Tonight’s video is of paintings done in the last couple of days. Oil on canvas, all destined for my online shops. The goal is to have 500 artworks in each of my two shops within six months. Currently, both shops have around 80. 160 down, 840 to go. An average of five paintings a day and replacing ones that sell, should mean being done by March/ April when I plan to visit Thailand for Songkran 2027. My girlfriend Aon, assuming she gets a visa, should be coming here in October. With Aon here I’ll have more time to dedicate to painting and getting them online. Aon’s Thai and currently living in a flat we’re renting in rural Isaan, near her parents. Here's a photo of how my studio looked earlier today:
My Strawberry Cake bandmate Mooney Ra Ra was round this weekend. She filmed most of the video. Ron Throop’s @ronthroop recently been putting up video tours of his studio, where he paints in the basement of his home in Oswego, near Lake Ontario. Mine’s more like a sales pitch to convert some of THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN display visitors into paying customers. Our motto FREE ART FREES ART means often being asked “How do you make money doing this?” The answer since I started doing Camden two years ago is “I don’t.” An answer I hate admitting to, as it means exclusively being for artists rich enough to absorb the financial loss. Effectively, a hobby with some empty words attached that aren’t even true. So, for at least the next few weeks the plan is to make the QR codes on display at Camden lead to sites where visitors spend money. Free art’s only freeing art when it’s netting at least £70 a day. From paintings, hopefully, like this one:
I’m calling this series of videos Black Ivory Studio Snapshot so that it’s not just my videos that qualify for the playlist. Great guy syndrome. It’s a video playlist for all three Black Ivory members. Ron’s been putting up first class studio tours of his, which I’ll add in too. The other Black Ivory member, Emma Pugmire, may have some as well later. There’s around seventeen new paintings in my video, not that I’ve painted that many in two days, they were all half done when I started them. I probably have fifty or so half done oil on canvas paintings waiting to be finished. Finishing these is the quickest and easiest way to get both my shops up to a hundred listings each. Here’s where I sit on my studio floor to paint.
As Moony Ra Ra was filming, we showed the painting I did for her earlier in the week. It’s an acrylic on canvas portrait of her cat, Oreo. A good excuse to plug my new pet portrait artist career. So far, just cats. I was thinking of doing dogs next, but I haven’t found a way of drawing pop art dogs that I like yet. In the meantime I’ll start on horses and tortoises. Here's Oreo:
Tomorrow, I’m painting at Billy’s studio at Chatham Dockyard, in Kent. I’ve been trying to get into the habit of painting as many oil paintings as I can the day before going to Billy’s, so I can spread them out in my London studio and have them drying while I’m away. Oil painting on stretched canvas, especially, is a nightmare for artists working in a small studio. They take so long to dry and take up so much space until they do. Getting a free day of drying when I’m out of town makes a big difference. The big painting in the photo below is from my Heckel’s Horse Jr. series. I’ll be painting a lot of these, if only because they take so little time to paint. Perfect for getting 840 done by March. The Heckel’s Horse Jr. series are versions of paintings Billy and I have already painted together (under the name Heckel’s Horse) so the composition is already done. My usual method of painting (and I think Ron’s too) is to make abstract marks on the canvas and work something figurative out from there. This takes a while, and by the end of the day can be mentally exhausting. Heckel’s Horse Jr. paintings are so much easier.
