Making Free Art Pay

Thai Sun and Lake Watch Edgeworth (@jompiy) and Aon Down a Rural Road 2026. Acrylic on loose canvas, 20 x 15"

Free Art Frees Art, and without another source of income for the art-maker, kills art too eventually, because people cannot make things for free unless they’re connected to a funding stream, which is rare, limited to student “artists” hoping on communal dreams and pensioners revisiting their long-ago retired passions. The in-between years are the money-making ones for the mass majority of humanity suffering under woeful pretend capitalism, when art practice (and many other refined and sensitive pursuits) gets set aside for the rigged Vegas scam of working 40 years gambling away a living, using life chips. The money gets made and the art made dormant.

But then there are those, like yours truly, who opted out of the grind (because he could) and continued to practice his art, with nary a display of private middle class wealth (i.e., going out to lunch at any opportunity). I remained frugal and thankful while taking on the domestic chores, freeing my spouse to build a career making money because she didn’t want to make her art on a line cook/chef’s salary. She was the better half to envision a future pension, rightly assuming that an income was needed for old age. She could not depend on me. So I kept to practicing writing and painting while raising children, planning and cooking meals, folding laundry, cleaning house, landscaping the yard, shopping, etc—all the things I would do alone anyway, as a financially strapped painter living sold-painting to sold-painting, (if ever such a thing existed in the real world), and I could continue the pattern into old age surviving meagerly. Thanks to Rose and me, we remain married and I reap the benefits of her stable employment, until the day she decides to leave me, which would mean financial ruin and bagging groceries into my 80’s, if good health allowed for it. This “comfort”, for all its perceived amenities, has not lessoned the stigma of my failure to support myself, let alone a family, with painting. Even if all I have ever desired is the equivalent of a dishwasher’s income, working night and day, creating and thinking about creating... The truth is, I am a ward of Rose. If she left me, I’d become an untouchable quicker than you could say “He scrubs latrines on hot days”. And art? Just forget about it.

So I’ve played the long con, turned my big trick, and planned for old age. One thing I have learned through years of rejection and dejection is that art does not pay unless you are made marketable by an established distributor, or turn your art into a factory, and yourself its sole salesperson. And then your schtick might not be anything like the freedom of art you invested in, but rather more like the man who makes toilet paper out of fallen leaves and sells rolls of it on Etsy®. There’s a market to tap into, he’s popular enough to make money—his paintings (toilet paper) are skilled, thoughtful, witty… However, if the next inspiration finds him hawking painted rocks in a basket, or sheets of shiny toilet paper made from used baked potato foil wraps, then he’s flash-bang out of the market and back into broke, making art. There are two ways to make art make money, and both are primed for the business savvy, never the determined artist.

No one buys the unmade painter, poet, and music maker. That is the great, silent shame of modern art.

So make art free, now more than ever, to save my passion and profession. Here is the plan:

The paintings are yours for the taking. Come and get them. Order through me and pay for shipping. I do not make beautiful, comfortable art. I actually wish it was messier, more raw and intense. I don’t think any shopkeeper could keep up with me and my future changes anyway. I will never purposely work the same way tomorrow. I want to paint with bricks. Now I want to whistle colored spit onto canvas and arrange a composition to grow malignant tumors inside I.C.E. brains. I don’t desire beauty. As Kenneth Patchen said, I hate the rich but I despise the poor. I know exactly what that means, no irony implied, and that’s why I can never sell art. Target® has enough beauty in store to deaden spirits for all eternity. Buy its art for the wall and take mine to put under your bed to help you dream again. Like you did when you were ten, not twenty, because that’s when you decided to think about money. I know that Free Art Frees Art is the only saunter going forward. All art—poetry, sculpture, music, what have you, must be freed because never enough output is purchased during the lifetime of a non-repeating artist to sustain him or her with the bare minimum— a humble studio life of minimal financial expectation. In fact, if I had my druthers, that would be my bare maximum. I cannot be homeless and make art. Nor can I remain middle class, to do it as well as I need to. I should be able to eat, have a dry space, toilet, a good night’s sleep, and access to paints and substrate. Hand to mouth is ok by me. I do not personally know a single artist on a gallery payroll, and I don’t need to know one ever, because they’re not making art in freedom while they’re making art money, which is the great art paradox. Nothing new is ever repeated.

So where do I get the income?

Advertism (see manifesto below) leading to

, [Bitcoin](, social crypto, and subscriptions. Advertism takes you to my art, and the coins sustain the finance of making more of it.

This will be the path to artistic freedom, and it needs to create a dishwasher’s salary to be successful. If I cannot make such a sum in a year, then I vow to go deep underground for the last time, resort to whoring my body to the trick of pretend capitalism—become a dull-eyed cashier or dishwasher in an industrial kitchen. Meanwhile, time to go hog wild marketing myself the painter and pushing this free art upon all and sundry. It ain’t gonna be pretty because I never intend to persuade you. The art cannot have any buyer in mind. But you can help by taking it for free and considering a tip sometime down the line.

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“Free Art Frees Art” is the catchy phrase coined by the great, unlate Edgeworth Johnstone (@jompiy). The following is its manifesto:

Advertism is primarily, and entirely, an artwork that’s an advert with only the undercurrent of being an artwork.

A painting is a blank canvas.

Don’t let Delaine Le Bas see Advertism, or it might end up in the Turner Prize.

Advertism allows artists to get paid without getting paid. It’s the porridgey sustenance of The Camden Market Free Art Man.

Advertism carries on the long hacky tradition of sticking “ism” on the end of an indicative and derogatory word to make it sound like a proper art movement.

Advertism made outside Black Ivory is like Champagne made in Luton.

Advertism is for artists who don’t play the laborious game of pretending we don’t want to be famous.

Advertism shepherds the eyes like a sheep dog of a shepherd.

Advertism is make up on a horse.

Edgeworth Johnstone of Black Ivory.
First published on Substack 13th October 2025.