New Signage Paintings for Camden

The last three weekends have been too hot to do The Camden Market Free Art Man, allowing some time to upgrade its signage. Alan, the Camden Market Town Crier, has been advising me on my display for months and so far, all his suggestions have worked. He says a yellow background theme works well for our patch at the Camden Lock bridge. Kozmic Records, the local record fair Alan and I promote do black letters on a yellow background, so hopefully my new signage will look good alongside John’s Kozmic Records posters. Here are the placards half finished:

These were all done with cheap paint, so took up to four coats of each colour. PVA glued for a gloss finish. Double primed the thick cardboard first. The idea is to make my display compete with both Alan and Zombie, the punk rocker who sits all day on the other side of the bridge. People come to Camden just to see Zombie and have their photo taken with him. People are constantly asking Alan to pose for a photo with them, all dressed up in his town crier’s uniform. Unlike Alan and Zombie, I dress in normal clothes at Camden so am rarely asked for a photo, but I’d like more people to find The Camden Market Free Art Man display worth a picture. I can understand why most don’t. My old signage is scrappy and half-arsed. I still don’t think I’ve done enough, but these new ones are a step in the right direction.

I’ll be making more text art using these colours. There’s a lot of info I want to get out into the public domain that no one will read in any other format. Not least, the recent hoo-ha over Ted Kessler’s Billy Childish biography that has a completely untrue and misleading quote about the paintings Billy and I do together under the alias Heckel’s Horse. Here's me moaning about it at the time:

Who knows how many copies of this book are out there in circulation? I’ll have to get this series underway soon. It’s old news now, but another series of text paintings I’d like to do will be about the suspected plagiarism of my work in the 2024 Turner Prize. The press, pretty much, universally ignored the story at the time. So, here are the finished versions:

<img src="" alt="Misjudged how much space I needed for the word "Art"." />