JESSICA HOLMES: Can you tell me something about the body of work in this show? Is there anything viewers might find surprising? 

BILLY CHILDISH: The paintings have been made over the last six months, so they’re very current. They are of subjects that have presented themselves and that I’ve worked through, or am still working through. People tend to have quite a lot of expectation, based on whether they are familiar with an artist or if they have ideas based on various misinformations that are available. Some people are surprised that I would work with the nudes. I painted nudes a great deal in the 1980s and 1990s and I haven’t painted them for the last five years or so — I think surprises are all down to expectations and knowledge.

I’d say that your paintings are deceptive because at first glance they are very straightforward, but there is great mystery once you really start looking. You frequently paint the natural world.

The natural world is a vibrating mystery of continual becoming and unbecoming. Within my paintings the bits that interest me are the abstracted parts. If I went round these pictures I’d say, “I like that bit.” It’s a love, an expression of my love of nature and an intense relationship with matter — vibrating, distorting matter, which is timeless and unable to be fixed in time.

I was going to ask you, since your work is so personal, how you feel when it’s released into the world, but maybe this is something that allows you to let it go.

My relationship with the art is making the picture and once that’s done, I don’t have much of a relationship afterwards. I’m not necessarily happy with my paintings when they’re finished. People hear my disregard for art and artists and they think I’m very satisfied with what I do. Not necessarily.

Does an idea ever morph into something else? Do you ever think you are going to make a painting and it becomes a poem, for example?

No, I know what I’m doing when I’m doing it. I paint on particular days of the week and I write poems in my notebook. I was in a British art show in the 1990s and they had some poems of mine painted on a wall, which is not something I would do, or which I considered to be art. And I said, “Well, I know what they are. They’re poems written on a wall.” I don’t see breaking down in categories as a freedom, I see it more as nonsense. There is nothing wrong with a poem being a poem. It doesn’t need to become a painting. I like all of my courses separate, so I don’t put my custard in with the roast beef. Not because I don’t like custard or I don’t like roast beef but because I do like custard and I do like roast beef.

Do you prefer painting to the other media?

Yes, it’s my natural ground. I’ve got works existing from when I was four or five, and I painted a great deal starting from when I was 12. I couldn’t really read and write until I was 14 [because of undiagnosed dyslexia], and I wasn’t involved with music until I was 17. Of all the other things, painting is the one where I don’t have those on/off buttons. I paint every Monday and Sunday, so I know what I am meant to be doing when I’m doing it. I had to discipline myself after I was expelled from art school, which fits my nature quite nicely. Going to art school doesn’t suit creative types.

Since you brought up your art school experience, which from what I understand was terrible, what would you say to somebody thinking of going to art school today, when there is so much emphasis placed on receiving an MFA?

When I went to art school, it wasn’t like the pressure now. Art schools these days seem to be there to try and create artists quickly, whereas I think an art school’s job is to give people stuff for their tool kit. I see it as much more craft-based or space-based. You’ve got to have quite a lot of self-will not to be run all over, or have them get rid of your real primal interests and send you on the course to being an Identi-Kit conceptual artist. What you need are the tools to actualize your vision. I’d say it might be better to be wary, ask questions, maybe not be like I was, and rather keep a bit of a low profile. I just fought with them.

What were some of the things you were made to do at St. Martin’s?

I had not been taught the type of obedience that they thought they should receive from someone as lowly as a student. I was required to take history of art and I found the person who taught it dull. You had to say things about canvas, or about art, using “art speak.” I told them I wouldn’t go, and they said I could sleep in that class if I wanted to, but I must attend it. I also refused to paint pictures at the college; I painted at home instead. I told them I didn’t want to become contaminated. I got into a lot trouble for writing what they called obscene poetry. I was talented and charismatic, which caused me more problems than if I hadn’t been. I was a good target.

You’ve stuck remarkably with your vision. How has that been beneficial, and how has it hindered you?

I think it’s in line with my nature, and it’s not an effort. I paint the pictures and, after the event, find out what psychological drive might be in there, which is far more interesting than having a prescriptive one. I just let it happen and then people can work out what fruitcake I am afterwards.

Or not!

Or not! Thank you!

[Laughter]

The thing is, there’s not many great thinkers in art. You have a few people like Picasso who always said smart stuff but you’re not going to get much intellectual stimulation from talking to artists. You can see how popular that opinion will make me! A curator asked me yesterday what I thought art was about, and I came up with a quote, and we wrote it down because I got the giggles. It was, “art is pornography and comfort food for the spiritually inept.” That doesn’t mean that’s true; that was yesterday’s definition!

Right! And what did she say?

She was in stitches!

[Laughter] 

Over the years you’ve used different names and pseudonyms. Do they represent different personalities?

In 1977, when I was 17, I was a punk rocker. I got the moniker Billy Childish from a friend of mine, which I used in bands. I didn’t like using that name in other areas so I always painted — and still paint — under my family name, William Hamper. When I was doing early exhibitions in German cooperatives, they knew I played music as Billy Childish, and it was forced onto me as a painter. Billy Childish has never made any paintings. Well, very rarely. When I was making films, I would use William Loveday. I was trying to compartmentalize so that I couldn’t be accused of trading off Billy Childish, a musician who now paints. It was self-preservation to stop people from categorizing me, but it didn’t work at all. 

I would love to hear you talk about your philosophy of Radical Traditionalism.

With Radical Tradition what I was trying to get across is that tradition, which I really like, is freeing because it is something you don’t have to invent. There’s this literal relationship with a history of painting, which used to be recognized and respected by artists as obvious. 

It’s a connection with antiquity in a way, right?

Yes. Nothing is as dated as the contemporary. Modern people want to lift the ego, but the ego is a block to creativity. Tradition is a way of subjugating the ego and allowing the thing to flow. Great artists, like Van Gogh for instance, wear their hearts on their sleeves. Van Gogh says whom he loves, and you can see whom he loves in his paintings. There’s no desperation for authorship. Really great art has got a timeless quality and it’s not narrow. You look at Van Gogh’s work, it looks contemporary, and it doesn’t look like it’s made in a mechanized age, either. When you are trying to be contemporary or relevant, to show us who we are, it’s like a rupture in time whereas if you give yourself to a tradition you dissolve time. With my music, we used to be pawned off as revivalists in the 1980s for playing guitar music and rock-‘n’-roll. Now people listen and say, “Your music doesn’t sound like any time at all.” That is what you want, for that thing to have a continued, timeless presence.

It’s got a life force.

Yeah. There’s still fight to it.

The post “The natural world is a vibrating mystery”: Billy Childish with Jessica Holmes appeared first on artcritical.

The Islanders at Galerie Mikael Andersen
January 9 to February 21, 2015
Bredgade 63, 1260 Copenhagen, Denmark

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the renowned institution 25 miles north of Copenhagen, has recently mounted a string of ambitious shows of figurative painters with an often psychologically pointed, symbolist bent: Philip Guston (the late work) and Emil Nolde were on view there this past summer, and a retrospective of the German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker continues there through April 6th.

A related expressive spirit infuses Galerie Mikael Andersen’s “The Islanders,” where four English painters of different generations explore the continued possibilities of figurative painting done from imagination and invention. Rose Wylie (b. 1934), 2014 winner of the John Moores Painting Prize, is the unlikely elder statesman of the group, which also includes Billy Childish (b. 1959), Ryan Mosley (b. 1980), and Tom Anholt (b. 1987).

These artists share an interest in intuitive image making, ostensibly rejecting preconceived plans or directly observed models — with the exception of Childish, whose The Great Banks After Wilkinson is a fairly direct copy after a 1936 work by English painter Norman Wilkinson. The show’s title seems to refer not only to the artists’ shared birthplace, but also to the exoticized subject matter of Peter Doig, an art school peer of Childish and likely influence on Mosley and Anholt. The best works here veer away from such calculated idiosyncrasy, offering a more immediate sense of weight and humor.

The whimsically enigmatic quality in Rose Wylie’s work seems to emerge from her asking very literal questions, rather than grasping deliberately for the odd. As she wrote in Frieze Magazine in 2014, “Another route to particularity is to make a written description of a person (or tree), and then to illustrate that list in the painting.” Her fragmented use of text, at first suggesting elusive phrases such as “With Go Imps,” pivots upon closer study to reveal more mundane descriptive purposes, as in the monumentally frumpy, “With Gold Lump.” (In another version of this show’s Gold Lump (single), Wylie attached an image of the Queen of Sheba, resulting in Queen of Sheba with Gold Lump.)

In a large work on paper, Wylie makes a written reference to a straightforward piece of advice from Ingres: “Never in drawing a face omit the ear.” Obligingly, a large yellow ear appears above on a very simplified profile. The humorous implication is that Wylie’s selection of detail has a matter-of-fact logic to it, even while she seems at times like a rogue camera, accidentally zooming in on an odd prop or the back of a head. Her use of scale to humorous effect recalls for me the cartoons collected in Roger Price’s 1953 Droodles, in which not-quite-readable, minimal images are explained by caption, and often revealed as extreme closeups or distance shots; for example, a vertical line and two triangles is described as a man with bow tie stuck between elevator doors. I could imagine Ack-Ack paired with a caption involving eggs or soccer, but it eludes easy reading even after its title has been deciphered as an off-translation of the German “acht-acht,” a common name for an anti-aircraft gun used in World War II. Wylie’s images resist tidy punch lines, reveling instead in the strangeness of figuration itself, and the possibility that something ambiguous or even illegible can, by explanation, become an authoritative representation.

While Wylie’s work also occasionally brings late Guston clearly to mind, as in The Man from London (film notes) (Thanks to Bella Tarr), her work feels forcefully individual. Her simple color choices take on an emblematic punch at a large scale, as she covers expanses of canvas without equivocation.

Satisfyingly direct paint handling takes on a different inflection in Tom Anholt’s paintings, another highlight of the show. His smaller works’ concentrated physicality and variety of mark-making bring to mind Brooklyn-based painter Katherine Bradford, as figures emerge out of layers of misty underpainting. A crust of paint built up on the panels’ edges provides a matter-of-fact record of working as well as a purposeful decorative element. At its best, as in Irish Family, this peripheral appearance of paint- as-itself has a tangible impact on the painted space within the image.

All four of these painters have been prolific producers, and their energy comes through in the work. While the works representing Mosley and Childish feel more forced in their kitschy oddity, Wylie and Anholt make a strong case for the pleasures and freedoms of working indirectly, beginning with what Wylie calls a “sideways jump” into the paintings.

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