The Room of Childish Musician

Billy Childish is half-joking when he calls himself a "Sunday painter", but when he arrives each week at the studio in his mother's house in Whitstable, that's exactly what he is. "I make sure I make a painting – that's my job," he explains. "And I cook the Sunday dinner." Alongside the numerous artworks he makes, he's a prolific musician, poet and novelist, and he has been working here for 18 years. He also works at his home in the Medway town of Chatham, at a studio in the dockyards there, and in Clerkenwell.

Childish likes to paint a picture in one sitting so his work is fluid and immediate: "I'm not trying to achieve perfection," he says. "I don't like this forced control people have over work." Light is preferable, but more essential is having a steady supply of traditional bristle brushes and paint rags. Finished canvases are slotted into every available space; it's "quite clogged" at the moment but continually changes. Propped up behind him is a sketch of a ship frozen on the Medway, one of his many paintings of the frozen river. On the wall is a monoprint by Tracey Emin, with whom Childish had a relationship in the early 1980s; the pair now share a New York gallery, and he describes her as very supportive of his work. To its right is Childish's portrait of his wife.

The keepnet is used to stash paint rags and dates from Childish's boyhood, when he copied everything his brother, four years his senior, did. In childhood that was fishing; in adulthood painting. Their mother, a potter, is also an artist. Also from the past are the items stacked on a cupboard: a childhood toy box filled with pieces of art from his time at Saint Martins – the art school from which he was eventually expelled for refusing to paint on the premises, and suitcases containing family photographs and collages from his Dada period. On the table are books featuring Childish's favourite artists, including Picasso, Baselitz and Munch.

So productive is Childish – he's currently also writing a novel, just "an hour or so at a time" – that it's a surprise to hear him say he doesn't regard himself in that light: "I don't spend a lot of time working if I can help it."


Visit Billy Childish at the ART HATE ARCHIVE on 11 January with Love Art London (loveartlondon.com)

Laviva Online Store

Posted in: Room Musicians