It strikes me that an artist privately owning his tools and materials independently of any others is closer to "the workers owning the means of production" than anything anyone calling themselves communist have ever accomplished.

Except when that artist buys the supplies on the free market for themselves and then for that artist to own them as private property.

The communist way is for the artist to join an artist collective, and for their art supplies to be supplied (free of charge of course) by whoever it is that makes art supplies. That artist might use some of the communal supply of art equipment that the artist collective collectively has access to. If the collective doesn't have whatever art supplies the artist wants, they'd have to make a request to whoever produces art supplies to produce something for them, which might arrive in a few months, assuming the request was approved.

between the two systems, capitalism or the free market economy or whatever you want to call it hands literally all of society to the elites slower than "communism" does.

IMO that's the key distinction. It seems like communism assumes people are fundamentally altruistic, and doesn't really have mechanisms to channel people's selfish drives. As a result, it gets corrupted much more quickly. Capitalism might suck a lot more in its ideal form than communism in its ideal form. But, it seems to do a better job of channelling people's greedy and selfish interests, so it's more resilient to the elites taking over completely. Communism is great in theory, but just doesn't seem compatible with the realities of humanity. Capitalism in theory is somewhat unpleasant, but at least it kind-of works.