Billy Childish

Billy Childish is a musician, artist and poet. He is a the co-founder of the Stuckists art group, which he has since left.

Sourced

• Artists who don't paint aren't artists.
  • Milner, Frank (ed): The Stuckists Punk Victorian [National Museums Liverpool, 2005], p. 134
  • From The Stuckist Manifesto, (1999) co-written with Charles Thomson

• It has become an ongoing national joke.
  • From The Turner Prize manifesto (2000), co-written with Charles Thomson
  • On the Turner Prize. Mostly quoted as "an ongoing national joke" or just a "national joke."

• Before 1999, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas offered to get me exhibitions, but joining the Stuckists put a kaibosh on all that — because I wasn't prepared to be controlled. I agreed to co-found the Stuckists to be allowed to say what I wanted, and I left the Stuckists because I didn't really want to be in them in the first place.
  • Milner, Frank (ed): The Stuckists Punk Victorian, p. 21. National Museums Liverpool, 2005.

• I like being on the margins. You work better there.
  • Tim Teeman, "The importance of being Childish", The Times, 2006-12-02

• I am angry with him but I have compassion for him. The reason I can have a relationship with him is that I don’t see him as my father but as an individual. I’m glad I didn’t murder him that day. I couldn’t have lived with myself if I had.
  • Tim Teeman, "The importance of being Childish", The Times, 2006-12-02
  • On his father and a fight they had when Childish was 20 years old.

• I loved moustaches. I used to draw myself with one. When I was 14, I was really into war and Van Gogh.
  • Tim Teeman, "The importance of being Childish", The Times, 2006-12-02

• When I was better known than her, she put my name in that tent. I was asked to do Celebrity Big Brother, but why should I? We live in an age where fame is not related to what you do.
  • Tim Teeman, "The importance of being Childish", The Times, 2006-12-02
  • Childish's name is the most prominent in Tracey Emin's Everyone I have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, appliquéd names in a tent (destroyed in the Momart warehouse fire).

• What, like Harpic?
  • Tim Teeman, "The importance of being Childish", The Times, 2006-12-02
  • Childish's response on hearing that Tracey Emin had said she wanted to be household name (Harpic is a well known lavatory cleaner).

• Bowie and McCartney arrived, and the biscuits and caviare started and I left immediately. I don’t like shouting across rooms, with people in shiny suits who look like used-car salesmen.
  • Tim Teeman, "The importance of being Childish", The Times, 2006-12-02
  • On a party in the mid-1990s.

About Billy Childish

• Your paintings are stuck, you are stuck! Stuck! Stuck! Stuck!
  • Milner, Frank (ed), The Stuckists Punk Victorian,, p. 134. National Museums Liverpool, 2004 (the Stuckists manifesto 1999).
  • Said to him by Tracey Emin, giving Charles Thomson the idea for the name Stuckism.

• a seething, dyslexic, better-looking British Bukowski
  • Miranda Sawyer, The Observer

• Britain's greatest cultural asset
  • The Guardian