RIP Edward

A young lady approached me at The Camden Market Free Art Man display a few weeks ago and asked if I’d write something in her notebook. She asked me to put one piece of advice for the reader that I thought might be useful to them. The reader could be anyone, the advice could be anything. The notebook appeared to already be half full of advice from other people she’d come across. I think she chose me because she had just taken a painting and finished giving the mandatory one minute video interview. Maybe she’ll publish them one day. Here’s the gist of what I wrote: “Don’t get out of bed until you’ve decided on what’s the most important thing you need to get done that day. Then get up and straight to it, avoiding any non-essential distractions or obligations till it's done.” Something I’ve heard recently in several YouTube interviews with, or about, self-made billionaires. Apparently 70% of the world’s billionaires are self made. Here's what I did today but haven't mentioned yet:

This morning, my job to get done was to finish ten 30 x 24 inch oil on canvas paintings, as they’re relatively popular in my online shops and are my most expensive and high profit item. I’m taking a break from doing The Camden Market Free Art Man until I’ve got the cash flow problem sorted out. They say every problem’s an opportunity. FREE ART FREES ART’s cash flow problem is the opportunity for BLACK IVORY to get our paintings into thousands of deserving and appreciative homes every year AND make some decent money while we’re at it, before globally rolling it out as a free, open source, cross promoting franchise community.

The first painting, of two cats (above), was a struggle, took far too long to finish and left me thinking there was no way I’d get ten done. Maybe five. I blame this on my diet, where I skip breakfast every morning and have a late lunch. So the diet got abandoned, and the next nine paintings were subsequently all done by mid-afternoon. No more diets on painting days. Every day’s a painting day. Here's me pretending to paint with my left hand as the camera's in my right:

Another new and exciting development in my workflow is that I’m now writing these blogs using the speech to text function in Google Docs, on Google Drive. Every 10 to 20 minutes I need to take a break from painting, so am dictating this in the breaks before tidying up the grammar manually later. Probably while watching Death in Paradise with my dad tonight, as we do every night. Another of today's paintings:

I don’t have enough art themed on my bands. My latest album is called Class and I’d like to do some paintings the same size as the ones I did today, themed on this album. Text based with lyrics and complete guitar tablature, each painting dedicated to a single song. Either this, or small 7 x 5 inch oil paintings on stretched canvas, I suspect will be the plan for tomorrow, unless I wake up with a better idea. Having lots of small paintings in stock will allow me to get back to running online auctions of my smaller paintings. I’ve done a few already, but was not getting enough bids to make it profitable enough. One painting sold for less than it cost me to post. Two paintings failed to get any bids despite having a starting price of 99p and coming with free postage. Encouraging as it further proves what’s apparent at Camden, that people won’t take a painting even if it’s free or, in the case of my online auctions, sometimes nearly free. I like that, it appears, only people genuinely wanting my paintings are getting them and that people aren’t just mindlessly taking something because it’s free. At Camden lots of people walk straight past my display and many spend time looking at it, but decide they don’t want to take a free painting. A lady once came back to return the free painting she’d taken earlier that day. This restores some faith in humanity for me, and I think is encouraging for the whole concept of FREE ART FREES ART. My worry was that people would thoughtlessly take my free paintings, then either throw them in the bin or treat it in a similarly disinterested and destructive way, but the impression I’m getting is that those who take, or buy for next to nothing, my paintings do value them and I’m happy for these people to have them without having to give me any money.

Above is a painting of two animals jumping into a flooding river. I usually work on the floor. A friend of mine at an art class I used to help out at said “If you want to know where Edgeworth is, he’s on the floor.” I don’t know how people manage to stand up all day painting. Back to free art, I can take care of the financial side independently and people can enjoy my work who don’t have any money, but do have a genuine interest in what I’m doing. This is the basic principle of FREE ART FREES ART and I think will be fundamental to its later success. Investors will spend millions on paintings they don’t even like, only to lock them away in tax haven shipping containers never to be seen again, but amazingly, FREE ART FREES ART filters out these people by offering them our paintings for free. We willingly distribute our work freely and prolifically destroying its financial value and any despicable and false air of exclusivity galleries like to use to make their artists, perversely, more attractive to their cliques. It’s the “limited edition” mentality FREE ART FREES ART opposes, as far as I’m aware, in the form of an active vocal artist group, alone. The want to have something only because others can't. Stuckism missed a trick, I think, in exposing and providing a positive alternative to this. If anything, Stuckism did a 180 on much of its first manifesto in pursuit of climbing the establishment ladder themselves. Andy Warhol had the right idea: don't join their party, create your own and have them trying to get in. My old friend, and recently deceased, Edward Lucie-Smith told me this. I worked with Edward quite a lot, making videos of artists he liked and wanted to help promote. He wasn't the biggest fan of my work, which we sometimes joked about, but he was a very kind and funny man. RIP Edward.

A lot of my larger paintings, like the one above of a man tugging a rope beside his pet dog, are reworkings of older ones. You have to be careful painting on top of oil as they can take a century to fully dry and for the paint to stop moving, so if you paint on top, it's liable to crack over time. It's not such a problem for me as I usually paint quite thin initially, then add the thicker paint later. Painting fat over lean's the rule. Painting thinly over thick paint is far more likely to be a long-term problem. Here's a man sat in an armchair with a swan in his lap. Another of today's:

Working in Billy Childish’s painting studio these last 13 years has been a privilege in so many ways, not least in opening my eyes to how much I despise the whole art world and gallery system. People from the high end art world, big professional art gallery industry and media have been suppressing and, I strongly suspect, flat out lying about the collaborative work Billy and I make together. They’ve sold it, removing my name from the attribution, and never paid me a penny. They’ve been selling and, I imagine, also taken any resale rights or copyright from me in the process. Now I’ve experienced firsthand how unethically the art world operates, I won’t ever be a part of it and set up BLACK IVORY and FREE ART FREES ART as the antithesis of everything I see them as standing for, but every first word problem’s an opportunity. Future displays at THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN will be entirely themed on this issue, specifically the misattribution of Heckel’s Horse and rubbish written about it in the book To Ease My Troubled Mind: The Authorised Unauthorised History of Billy Childish by Ted Kessler. Let's see if they address it in the paperback.

The painting above is a champagne celebration scene. I should also post about the weekly Black Ivory podcast @ronthroop Ron Throop, Emma Pugmire and I are publishing weekly episodes of. We talk for roughly an hour about our art, music and plans for FREE ART FREES ART. Emma often updates us on the latest art exhibitions in London she’s been too. The stand out idea from this Thursdays episode, for me, was taking the band merch I used to offer to members of our fanclub and give it away at Camden. Cross-promoting our music and art at Camden Market is something I really must get around to soon. I might even risk annoying the punks on the other side of the bridge by playing our Class album on a ghetto blaster to the passing tourists.