Artist Billy Childish comes of age

Billy Childish is a musician, a poet, a novelist, a photographer and a painter.

Unless you’re familiar with the independent British music scene of the late 1970s and early 80s, however, you almost certainly won’t have heard of him. Until recently, he tended to be defined via his relationship with a rather better-known British artist called Tracey Emin, with whom he’d had a relationship in the 80s. If his name was known to the general public at all, it was because it had been stitched, along with many others, on to a tent in her seminal opus Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963 – 1995.

One exasperated day, Emin yelled at Childish, “Your paintings are stuck. You are stuck, stuck, stuck!” As a result of this observation, the Stuckist art movement was formed in 1999 (whereupon the friendship with Emin foundered for about a decade). The Stuckists were against conceptual art of which embroidered tents, rotting sharks, blaspheming elephant dung, etc were only the most obvious examples.

A core belief of the Stuckists was that “artists who don’t paint aren’t artists”, and although Childish left the movement a couple of years later, this is the way he continues to think. The first thing people say about him is that he’s an eccentric; but in the art world of 2014, perhaps the most truly eccentric thing about him is that he’s a traditionalist.

Still, he’s now having “a moment”. In recent years, he’s been shown in Berlin and Los Angeles. On March 27, Lehmann Maupin opened a Childish exhibition in Hong Kong, which follows one it held in its New York gallery last spring. As it happens, I saw the New York show. I’d never heard of Billy Childish (and thought the name was offputtingly terrible), and was only in the gallery by chance, but his large oil paintings – mostly of figures set within the Kentish landscape of water and sky where he’s spent his entire 54 years – were compelling enough to prompt a tour of the show, twice. They weren’t installations, they weren’t videos, they weren’t putrefying. They appeared to be the vigorous artistic result of a British mind-meld between Munch and Van Gogh.

When I mention this to Childish a couple of weeks ago, in his studio, he smiles and twiddles his moustache in a pleased manner. Although he likes to insist he doesn’t require validation on his journey, it’s obviously pleasant to encounter a thumbs-up at this stage on the road.

“The only reason I’m here is because I took no notice of everyone who told me I was doing the wrong thing,” he says.