Vertical clips and sketch paintings to go with the full song videos. These are some sketch paintings I just did of one of our recent band practices, September 3rd at Black Ivory in London. Emma Pugmire has been my drummer for the last 11 years. Pencil sketches painted over in acrylic paint, on 400gsm acid free card, slightly larger than A4 size (12 x 9 inches). The hand cut one with only me in it was the only reject. I looked okay but I messed up Emma. Seven out of eight is an 87.5% hit rate for the evening. Better than earlier today, where I spent a good four hours packing five paintings being sent to America. Custom forms were the main problem. I now know to make a list of what’s in each parcel before wrapping it up, rather than trying to remember retrospectively what I put in. A problem with including so many impulsive freebies.
It was from this band practice that I’ve started uploading YouTube shorts. Putting these minute long vertical clips online was inspired by @offgridlife uploading multiple series of his AI claymation videos, which themselves inspired a series of oil paintings on cardboard earlier this year. I thought they turned out well, but the online buying public don’t agree yet. The crowd at THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN like them though, so I guess it’s an issue with my photos or SEO. So far I’ve scheduled one video to upload every day for the next ten days. All are clips of a new song we’re rehearsing called Electric Virus. If they get enough interest, I’ll keep the daily band practice videos going.
I tried the same schedule for videos of the interviews I do at Camden, but they fell flat. I still have a load of those videos scheduled to run until at least November. What a waste of time editing and uploading those was. Although Thomas Edison said "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work". Electric Virus might be our electric lightbulb. I’d like to record this song at Ranscombe Studios next year, where we did the Class album.
We used to be called “Edgeworth” but when that name wasn’t available for our Facebook page I changed it to “Edgeworth Band”. Recently, I changed it again to “The Camden Market Free Art Man”, as I want to have a dedicated section in THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN just for art themed on my music. It needs to be obvious to passers by that it’s not a friends band, but that the art and music is all by me. For this reason, I won’t take any art or music themed on any of my other bands yet, until I can make the signage clear that the other bands are all The Camden Market Free Art Man bands too.
This was a problem when I started the new-look Camden display, after I saw how successful Ron Throop @ronthroop was, doing his version of FREE ART FREES ART when he flew over to London from New York, and we went out and did Camden together. Him on one side of Camden Lock bridge with his wide range of original art and books, and me the other with my virtually Jompiy G series-only selection. From seeing how well he did that day, the next time I went out, I recreated his display but with my work. Then, as I built from there and started taking more and more paintings, people would think they were by different artists because of the different styles I paint in. An oil painting that looks like it belongs with the Surrealist wing of the German Expressionist movement doesn’t look like it’s by the same artist who did the flat-colour cartoon pop art glossy acrylic painting of silver robot. ADVERTISM helped give them more of a connected look, but it still took a couple of months of switching things around to find a way of displaying them as obviously all by me. Once this was done, things got more busy and the display got its own identity going.
My first proper band 2 out of 3 Rule were mostly gentle indie pop. Elbow Sisters did a lot of shoegaze. Farangers are the three BLACK IVORY members, one of which is Ron Throop, where we all play unrepeatable improvisations. As do Strawberry Cake and Heckel's Horse Jr. when Mooney Ra Ra comes round a fancies playing some violin and singing. They’ll all have to get squeezed into THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN display eventually, but not before they’re all represented in my online shops. The shops have to be running first. Trying to do Camden before the shops were ready was one of the most painful of the 10,000 positive discoveries of failure I’ve made so far. Looking back, it should have been obvious. I don’t think Andy Warhol would have made such a mistake, at least not twice. I made it several times a week for nearly two years, not including my frequent jollies to Thailand. If I don’t sharpen things up soon, FREE ART FREES ART’s going nowhere. At least my attempt at it. Here's the real motivation. Not the idea of my attempt failing, but the nightmare scenario of someone else taking the idea and succeeding. FREE ART FREES ART just needs doing right. If I'm finally on the right track with it, it’s just a case of being patient enough to dilligently go through the motions. Fill the shops, collect the money, pay the taxes, get back out to Camden, promote our band to the point we can book gigs without the promoter refusing to work with us again, record and publish everything. Once all this is up and running, the franchise will start itself. Then the FREE ART FREES ART dot com becomes its own site promoting each franchisee. Then we move completely off fat cat social media and exclusively publish on crypto-social blogging sites, becoming the greatest and most effective global anti-establishment art movement in history. Get in early. FREE ART FREES ART!
