Camden Shelved

Camden's ready for 2027 but the online shops aren't. Building and running them is taking more time than expected, but is otherwise going well. Sales have been coming in and seeing the number of listings grow is so satisfying, it almost makes selling a painting disappointing as it reduces the inventory by one. Every sale makes the shop weaker and less attractive. It’s easy to forget the main objective here. The most recent online additions are the drawings breaking up this post. Fade resistant black ink drawings, probably a Sharpie permanent marker pen, on A4 sized sketchbook paper, 29.7 x 21 cm. Signed on the backs in pencil. I drew them a few years ago, but have recently been tidying the house and finding these and others I had long forgotten about.

The plan was for weekdays to be dedicated to building the online shops and to do THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN at weekends, but the shops need too much work. They’re still a long way off their target of £70 profit per day, and I can’t be fighting on two fronts when there’s only about 8 weeks left before I’m planning to fly off to Thailand for a month. Aon, my girlfriend, and I haven’t seen each other in the flesh since I left Thailand on January 20th. We videophone several times a day, but enough’s enough. Apparently, they’re cutting the visa free period for UK passport holders from two months to one. I can take a month’s break without losing too much of the momentum we’ve (Ron Throop @ronthroop and I) built for FREE ART FREES ART.

2026 has already been written off as research and development anyway. 2027 is when Camden will be operating on set days and times every week, weather and health allowing. The concept’s already been proven, as far as getting the Camden public interest and traffic to my websites.The missing part’s the conversion of this interest into cold hard cash. Looking at how far the online shops have come over the last couple of weeks, it’s little wonder people were visiting but not buying anything. In 2027, I expect there’ll be a strong correlation between how many days THE CAMDEN MARKET FREE ART MAN runs and how much the online shops take. It seems that Camden’s suited to small works, and online is suited to big. I still only have a handful of large paintings online, but this will change slowly over the next 8 weeks, before the shops go into holiday mode while I’m away. If things start going really well, maybe postpone Thailand till December.

So Camden’s shelved, probably till next year. Transit Compensation Packs are the new big thing, see recent posts. Not all my art can be free for all, but it can always be free for all who need it to be. To be able to sell my work for next to nothing globally is the FREE ART FREES ART dream come true. Shipping and tariff costs, once thought to be prohibitively expensive, now allow me to sell my art worldwide. Conclusive, scientific, irrefutable proof that FREE ART FREES ART. Thank you Transit Compensation Packs! Made possible through the realisation that art is currency. The customer pays the shipping and any extra charges in their native government currency, I reimburse them in art. Painting a picture’s like printing a £20 note. Artists are walking money printers who spend most of their time complaining that they don’t have any. Struggling artists? Darwiner’s say the species that survives is the one that adapts to the changing environment (Leon C. Megginson), but artists needn’t settle for the environment they find themselves in. We can create our own to suit our preferred state. The commercial artworld is BLACK IVORY kryptonite, no problem, we have artworld kryptonite…Transit Compensation Packs. Struggling artists lack imagination, industry and Transit Compensation Packs. FREE ART FREES ART makes the world our oyster.

A friend phoned a couple of days ago to ask me a yes/ no question. Four hours later we were still talking, only cut short because Aon had been trying to get through multiple times and I was worried it was something important. It wasn’t. During the four hours, it occured: If my work becomes financially valuable then my display at Camden will be overrun by despicable collectors and eBayers whose interest is purely financial. It would kill FREE ART FREES ART. But it won’t because there’ll be an exam to pass before the artwork is released. As always, four questions, but adapted to the ever changing environment. FREE ART FREES ART will always survive.