To some he’s the new Blake, an eccentric genius. To others he’s a prolific mediocrity with a famous ex-girlfriend and a talent for committing commercial suicide. John-Paul Flintoff enters the weird world of Billy Childish. Photographs by Brian Griffin
Billy Childish can talk. And talk.
At school he was told he had verbal incontinence, and it seems that hasn’t changed. He paints, writes and makes music no less abundantly. He has produced 2,500 pictures, published 40 books of poetry and four novels, and released more than 100 full-length albums – about half as many again as the Rolling Stones, who have been at it twice as long. “I’m Sagittarius to the power of a million,” Childish explains. “And I have that with Jupiter, so I can never do enough – absolutely unlimited, pffft!”
Despite his extraordinary output, the chances are that you have not heard of Childish, or you only know vaguely that he once went out with the artist Tracey Emin. In 2006 he declined a lucrative offer to appear on Celebrity Big Brother. Indeed, Childish does not watch television, or listen to the radio, or read newspapers, and hasn’t done so for years. He doesn’t “do” e-mail or mobile phones, and the last time he went to a gig, other than as performer, was in the 1970s. This helps to explain how he has the time to produce so much work. It also explains his extraordinarily scanty grasp of popular culture. “People think I’m being cute when I don’t recognise the names of people they mention,” he says.
Nevertheless, Childish has himself been a cult hero to successful people such as the late Kurt Cobain, P J Harvey and Robert Plant. The White Stripes asked Childish to paint live on stage with them on Top of the Pops. Kylie Minogue phoned him to ask if she could use part of the title of one of his poetry books for her album Impossible Princess. (“She was very polite and very nice,” he reports.) His poetry has twice won him National Poetry prize commendations. The poet laureate, Andrew Motion, said of Childish: “He looks like he’s having more fun being a poet than I am.” As for the art world, Emin has acknowledged his profound influence on her own work, and a new critical study of Childish by the artist and writer Neal Brown describes him as “one of the most outstanding, and often misunderstood, figures on the British art scene”. Brown “discovered” Childish in the course of writing a book about Emin for the Tate. He couldn’t fathom why nobody was writing similar books about Childish.
“I think it’s because Billy has done such a lot of work,” Brown tells me, “and because of the sheer range it covers. Also, there’s a sense of embarrassment because of the sincerity of the work. Painterly nuance is not necessarily the point. A conspicuous emotional register is – particularly moods of poetic exhilaration.”
The artist Peter Doig, who has known Childish for many years, agrees: “A lot of people are embarrassed by work like Billy’s – but that’s what’s great about it as well. He is very honest.” For the record, people who have found his work embarrassing include critics writing in Time Out (“nothing more than a Bayswater Road-style dauber”), Virgin’s in-flight magazine (“infantile paintings”), and the East Anglian Daily Times (“some of the worst painting I have ever seen on public show”).
Childish has been compared to William Blake and D H Lawrence – like them, he both writes and paints. He also shares their sincerity and eccentric otherworldliness. When I mention these names to Childish, he thinks for a moment, then says: “I’m not unique. I come from a tradition which only seems to pop up occasionally.” He pauses. “I can imagine how arrogant that will sound, written down.” (He is frequently accused of arrogance.)
“But what I mean is that I’m just not intimidated. I don’t take it too seriously. I’m confident enough to do things regardless of ability. I don’t sweat over them. I’m not fussy. It’s like cooking: I’m good at that, and I don’t need recipes.”
Billy Childish can talk. And talk.
At school he was told he had verbal incontinence, and it seems that hasn’t changed. He paints, writes and makes music no less abundantly. He has produced 2,500 pictures, published 40 books of poetry and four novels, and released more than 100 full-length albums – about half as many again as the Rolling Stones, who have been at it twice as long. “I’m Sagittarius to the power of a million,” Childish explains. “And I have that with Jupiter, so I can never do enough – absolutely unlimited, pffft!”
Despite his extraordinary output, the chances are that you have not heard of Childish, or you only know vaguely that he once went out with the artist Tracey Emin. In 2006 he declined a lucrative offer to appear on Celebrity Big Brother. Indeed, Childish does not watch television, or listen to the radio, or read newspapers, and hasn’t done so for years. He doesn’t “do” e-mail or mobile phones, and the last time he went to a gig, other than as performer, was in the 1970s. This helps to explain how he has the time to produce so much work. It also explains his extraordinarily scanty grasp of popular culture. “People think I’m being cute when I don’t recognise the names of people they mention,” he says.
Nevertheless, Childish has himself been a cult hero to successful people such as the late Kurt Cobain, P J Harvey and Robert Plant. The White Stripes asked Childish to paint live on stage with them on Top of the Pops. Kylie Minogue phoned him to ask if she could use part of the title of one of his poetry books for her album Impossible Princess. (“She was very polite and very nice,” he reports.) His poetry has twice won him National Poetry prize commendations. The poet laureate, Andrew Motion, said of Childish: “He looks like he’s having more fun being a poet than I am.” As for the art world, Emin has acknowledged his profound influence on her own work, and a new critical study of Childish by the artist and writer Neal Brown describes him as “one of the most outstanding, and often misunderstood, figures on the British art scene”. Brown “discovered” Childish in the course of writing a book about Emin for the Tate. He couldn’t fathom why nobody was writing similar books about Childish.
“I think it’s because Billy has done such a lot of work,” Brown tells me, “and because of the sheer range it covers. Also, there’s a sense of embarrassment because of the sincerity of the work. Painterly nuance is not necessarily the point. A conspicuous emotional register is – particularly moods of poetic exhilaration.”
The artist Peter Doig, who has known Childish for many years, agrees: “A lot of people are embarrassed by work like Billy’s – but that’s what’s great about it as well. He is very honest.” For the record, people who have found his work embarrassing include critics writing in Time Out (“nothing more than a Bayswater Road-style dauber”), Virgin’s in-flight magazine (“infantile paintings”), and the East Anglian Daily Times (“some of the worst painting I have ever seen on public show”).
Childish has been compared to William Blake and D H Lawrence – like them, he both writes and paints. He also shares their sincerity and eccentric otherworldliness. When I mention these names to Childish, he thinks for a moment, then says: “I’m not unique. I come from a tradition which only seems to pop up occasionally.” He pauses. “I can imagine how arrogant that will sound, written down.” (He is frequently accused of arrogance.)
“But what I mean is that I’m just not intimidated. I don’t take it too seriously. I’m confident enough to do things regardless of ability. I don’t sweat over them. I’m not fussy. It’s like cooking: I’m good at that, and I don’t need recipes.”
As a journalist, I’m accustomed to meeting creative people who know they are rather special. I’ve also met a number of crushed souls who, believing themselves to be useless, daren’t try their hand at anything. Childish is a stunning exception: passionately creative in any discipline, but also substantially indifferent to worldly success. Having followed him for several months – to an exhibition of his paintings in London, and a combined poetry reading and music event – and talked with him at great length, I find that Childish has quite some influence on me. I have written poems, produced dozens of sketches and paintings and not a few lino-cuts. So I have come to see him at home to offer him a challenge that I wouldn’t dream of suggesting to most serious artists: can we do some painting together? In principle, he has agreed. But he is not feeling well today. He looks uncharacteristically glum and says he has been for certain unspecified medical tests and has had to cancel gigs during the summer. I offer to go away, come back another time. But he says that won’t be necessary, makes me a cup of green tea in a glass cup, and sits down for a long talk.
Childish lives in Chatham, Kent, around the corner from where Dickens once lived very miserably. The house, owned by Childish’s mother, stands in a terrace of bedsits. He shares it with his wife, Julie, and his young son (by a previous girlfriend), Huddie. It’s like something from another time: there seems to be nothing plastic. On the wall in the kitchen is an ancient telephone that still works. There’s a wooden desk, a Buddha, colourful flags, innumerable hats, guitars and many paintings by Childish. Over the door to the garden the wall is decorated with primitive animal images scratched into wet cement. He commissions a lot of work from others, much of it practical: a hefty ladder leading to the loft, wall panelling, a wooden washboard. Some have been paid for with art: in return for the ladder, he painted the carpenter’s daughters.
Like the house, Childish himself appears to belong to another era – not only because of his pointy moustache. Today he wears a collarless work shirt of the sort worn by Victorian navvies. I’ve also seen him in walking boots with real nails in the soles, and a set of replica 1912 Royal Flying Corps overalls – all items specially made for him by friends.
He was born Steven John Hamper on December 1, 1959. (He adopted the name Billy Childish in 1977, but uses several others too.) He was sexually abused, aged nine, by a male family friend. “We were on holiday. I had to share a bed with him. It happened for several nights, then I refused to go near him. I didn’t tell anyone.” He has subsequently made up for that, spilling the beans in his early poetry and two of his novels, My Fault, and Sex Crimes of the Futcher. (Severely dyslexic, he declines to have his unusual spellings amended.) He has written a great deal of other personal material, on subjects including his years of alcoholism, and a youthful experiment in sexual relations with a dog.
Recently his work has become mellower. This has a lot to do with giving up alcohol and taking up yoga in 1993, but he also acknowledges the influence of Jesus Christ and Buddha. “We’re all stardust,” he might say these days. “Nothing new is coming into being. Everything just changes shape and form. My nose, for example, was once a tyrannosaurus’s toenail.” Or: “You have to take life very seriously, and realise that it’s all a joke. That is the art of living.”
His own sense of humour is still dark. “I amuse myself with base homophobic jokes,” he tells me. “I’m English and I was brought up in the provinces.” He likes racist humour as well. “My wife is black and American Indian. She says that she’s allowed to make those jokes but I’m not… Humour is next to taboo. It can be playful. It can be hurtful too, but I don’t use it that way.”
When he left school, he decided to devote himself to art but was refused an interview at the local art college, so he worked as an apprentice stonemason at the naval dockyard in Chatham. One day he purposefully smashed his hand with a 3lb club hammer and declared he’d never work again. He was 16. He no longer wished to carve identical blocks of stone every day. It was to be his last prolonged period of employment.
He was accepted into Saint Martin’s School of Art under a “genius clause” – his many drawings made up for his poor academic record – but was expelled. Shortly afterwards, in 1982, he met Emin. She was in her late teens, a nihilistic fashion student at Medway College of Design. “Billy was the first person I’d met who was doing what they wanted to do,” she later recalled.
“That was a very subtle and important influence. I was really in love with him as well.” In her famous “tent”, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, Childish’s name was displayed prominently. Their friendship ended when Emin found success. “Once upon a time she acknowledged me as a ‘major influence’,” Childish has said, “but when I didn’t applaud her stuff she got the knife out. I have gone from being thanked by her for my endless support to being some kind of Charles Manson figure.” He mentions Emin fairly often, but usually asks me not to repeat what he says because it will “cause more aggravation”. Not long ago, Emin popped in to see his mother, to whom she has long been close, and he says he doesn’t want to spoil things.
Some might suspect he just wants to get on the good side of Emin, more successful than him in so many ways. Is that right? “If I was climbing a mountain, I’d have done everything I could to stay on the right side of Tracey. My ambition is much bigger than that. My ambition is to do what I want to do, the way I want to do it, and do it right.” For what it’s worth, I believe him. Far from sucking up, Childish has a tendency to fall out with people unnecessarily. He once told GQ magazine that he couldn’t listen to the White Stripes, who greatly admire him. “It’s a shame it came over that way; I was asked about the White Stripes, but in truth I’m not into the modern sound at all, so I don’t like the modern groups – or many old ones, for that matter. I’m not a music fan, if you like.” (Having released 100 albums himself, he must surely mean only that he doesn’t much like other people’s music.)
He also fell out with the influential group of artists he helped to form: the Stuckists. The group took its name from a poem Childish wrote, based on a conversation he had with Emin. She accused him of being “stuck” in a particular approach to art. The Stuckists achieved considerable press coverage, fuelled by Emin’s nomination for the Turner prize in 1999 – indeed, Childish was thrown out of the Tate for distributing anti-Turner-prize manifestos.
He stands by the trenchant manifestos he wrote for the Stuckists, but he will tell you that he left the group in 2001 and did not show any work in the large Stuckist exhibition of 2004. Childish has made a life’s work of founding groups and writing manifestos, then quitting. But he remains on good terms with the group’s co-founder, Charles Thomson, who interviewed him recently and said: “I’ve known you for over 25 years and spent a lot of time trying to work you out, in particular some apparent contradictions. For example, you can take a very big, deep, philosophical view on things, have a lot of compassion and understanding for others and help people out… You can also be very damning and critical, showing little empathy for anyone that doesn’t fit in with your values.”
Childish rejoices in self-contradiction, and to say he can be damning and critical is an understatement. “My least favourite of the Stuckists,” he says, “was a guy who was good at drawing but pitched it just wacky enough to get the c***s to buy it.” Does he mean that art that attracts a buyer is therefore less worthwhile? Are people who buy art necessarily “c***s”? “The question of what is art is “very, very simple”, he says. “Would the person do it if he wasn’t being paid? This would eradicate all of contemporary art! You don’t pickle sharks in your shed for 20 years because you believe in it. The good thing about art is, no matter how bad it is, if it’s lying in the street, people recognise it as art. Whereas a lot of the work we have these days wouldn’t be.”
People should do more art, he believes. “George Orwell, working as a policeman in Burma, had to practise drawing because they didn’t have cameras. This happened a lot in the services. My grandfather was a carpenter in the navy and he had to be able to draw. And the officers too. You had to be able to record things, to convey ideas. And that enables you to see rather than just look.
“When I was a kid, from three to six, my painting was loose. Then it was colourful from 11 to 16, then dark and graphic as a 21- to 33-year-old drunk. Since 33, I’ve just been working backwards again. That’s when I became an adult, at 33, and gave up drink and inverted anger.”
Other people don’t produce half as much work as him. Why is that? “I have to pretend I don’t do as much as I do, because it embarrasses me. People sometimes ask me and I pretend I haven’t done anything recently.” He is prolific, it seems, not only because he doesn’t watch telly or read the papers but because he is fast. “I paint a picture in 15 minutes, maybe 20, sometimes three-quarters of an hour; if it’s all going to hell, three hours. Sometimes time and effort rescues it, but usually it just tortures it. Most times I like the first go, then come back a couple of hours later and decide whether to add one tiny brush mark; that’s the touch that pleases my soul.”
He’s sometimes asked to teach in art schools. As a result, he says, the students produce more in one afternoon than in the rest of the term. “I try to get them to let go and use no skill whatever. This is an absolute block. They’re so tied up because they can’t bring themselves to do rubbish.” But isn’t the point of being students that they want to move beyond making rubbish?
“When people say their kids could do such-and-such a painting, my smart answer is, ‘Well, I would expect your kids to do it, but can you?’ It takes a lot of work to get that free and easy – to be natural. Skilful means effortless. You can get that with beginner’s luck, but after that you have to do some more work to recapture it, which is what Picasso talked about. I’ve been working between the tension of my skill and allowing the painting to be as it wants to be since I was 33. The first trick was to not care what others might think of my work. The next was to paint and not care what I thought about it myself. That’s why I work quickly, and why I don’t look at it again for another week.” (He paints on Sundays, at his mother’s house.) “So I can see it as if it was done by someone else.” He seems relaxed about work that turns out badly. “I saw some of my paintings today and I’m appalled by them.” For most artists to say that would be devastating, but to Childish it’s just five minutes’ annoyance.
The interesting thing about painting pictures, he concludes, is painting pictures. And with music, the interesting thing is playing it. “When I was a child, people got together and played in the pub and in the car park. And people knew how to do a turn. People think I’m an amateur. That’s become a derogatory term, like I don’t know what I’m doing. But the amateur is someone who does things out of love.”
That said, when I went to see him perform – to an audience of 100 or so in the basement of his London gallery – he confessed to being not very good at tuning his guitar and asked the audience: “Is that flat or sharp?”
In keeping with the amateurism is his cussedly uncommercial approach. At his gallery, his dealer, Steven Lowe, showed me Childish’s latest novel, The Idiocy of Idears. It was the second edition, the first having been printed with a notice saying that shoppers should refuse to pay anything for it. Similarly, after being told that he was committing commercial suicide by releasing too much music, one of his bands, Thee Milkshakes (sic), released four LPs in a single day. Plainly, he doesn’t care about money. “If you want to be rich,” he tells me, “value what you have got.” I ask him why, as somebody who has no time for the media, he has given me so much of his time over the past few months. He gives it a moment’s thought. “I like to influence people.”
He takes me into the office and sits in front of Julie’s gleaming Apple computer – the first piece of plastic high-tech I’ve seen in the house. He opens various music files: tracks from his latest album, Thatcher’s Children. He plays them and every so often laughs unashamedly at the lyrics. It turns out that several of the songs were written by Julie, and sung by her too: “Most of my girlfriends have ended up painting or singing.”
If there’s one thing that being with Childish has taught me, it’s this: “Creativity is our birthright. But the English don’t like people who are self-taught. They haven’t passed the driving test. It’s not about whether you can do it, but did you go through the right channels?” This is an incredibly empowering idea, and all the more worthwhile because – to put this bluntly – not absolutely everything Childish does seems to me to be brilliant. I hugely admire the energy of his music, and share his amusement at many of the lyrics, but on balance it’s sometimes a racket.
I remind him that he has promised to do some painting with me, but we’re running out of time. A friend of his – a member of the Band of Historical Hillwalkers – is coming soon to dress up in tweed, wool and leather (Velcro and Gore-Tex are discouraged,) then set out to breathe the air (as the Hillwalkers’ manifesto, by Childish, puts it) and engage with the world by making pinhole photographs and painting. Childish whizzes me back into the kitchen. Looking through my sketchbooks, he says my drawings look a bit “tight”, but stops to commend one hasty study of pine cones. We tear pages from a sketchbook and throw tubes of paint all over the floor, and in the next 15 minutes we make no fewer than eight paintings of each other. The colours are in no way realistic, and the shapes aren’t always right, either. “Is my head really that heart-shaped?” he asks at one point.
Some days later, Childish sends me an e-mail – itself rather a surprise. I almost junk it because he uses one of his many pseudonyms, William Claudius. It consists of a poem he wrote the previous night, inspired by our conversation: “some say im/ laurence/some say im/ blake/ some say im/ true/ some say im/ fake,” it starts.
I phone to thank him, and ask why he wanted me to paint so fast. He has talked often enough about the need for sincerity and authenticity in art – couldn’t I have achieved those at a slightly slower pace? Or was it simply that we had run out of time? Not at all, he insists. We worked fast, he explains, to feel truly alive: “Every artist knows that if they get something in a sketch it can be impossible to recapture that energy in another medium. And that’s the kind of energy I’m trying to get into everything. When you paint, you’re in the moment. Creativity is the only thing that engages with life. It’s the joining of mind and material. It’s a spiritual thing – and all of life should be like that.”
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Childish lives in Chatham, Kent, around the corner from where Dickens once lived very miserably. The house, owned by Childish’s mother, stands in a terrace of bedsits. He shares it with his wife, Julie, and his young son (by a previous girlfriend), Huddie. It’s like something from another time: there seems to be nothing plastic. On the wall in the kitchen is an ancient telephone that still works. There’s a wooden desk, a Buddha, colourful flags, innumerable hats, guitars and many paintings by Childish. Over the door to the garden the wall is decorated with primitive animal images scratched into wet cement. He commissions a lot of work from others, much of it practical: a hefty ladder leading to the loft, wall panelling, a wooden washboard. Some have been paid for with art: in return for the ladder, he painted the carpenter’s daughters.
Like the house, Childish himself appears to belong to another era – not only because of his pointy moustache. Today he wears a collarless work shirt of the sort worn by Victorian navvies. I’ve also seen him in walking boots with real nails in the soles, and a set of replica 1912 Royal Flying Corps overalls – all items specially made for him by friends.
He was born Steven John Hamper on December 1, 1959. (He adopted the name Billy Childish in 1977, but uses several others too.) He was sexually abused, aged nine, by a male family friend. “We were on holiday. I had to share a bed with him. It happened for several nights, then I refused to go near him. I didn’t tell anyone.” He has subsequently made up for that, spilling the beans in his early poetry and two of his novels, My Fault, and Sex Crimes of the Futcher. (Severely dyslexic, he declines to have his unusual spellings amended.) He has written a great deal of other personal material, on subjects including his years of alcoholism, and a youthful experiment in sexual relations with a dog.
Recently his work has become mellower. This has a lot to do with giving up alcohol and taking up yoga in 1993, but he also acknowledges the influence of Jesus Christ and Buddha. “We’re all stardust,” he might say these days. “Nothing new is coming into being. Everything just changes shape and form. My nose, for example, was once a tyrannosaurus’s toenail.” Or: “You have to take life very seriously, and realise that it’s all a joke. That is the art of living.”
His own sense of humour is still dark. “I amuse myself with base homophobic jokes,” he tells me. “I’m English and I was brought up in the provinces.” He likes racist humour as well. “My wife is black and American Indian. She says that she’s allowed to make those jokes but I’m not… Humour is next to taboo. It can be playful. It can be hurtful too, but I don’t use it that way.”
When he left school, he decided to devote himself to art but was refused an interview at the local art college, so he worked as an apprentice stonemason at the naval dockyard in Chatham. One day he purposefully smashed his hand with a 3lb club hammer and declared he’d never work again. He was 16. He no longer wished to carve identical blocks of stone every day. It was to be his last prolonged period of employment.
He was accepted into Saint Martin’s School of Art under a “genius clause” – his many drawings made up for his poor academic record – but was expelled. Shortly afterwards, in 1982, he met Emin. She was in her late teens, a nihilistic fashion student at Medway College of Design. “Billy was the first person I’d met who was doing what they wanted to do,” she later recalled.
“That was a very subtle and important influence. I was really in love with him as well.” In her famous “tent”, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, Childish’s name was displayed prominently. Their friendship ended when Emin found success. “Once upon a time she acknowledged me as a ‘major influence’,” Childish has said, “but when I didn’t applaud her stuff she got the knife out. I have gone from being thanked by her for my endless support to being some kind of Charles Manson figure.” He mentions Emin fairly often, but usually asks me not to repeat what he says because it will “cause more aggravation”. Not long ago, Emin popped in to see his mother, to whom she has long been close, and he says he doesn’t want to spoil things.
Some might suspect he just wants to get on the good side of Emin, more successful than him in so many ways. Is that right? “If I was climbing a mountain, I’d have done everything I could to stay on the right side of Tracey. My ambition is much bigger than that. My ambition is to do what I want to do, the way I want to do it, and do it right.” For what it’s worth, I believe him. Far from sucking up, Childish has a tendency to fall out with people unnecessarily. He once told GQ magazine that he couldn’t listen to the White Stripes, who greatly admire him. “It’s a shame it came over that way; I was asked about the White Stripes, but in truth I’m not into the modern sound at all, so I don’t like the modern groups – or many old ones, for that matter. I’m not a music fan, if you like.” (Having released 100 albums himself, he must surely mean only that he doesn’t much like other people’s music.)
He also fell out with the influential group of artists he helped to form: the Stuckists. The group took its name from a poem Childish wrote, based on a conversation he had with Emin. She accused him of being “stuck” in a particular approach to art. The Stuckists achieved considerable press coverage, fuelled by Emin’s nomination for the Turner prize in 1999 – indeed, Childish was thrown out of the Tate for distributing anti-Turner-prize manifestos.
He stands by the trenchant manifestos he wrote for the Stuckists, but he will tell you that he left the group in 2001 and did not show any work in the large Stuckist exhibition of 2004. Childish has made a life’s work of founding groups and writing manifestos, then quitting. But he remains on good terms with the group’s co-founder, Charles Thomson, who interviewed him recently and said: “I’ve known you for over 25 years and spent a lot of time trying to work you out, in particular some apparent contradictions. For example, you can take a very big, deep, philosophical view on things, have a lot of compassion and understanding for others and help people out… You can also be very damning and critical, showing little empathy for anyone that doesn’t fit in with your values.”
Childish rejoices in self-contradiction, and to say he can be damning and critical is an understatement. “My least favourite of the Stuckists,” he says, “was a guy who was good at drawing but pitched it just wacky enough to get the c***s to buy it.” Does he mean that art that attracts a buyer is therefore less worthwhile? Are people who buy art necessarily “c***s”? “The question of what is art is “very, very simple”, he says. “Would the person do it if he wasn’t being paid? This would eradicate all of contemporary art! You don’t pickle sharks in your shed for 20 years because you believe in it. The good thing about art is, no matter how bad it is, if it’s lying in the street, people recognise it as art. Whereas a lot of the work we have these days wouldn’t be.”
People should do more art, he believes. “George Orwell, working as a policeman in Burma, had to practise drawing because they didn’t have cameras. This happened a lot in the services. My grandfather was a carpenter in the navy and he had to be able to draw. And the officers too. You had to be able to record things, to convey ideas. And that enables you to see rather than just look.
“When I was a kid, from three to six, my painting was loose. Then it was colourful from 11 to 16, then dark and graphic as a 21- to 33-year-old drunk. Since 33, I’ve just been working backwards again. That’s when I became an adult, at 33, and gave up drink and inverted anger.”
Other people don’t produce half as much work as him. Why is that? “I have to pretend I don’t do as much as I do, because it embarrasses me. People sometimes ask me and I pretend I haven’t done anything recently.” He is prolific, it seems, not only because he doesn’t watch telly or read the papers but because he is fast. “I paint a picture in 15 minutes, maybe 20, sometimes three-quarters of an hour; if it’s all going to hell, three hours. Sometimes time and effort rescues it, but usually it just tortures it. Most times I like the first go, then come back a couple of hours later and decide whether to add one tiny brush mark; that’s the touch that pleases my soul.”
He’s sometimes asked to teach in art schools. As a result, he says, the students produce more in one afternoon than in the rest of the term. “I try to get them to let go and use no skill whatever. This is an absolute block. They’re so tied up because they can’t bring themselves to do rubbish.” But isn’t the point of being students that they want to move beyond making rubbish?
“When people say their kids could do such-and-such a painting, my smart answer is, ‘Well, I would expect your kids to do it, but can you?’ It takes a lot of work to get that free and easy – to be natural. Skilful means effortless. You can get that with beginner’s luck, but after that you have to do some more work to recapture it, which is what Picasso talked about. I’ve been working between the tension of my skill and allowing the painting to be as it wants to be since I was 33. The first trick was to not care what others might think of my work. The next was to paint and not care what I thought about it myself. That’s why I work quickly, and why I don’t look at it again for another week.” (He paints on Sundays, at his mother’s house.) “So I can see it as if it was done by someone else.” He seems relaxed about work that turns out badly. “I saw some of my paintings today and I’m appalled by them.” For most artists to say that would be devastating, but to Childish it’s just five minutes’ annoyance.
The interesting thing about painting pictures, he concludes, is painting pictures. And with music, the interesting thing is playing it. “When I was a child, people got together and played in the pub and in the car park. And people knew how to do a turn. People think I’m an amateur. That’s become a derogatory term, like I don’t know what I’m doing. But the amateur is someone who does things out of love.”
That said, when I went to see him perform – to an audience of 100 or so in the basement of his London gallery – he confessed to being not very good at tuning his guitar and asked the audience: “Is that flat or sharp?”
In keeping with the amateurism is his cussedly uncommercial approach. At his gallery, his dealer, Steven Lowe, showed me Childish’s latest novel, The Idiocy of Idears. It was the second edition, the first having been printed with a notice saying that shoppers should refuse to pay anything for it. Similarly, after being told that he was committing commercial suicide by releasing too much music, one of his bands, Thee Milkshakes (sic), released four LPs in a single day. Plainly, he doesn’t care about money. “If you want to be rich,” he tells me, “value what you have got.” I ask him why, as somebody who has no time for the media, he has given me so much of his time over the past few months. He gives it a moment’s thought. “I like to influence people.”
He takes me into the office and sits in front of Julie’s gleaming Apple computer – the first piece of plastic high-tech I’ve seen in the house. He opens various music files: tracks from his latest album, Thatcher’s Children. He plays them and every so often laughs unashamedly at the lyrics. It turns out that several of the songs were written by Julie, and sung by her too: “Most of my girlfriends have ended up painting or singing.”
If there’s one thing that being with Childish has taught me, it’s this: “Creativity is our birthright. But the English don’t like people who are self-taught. They haven’t passed the driving test. It’s not about whether you can do it, but did you go through the right channels?” This is an incredibly empowering idea, and all the more worthwhile because – to put this bluntly – not absolutely everything Childish does seems to me to be brilliant. I hugely admire the energy of his music, and share his amusement at many of the lyrics, but on balance it’s sometimes a racket.
I remind him that he has promised to do some painting with me, but we’re running out of time. A friend of his – a member of the Band of Historical Hillwalkers – is coming soon to dress up in tweed, wool and leather (Velcro and Gore-Tex are discouraged,) then set out to breathe the air (as the Hillwalkers’ manifesto, by Childish, puts it) and engage with the world by making pinhole photographs and painting. Childish whizzes me back into the kitchen. Looking through my sketchbooks, he says my drawings look a bit “tight”, but stops to commend one hasty study of pine cones. We tear pages from a sketchbook and throw tubes of paint all over the floor, and in the next 15 minutes we make no fewer than eight paintings of each other. The colours are in no way realistic, and the shapes aren’t always right, either. “Is my head really that heart-shaped?” he asks at one point.
Some days later, Childish sends me an e-mail – itself rather a surprise. I almost junk it because he uses one of his many pseudonyms, William Claudius. It consists of a poem he wrote the previous night, inspired by our conversation: “some say im/ laurence/some say im/ blake/ some say im/ true/ some say im/ fake,” it starts.
I phone to thank him, and ask why he wanted me to paint so fast. He has talked often enough about the need for sincerity and authenticity in art – couldn’t I have achieved those at a slightly slower pace? Or was it simply that we had run out of time? Not at all, he insists. We worked fast, he explains, to feel truly alive: “Every artist knows that if they get something in a sketch it can be impossible to recapture that energy in another medium. And that’s the kind of energy I’m trying to get into everything. When you paint, you’re in the moment. Creativity is the only thing that engages with life. It’s the joining of mind and material. It’s a spiritual thing – and all of life should be like that.”
For Full Article:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article4907686.ece
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