Coming to America

I spent much of this morning on a videophone call, pushing 50 with nothing in the bank, unhelpfully wearing a reversed baseball cap, trying to convince my girlfriend that FREE ART FREES ART isn’t just a delusional last ditch attempt to desperately salvage something from my flailing midlife crisis. It may be all of those things, but in addition, FREE ART FREES ART will destroy and rebuild contemporary art beyond recognition. As it’s a new concept though, I don’t have a proven road map to reassure her but once the online shops are fixed, we’ll be well on the road. Ron Throop @ronthroop and I have been working on FREE ART FREES ART for, maybe a couple of years now, and once my latest batches of stretched canvas paintings are dry, available to buy online and I’m selling outside of Europe, the FREE ART FREES ART machine will be oiled and running, pretty much, full steam. Until the money side’s fixed FREE ART FREES ART means nothing but once the cash starts rolling in, we’ll be unstoppable. I need to start selling outside of Europe, and it was while Aon and I were videophoning this morning that it occurred how.

The photo above is of the last of today's four paintings. All four promote my new album, Class. Each painting is themed on a song from the album. The album has twenty songs, fifteen studio recordings and five home demos. The studio ones were all recorded at Ranscombe Studios in Chatham. The same studio and engineer Billy uses. The same Billy I paint with on Tuesdays. I’ve been mostly working in oil paint recently, and have temporarily abandoned working on cardboard in favour of the more traditional, stretched canvas. I think Damien Hirst said that paintings on stretched canvas are the T-shirts of art. He’d know, but here’s why I haven’t been selling outside of Europe. The problem was that my paintings are so cheap and posting outside of Europe’s so expensive that shipping would often, at least, double the price. Historically, outside of Europe, I’ve sold more to America than anywhere else by far, and now we’ve got these new tariffs making selling to America even harder. So I decided to stop making my paintings available to buy outside of Europe. I also had a couple of problem customers and bad delivery service experiences in the US, but think this was just bad luck. Ordinarily, I’ve probably had a better reception to my work in the US than anywhere else. Especially my music. My modern influences in both art and music from the last 60 years or so, are almost entirely from America so guess it’s no surprise. But here’s the solution arising from this morning's videophone call: Offer compensatory freebies to those paying for shipping and tariffs. If a £50 painting costs £100 by the time it arrives, don’t worry, I’ll put an extra £50’s worth of artwork in the parcel. It only took me two years to figure this out. I’ll update my online shops this week and hopefully see more orders coming in. Sales have been sluggish of late:

Mornings are the best time to videophone Aon, as she’s usually just finished work and is back at the flat we’re renting after visiting her family (she’s six hours ahead in Thailand). She tells me what’s going on there, and I tell her what I plan to do that day, getting and refining ideas as we talk. This morning, I woke up around six and am developing this self-made billionaire's habit of keeping a list of prioritised tasks and visualising how I’ll get the most important one done before getting out of bed. Once up, the trick is to not engage in any non-essential activity till the most important task is completed. It’s working well so far although I’m still waiting for my billion dollars. Top of today’s list was oil paintings themed on my new album, Class. I planned to get five done, but only managed four. It was a good day’s work though. Had I known how involved and complex each of the four paintings would be (especially Dilated Lines), I’d have only planned on doing four anyway. I'm painting at Billy’s studio tomorrow and will therefore be out most of the day, so filling up my studio with as many wet oil paintings as possible means my studio will be passively at work all day drying them.

Once all the Class songs are painted, I’ll make videos for each song. They’ll be splitscreen with the song playing in the background. I used to enjoy making videos for one of my old bands, Elbow Sisters, so much that I’d often write a song solely because I had run out of songs to make videos for. My favourite video was for a song called Gan Mao, which I’ll write about more in a future post. But these Class songs will be more like guitar tutorials. All the guitar parts for every song are in the paintings. I couldn’t get all the lyrics in for all the songs, but made sure I didn’t exclude any important guitar info. One of things I regret about Elbow Sisters is that I can’t remember how to play a lot of them, and don’t have the music written down anywhere. Even though they’re simple enough songs, I often play odd chords that will be a pain to try and figure out. At least with my recent songs, there’ll be paintings and videos quickly showing how to play them. I’ll pan the camera around the painting so that it matches the part of the song being played, and have my fret playing hand shown at the same time. Might as well put the lyrics up as well, as some are missing from the paintings.

Most of my lyrics come about like my paintings. Abstract noises that I sing along when playing, later morphing into words that don’t necessarily make a lot of sense. Find me a Husband has more of a solid story than most: Russian widows gathering in the town square in the snow. Their husbands recently killed in the war. I don’t know what war, but around World War 1 time. Then off to the snowy Nepalese mountains where the Sherpas all survive so the women get to be happy nurturing mothers.

I very clearly remember recording Spinner Maid. We’d typically record around twelve songs in a day and Spinner Maid was one of the last. My voice was shot, as we had just recorded a song called Police There which strains my throat more than any other. I don’t have a strong booming voice that can take a lot of stress. Although the only time I’ve ever completely lost my voice was after my current band's first gig at The Hope and Anchor in Islington. We were called Edgeworth Band then but are now called THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN. I was sat at the table with my friends after the gig and, literally, couldn’t even talk. It wasn’t quite as bad when recording Spinner Maid, but was agonising enough to both perform and listen along to in my headphones. I was aware the whole time, as I was singing that it was sounding pretty awful but when we listened back I really liked it. I like it so much now that if we ever play Spinner Maid live we’ll do so at the end of the gig. Probably after Police There. Time for bed. Tomorrow’s Tuesday. Tuesday’s the only day I don’t need to plan. It’s autopilot. Get the bus to St. Pancras train station in the morning, take the high speed to Chatham, walk twenty minutes to the dockyard and start painting. Sometimes Billy and I will make collaboration paintings together, under the name Heckel’s Horse.