How the Whale got his Throat

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.