reading the idiocy of idears by 'childish'.
its interesting on several levels, not least it's curious 'englishness': something I can't put my finger on but which attracts me in a completely unnationalistic way. This ties in (somehow) with mucknall and the 'anglo-saxon' monastic thing that has been dogging me since I read about william of glassington. . . . . .
On his website (music, paintings. woodcuts. poetry - a kind of Blake figure actually) he talks about 'stuckism', a word that developed from some 'conceptual' artist telling him(?) that his work was stuck. (because he paints rather than 'conceives' perhaps.) the article in times online puts it more usefully: (times online on childish)

“The question of what is art is “very, very simple”, he says. “Would the person do it if he wasn’t being paid? This would eradicate all of contemporary art! You don’t pickle sharks in your shed for 20 years because you believe in it."

I suppose all struggling amateur artists have to agree with him when he says that art should never be about money, but where does that leave beethoven, bach and handel? They all wrote to earn a living didnt they?

further on in the article:
'The first trick was to not care what others might think of my work. The next was to paint and not care what I thought about it myself. That’s why I work quickly, and why I don’t look at it again for another week.” (He paints on Sundays, at his mother’s house.) “So I can see it as if it was done by someone else.” He seems relaxed about work that turns out badly. “I saw some of my paintings today and I’m appalled by them.” For most artists to say that would be devastating, but to Childish it’s just five minutes’ annoyance.


The interesting thing about painting pictures, he concludes, is painting pictures. And with music, the interesting thing is playing it. “When I was a child, people got together and played in the pub and in the car park. And people knew how to do a turn. People think I’m an amateur. That’s become a derogatory term, like I don’t know what I’m doing. But the amateur is someone who does things out of love.”

The article ends like this:

Childish whizzes me back into the kitchen. Looking through my sketchbooks, he says my drawings look a bit “tight”, but stops to commend one hasty study of pine cones. We tear pages from a sketchbook and throw tubes of paint all over the floor, and in the next 15 minutes we make no fewer than eight paintings of each other. The colours are in no way realistic, and the shapes aren’t always right, either. “Is my head really that heart-shaped?” he asks at one point.



Some days later, Childish sends me an e-mail – itself rather a surprise. I almost junk it because he uses one of his many pseudonyms, William Claudius. It consists of a poem he wrote the previous night, inspired by our conversation:
some say im
laurence
some say im
blake
some say im
true
some say im
fake,
       it starts.


I phone to thank him, and ask why he wanted me to paint so fast. He has talked often enough about the need for sincerity and authenticity in art – couldn’t I have achieved those at a slightly slower pace? Or was it simply that we had run out of time? Not at all, he insists. We worked fast, he explains, to feel truly alive: “Every artist knows that if they get something in a sketch it can be impossible to recapture that energy in another medium. And that’s the kind of energy I’m trying to get into everything. When you paint, you’re in the moment. Creativity is the only thing that engages with life. It’s the joining of mind and material. It’s a spiritual thing – and all of life should be like that.”