Transit Compensation Packs so good that people buy my paintings just to get one, would both guarantee FREE ART FREES ART’s financial future and perfectly demonsttrate free art freeing both art and artist.

These newly improved joblots of original, handmade, signed prints and paintings are the missing link FREE ART FREES ART needs to keep THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN running every weekend . Given how important it’s now clear that Transit Compensation Packs are, it makes no sense to limit their availability to the handful of people outside of Europe who are likely to spend over £50 in my online shops. Transit Compensation Packs will be to FREE ART FREES ART what Blond Cards were to THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN. Blond Cards took Camden from 10-15 distributed artworks per day to over 40. Transit Compensation Packs represent EVERYTHING the commercial artworld hates. No exclusivity, no controlled output, no controlled exposure, no consistent brand, no pigeon-hole, no profit, no fear of saturation. In the two years I’ve been doing FREE ART FREES ART, I’ve been working my way through the list of everything everyone involved in Contemporary Art has told me not to do. Subsequently, I’ve seen everything I initially liked about the Stuckist manifesto, when I first read it in 2006, manifest itself before my very eyes. Finally, meeting private with public. Finally, art not having to be in a gallery at all, let alone to be art. The Latin for “enriching society by giving shared form to individual experience and an individual form to shared experience” would be THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN coat of arms motto. Stuckism should have been on the streets, not the poncy Walker Gallery or wherever Go West was. The Stuckist risks failure, THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN insists on failure. The Stuckist doesn’t strive, THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN strive’s like nothing else. The Stuckist neither looks backwards nor forwards but is engaged with the study of the human condition, THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN looks forwards, backwards and couldn’t care less about the human condition. The Stuckist calls for exhibitions to be held in homes, THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN calls for exhibitions to be held outside of homes. The Stuckists call for an open policy of admission to all art schools, THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN wouldn’t wish art school on his worst enemy. THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN is the Director of Stuckism and, I suspect, its biggest fan. I feel like I almost love Stuckism. The closest to me in blindly secular society recommend artists start out by trying to get accepted into the commercial art world. When this inevitably fails, we should try and build our own sad impression of it. Mimic everything the commercial artworld does. Stage Private Views in convincing enough looking “galleries” that hosted last week’s local book club. Price our work to ensure nothing sells but invites people to think we’re more successful than we really are, and hope all this springboard launches us into the establishment artworld we failed getting into in the first place. What could go right? If only I knew twenty years ago what I know now. But I knew exactly what I know now twenty-one years ago, before I started learning stuff. Here’s what I knew when I left school: If I make 1000 units for £50, I can sell 200 units for £2 and give 800 away to promote the next batch, which will subsequently sell 400 units for £1 and teach me how to make 4000 units for £50, which by then will be selling 1000 units for 40p and have me desperately looking for an assistant. FREE ART FREES ART. It’s so bloody obvious. Why has it taken me twenty years to unlearn the lie? Transit Compensation Packs are the only manifesto necessary.

So no Camden Market this weekend. Mooney Ra Ra’s coming round tomorrow and will likely stay till Sunday night. Will we make Strawberry Cake? Maybe if she’s desperate to.
Apparently, self-made billionaires all know that the early mornings are when the brain is most likely to lucidly assess problems and generate the best ideas. The last thing I need when I’m painting is lucidity and ideas. Success to the Stuckist is to get out of bed in the morning and paint. Success to THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN is to stay in bed in the morning and think. Whether writing songs or painting, I’m ideally not thinking about anything at the time. If I have an idea when I’m working, I have to stop and deal with it. There’s a time for work and a completely different time for ideas. It helps that I’m self-employed and my girlfriend’s in Thailand. Being protective of what gets my attention first thing in the morning is, subsequently, pretty easy. No getting straight out of bed, no radio, no TV, no message checking, no breakfast, nothing. The first half hour of the day is for dozing, rolling around in my duvet and letting my premium brain cells organise what’s ahead. What to do and in what order, without trivial distractions like choosing whether to walk to the supermarket to get some proper butter or make do with dad’s margarine. Using optimum brain power on everyday tasks is anti-art. The only non-seemingly-essential distraction allowed is to jot each morning revelation down as it occurs. This recent practice has helped me get a lot of things straight about what FREE ART FREES ART needs to be doing and not doing. Today, I need to make the first 18 Transit Compensation Packs packaging, add them to my website and shops, pack and dispatch the painting and drawings I just sold, then set my online shops to sell outside Europe. If I only get these three things done, it’s been a productive day. The buyer of today’s drawings got this free one I quickly drew while packing them. A Heckel’s Horse Jr. no less:

If someone spends £100 they get two Transit Compensation Packs. One pack per £50. Another idea occurred to me this morning, shortly after I woke up. They need to be a literal pack. Not just loose works in an anonymous envelope. A pack is a single unit and it’s important for them to obviously be so. But I need to post the current order qualifying for a pack in the next couple of days, so it needs to get done today. Straight after dictating and tidying up the grammar in this. Today I’ll design and cut a stencil to use with acrylic paint and paint the front of the envelopes that the seven free artworks come in. The stencil will say “Transit Compensation Pack” then a separate one cut for the edition number in a bolder colour. If it’s immediately obvious that the packs are numbered, a few collectory-types may be encouraged to act fast before all the low numbers get snapped up. You never know. Even those not qualifying for a pack deserve something. All orders get something, like the drawing above. If someone buys three items for only one parcel, the least I could do is a quick pencil sketch for them. An artist’s hands are 24 hour, 7 day a week money printers immune to inflation. Why are we so mean with our output? It’s the institutionalised thinking of the Contemporary Art Gallery slave. I can’t keep putting my band on hold though. Here’s a photo of us a few days ago, at our most recent band practice. We publish our band practice videos online:

There’s a new album’s worth of songs I’d like to record at the same place we’ve recorded all our studio albums to date, the magnificent Ranscombe Studios in Chatham. Emma and I are starting to work our way through some of the new songs and get a new set list ready for a gig, hopefully this winter if I don’t go to Thailand, and if any of our old promoters will work with us ever again. We’ve burned our bridges with a lot of the people who book small London venues through constantly failing to bring enough paying customers. But I’ll record the next album without Emma, like I did the studio recordings on the Class album. It’s frustrating that if it wasn’t for time and money, I could be in Ranscombe Studios tomorrow. A lot of musicians are cancelling arena shows now because their fans don’t want to pay festival ticket prices to see them. The middlemen are getting a lot of the blame for the prices being what they are. It’s always the middleman. FREE ART FREES ART has no middleman. Musicians would like to drop their prices, but apparently it’s not that easy with all those middlemen to feed. The next thing is to get those buying my art to buy my music, and for those buying my music to buy my art. This would bring me right back round to 2005, when I first heard of, and saw, Billy Childish playing live at The Boston Arms in Tufnell Park. There was a table of his albums for sale with his paintings on the front cover. I can’t remember if I bought one, but the rest is history. Billy and I now paint Heckel’s Horse paintings together at his painting studio. Emma Pugmire, my drummer, first got in contact over a Stuckist exhibition my ex-wife and I put on in our flat in Wood Green. Ron Throop @ronthroop our fellow Black Ivory member, first got in touch through our shared connections with Stuckism and now plays in our band, Farangers. The overlaps between us as artists and musicians are aplenty, yet not so much in our audience, it seems. I’m sure we could generate a cross-over interest without too much trouble. Music related art and art related music. All free.