Heckel's Horse Jr Painting Studio 28 July 2026

Now my home studio has been cleared out to make room for our weekly Thursday afternoon band practices, I have enough floor space to do some bulk paintings. Three at a time, each set of three taking roughly an hour, two sets per day. All are oil paintings for my Heckel’s Horse Jr series on stretched canvas. Today I got an extra painting done in the first session, so ended up with a total of seven paintings. Here’s me standing with the second set of today’s paintings:

Under each painting is a page from the Heckel’s Horse Jr catalogue I did for an exhibition at Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution in 2024. It was at this exhibition that I first met Ron Throop @ronthroop and Rose Throop in person for the first time. The pages are nailed to the wall to act as a guide, but I’ve painted so many versions of these paintings I rarely look at them. Both of today’s painting sessions were filmed on my webcam and published on YouTube. Here are the paintings from today’s first session:

After a long period favouring acrylic over oil, mainly due to its faster drying time, I’m now back on oil. The problem I’ve been having with acrylic recently is that it dries too fast on the palette when I’m painting in my expressionist style. Acrylic’s fine for flat colour painting, as I know which colours I’ll be using and can paint them one at a time. But for the expressionist paintings, I need to have all colours instantly available. Having to stop and squeeze tubes every couple of minutes, and judge how much to squeeze doesn't work. When it comes to painting three or more expressionist paintings concurrently, it has to be oil.

To keep this rate going, assuming it’s to be a weekly half-day painting event, I’ll need to sell a few to pay for the stretched canvas. Even aside from the money, I’ll need to sell them as stretched canvas takes storage space my house doesn’t have. A friend recently gave me a load of blank canvases and oil paints, so I’ll be fine for the next few weeks even if none sell. For my oil on canvas work, I’ve stopped putting Advertism on the front. Adverism needs glue, and I’m not gluing these oil paintings. I like the matt oil look Pierre Bonnard and Gauguin paintings have when it comes to this looser work. The flat colour acrylic pop art’s different.

As well as the seven Heckel’s Horse Jr paintings, I reworked a couple of old paintings I did under my real name, Edgeworth Johnstone. They both had borders around the edge, which I don’t like any more. I used to like putting borders into paintings after seeing some German Expressionists doing it, and in particular, Billy Childish when I started working in his studio around 2013. All these paintings will take a few weeks to dry enough to put in my online stores, so I’ll still have to do some acrylic work in the meantime to keep the regular flow of work into my online shops going. My goal is to have two hundred oil on canvas artworks in each of my online shops by 2027. I’ll be the Ryan Air of art and revolutionise its business model through FREE ART FREES ART. If I’m going back to Thailand this winter, I’ll need to get painting.