fellow Strawberry Cake band member Mooney Ra-Ra back to her mothers house. The plan for the next eight weeks will get drawn up on the bus ride home.
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Camden’s ready for 2027 but the online shops aren’t. Building and running them is taking more time than expected, but is otherwise going well. Sales have been coming in and seeing the number of listings grow is so satisfying, it almost makes selling a painting disappointing as it reduces the inventory by one. Every sale makes the shop weaker and less attractive. It’s easy to forget the main objective here.
The plan was for weekdays to be dedicated to building the online shops and to do THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN at weekends, but the shops need too much work. They’re still a long way off their target of £70 profit per day, and I can’t be fighting on two fronts when there’s only about 8 weeks left before I’m planning to fly off to Thailand for a month. Aon, my girlfriend, and I haven’t seen each other in the flesh since I left Thailand on January 20th. We videophone several times a day, but enough’s enough. Apparently, they’re cutting the visa free period for UK passport holders from two months to one. I can take a month’s break without losing too much of the momentum we’ve (Ron Throop @ronthroop and I) built for FREE ART FREES ART.
2026 has already been written off as research and development anyway. 2027 is when Camden will be operating on set days and times every week, weather and health allowing. The concept’s already been proven, as far as getting the Camden public interest and traffic to my websites.The missing part’s the conversion of this interest into cold hard cash. Looking at how far the online shops have come over the last couple of weeks, it’s little wonder people were visiting but not buying anything. In 2027, I expect there’ll be a strong correlation between how many days THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN runs and how much the online shops take. It seems that Camden’s suited to small works, and online is suited to big. I still only have a handful of large paintings online, but this will change slowly over the next 8 weeks, before the shops go into holiday mode while I’m away. If things start going really well, maybe postpone Thailand till December.
So Camden’s shelved, probably till next year. Transit Compensation Packs are the new big thing, see recent posts. Not all my art can be free for all, but it can always be free for all who need it to be. To be able to sell my work for next to nothing globally is the FREE ART FREES ART dream come true. Shipping and tariff costs, once thought to be prohibitively expensive, now allow me to sell my art worldwide. Conclusive, scientific, irrefutable proof that FREE ART FREES ART. Thank you Transit Compensation Packs! Made possible through the realisation that art is currency. The customer pays the shipping and any extra charges in their native government currency, I reimburse them in art. Painting a picture’s like printing a £20 note. Artists are walking money printers who spend most of their time complaining that they don’t have any. Struggling artists? Darwiner’s say the species that survives is the one that adapts to the changing environment (Leon C. Megginson), but artists needn’t settle for the environment they find themselves in. We can create our own to suit our preferred state. The commercial artworld is BLACK IVORY kryptonite, no problem, we have artworld kryptonite…Transit Compensation Packs. Struggling artists lack imagination, industry and Transit Compensation Packs. FREE ART FREES ART makes the world our oyster.
A friend phoned a couple of days ago to ask me a yes/ no question. Four hours later we were still talking, only cut short because Aon had been trying to get through multiple times and I was worried it was something important. It wasn’t. During the four hours, it occured: If my work becomes financially valuable then my display at Camden will be overrun by despicable collectors and eBayers whose interest is purely financial. It would kill FREE ART FREES ART. But it won’t because there’ll be an exam to pass before the artwork is released. As always, four questions, but adapted to the ever changing environment. FREE ART FREES ART will always survive.
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