Art - Billy Childish

Billy Childish first reached the consciousness of the mainstream gallery-going public when his name appeared literally writ large in the interior of Tracey Emin’s renowned work, ‘Everyone I have ever slept with: 1963-1995’. And it was Emin’s well documented criticism, ‘Your paintings are stuck. You’re stuck, stuck, stuck’, that unwittingly fuelled the movement that was to make him an underground name. The ‘stuckists’, co-founded by Childish stood in defiance of the all-prevailing conceptual Brit art scene, engaging in the then deeply unfashionable form of painting. But ironically for a man who has generated a lot of publicity through association, the prolific artist, singer, writer and poet’s philosophy is to wilfully go it alone. “I knew people who were involved in all that” he says, over the phone, in reference to the conceptual art scene, “I could have been a part of it but there was no room for freedom of speech and I think disagreement is essential to creativity”.
Though it was disagreement that soon led to Childish falling out with the Stuckists, too. “I like to have freedom from constraints he explains, I’ve spent my life escaping from them, like school and work [he spent fifteen years on the dole]. I just believe in what I do. I don’t want to get sucked into anything - to get fossilised.”
“Is it not possible to have a community of like-minded people, though?” I ask.
“I don’t know” he answers. “I don’t need that.”