Billy Childish

Who is Billy Childish?

Billy Childish is an English painter, author, poet, photographer, film maker, singer and guitarist. He is known for his explicit and prolific work – he has detailed his love life and childhood sexual abuse, notably in his early poetry and the novels My Fault, Notebooks of a Naked Youth, Sex Crimes of the Futcher – The Idiocy of Idears, and in several of his songs, notably in the instrumental "Paedophile" and "Every Bit of Me". From 1981 until 1985 Childish had a relationship with artist Tracey Emin.

He is a consistent advocate for amateurism and free emotional expression. Childish co-founded the Stuckism art movement with Charles Thomson in 1999, which he left in 2001. Since then a new evaluation of Childish's standing in the art world has been under way, culminating with the publication of a critical study of Childish's working practice by the artist and writer Neal Brown, with an introduction by Peter Doig, which describes Childish as "one of the most outstanding, and often misunderstood, figures on the British art scene". He is a visiting lecturer at Rochester Independent College.