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Britain's most prolific living artist talks to Luke Coppen about his vision of a spiritual renewal of the arts
What do Billy Childish and the Pope have in common? On the face of it, not a lot. Childish is the Michelangelo of Medway, a cult poet, painter, novelist and musician, with a following that stretches from Sapporo to Seattle. Over the past 25 years, he has established himself as one of Britain's most prolific living artists, with 30 collections of poetry, more than 2,000 paintings, two novels and 100 albums to his name. Not bad for an unemployed, tone deaf dyslexic from Chatham, Kent. But returning to our question, what connects the bewhiskered British bohemian to the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church? The answer is that both have issued manifestos calling for a spiritual renaissance in the arts. John Paul II got there first. In April 1999, he published a Letter to Artists, inviting creative people to "rediscover the depth of the spiritual and religious dimension which has been typical of art in its noblest forms in every age". In March 2000, Childish, and fellow provocateur Charles Thomson, released the "Remodernist" manifesto, appealing for "the rebirth of spiritual art". The pair had founded the Stuckist movement a few months earlier in protest at the dominance of conceptualism and denigration of painting in the art world. The manifesto argued that artists had betrayed the high ideals of modernism in favour of "crass postmodern commercialism". Their art was so fixated with the "dull, boring, brainless destruction of convention" that it failed to address what it meant to be human. What society needed now was a spiritual art that bravely and unflinchingly explored the recesses of the soul. This art would be driven by man's unquenchable thirst for God. "Let there be no doubt," the manifesto concluded, "there will be a spiritual renaissance in art because there is nowhere else for art to go." Billy Childish still lives in Chatham, the delapidated naval town on the River Medway where he was born 43 years ago. His decision to remain there, ignoring the temptation to move to London, is consistent with his artistic vision. It is his contention that it's possible for anyone to be an artist anywhere. You don't have to be born in Florence to be a painter or be able to spell to be a poet. This liberating ethos has inspired artists around the world, including Kurt Cobain, Kylie Minogue, Beck and the White Stripes. But such celebrity patronage has never deflected Childish from his commitment to small-scale, instinctual and intimate art. His work is strange and sometimes viscerally shocking, but in person Childish is jovial, gentlemanly and generous. He is a striking figure, with piercing eyes, fighter ace moustache, navy workman's trousers, faded blue shirt and jaunty cravate. "People often have a problem with me," he explains between sips of green tea at his home near Chatham railway station. "They'll want to work with me, but when they find out it's easy to work with me and I'm not really very special at all, they lose interest. Once they talk to me a bit, they realise that any projections of greatness they have are false, because I don't maintain them and I don't keep distance. I don't spend my time building that illusion. I spend my time taking it down." Childish, who was born Steven Hamper, grew up in a nominally Church of England family, but first encountered religion at school. With his highly visual imagination, much of what he heard at assemblies made little sense to him. He connected the phrase "God dwelling in heaven" to the shoe boxes his class used to make nativity scenes, and imagined that heaven was a shoebox suspended in the air by a propeller. "The power and the glory" made him think of a jigsaw with a power station by a river. The only thing he readily understood was Jesus' teaching in St Luke's Gospel that "the Kingdom of God is within you". Childish's charmingly naïve relationship with Christianity did not last long. At the age of nine, he was sexually abused by a family "friend" who later presented him with a brass-inlayed cross. The cross, inevitably, became a symbol of his abuser. Childish's father added to the misery through his woeful neglect of the family and fits of violence. The only solace Childish found was in drawing. "Without painting pictures, I wouldn't be able to be," he says in his distinctive nasal voice. "I wouldn't have survived school. I wouldn't have survived being a human being. It sounds very pseudo, but it really is true." He left school at 16 and got his first (and only) job working as an apprentice stonemason at Chatham Naval Dockyard. One day he decided he had had enough, struck his hand with a club hammer and vowed to dedicate the rest of his life to art. The next decade was a vortex of garage rock, poetry readings, oil paints and whiskey bottles. At some point in his late twenties or early thirties - it is not clear when - Childish experienced his own personal spiritual renaissance. He gave up alcohol and began to explore the world's great religious traditions. He read deeply about Buddhism and early Christianity, and learned to meditate. After some 10 years of searching, he has come to the conclusion that life is a spiritual journey and that creativity is intimately connected to the inner life. Although he finds it difficult to define his beliefs, he says he feels intuitively that God exists: "It seems very likely that everything is one thing. If everything is one thing, we can call it God if you like, that will do. I would think that everything has a will towards good and abundance, and to being. Things desperately want to be. God for me would be like a great ambivalent mind that is actually goodness. But it can't take responsibility away from each thing. It's beyond my comprehension." He quotes the American poet, Robinson Jeffers, approvingly. "He talks about God being known by his great superfluousness. It's because of making reproduction a wonderful experience, and making impossible beautiful patterns on deep sea shells that will never be seen. So he says you recognise God in the world because of the superfluousness of it all, because there's no reason to have it all. It's so rich." But he finds it difficult to relate this superabundant God to the Jesus proclaimed by the Church. If Jesus is the Son of God, he argues, then he is wholly different to us and we cannot hope to follow him as we wish to. "Jesus doesn't have to be divine to be important to me," he explains. "I talk to my son, who's only three, about this. He was asking about a statue of the Buddha that I bought my wife as a wedding present. I said: 'This statue represents someone who wanted to teach people to be happy and live well together.' We talked about Jesus and I said that's also what he wanted to do. And that's why they're significant, because they were less selfish than the average person." Selfishness, Childish believes, is running rampant in society and is also the driving force behind much modern art. "Fashion art practice is really the raising of the ego," he says, with a thoughtful stroke of his moustache. "It's a personality cult. It's anti-spiritual and nihilistic. Basically we've got a teenage society and a teenage art, and we probably deserve it. "We're still kicking against the Victorians in a really sad, pathetic way. The First World War is still alive and well. We've come out of this structure and we don't know what the hell to do. It's children without boundaries, and no adults involved." The premise of modern life, he continues, is that you mustn't stop. You must eat fast food, drive fast cars, listen to loud music, watch television, desensitised to experience and deprived of self-knowledge. "What we've got is assimilated spirituality. It's rampant in the West. Disembodied spirituality is not connected to the reality of being here, because it's not interested in dealing with being a human being. It's interested in feeling like a God all the time." Society's spiritual immaturity, he thinks, is illustrated by the furore over paedophilia that has gripped Britain for the past few years. As someone with first-hand knowledge of abuse, he is dismayed by the "self-righteous" and simplified treatment of the issue in the mass media. In a courageous article, entitled "The Forgiveness of Paedophiles", shown to The Catholic Herald, he challenges the stereotype of the paedophile as the demonic outsider. Most abusers, he points out, are known to the abused. "If we could look deeply into our anger we would see that the people we call our enemies are also suffering," he writes. "This understanding is what builds the bridge to compassion, and we can begin to actually help them. "The more we blame bogeymen, and refuse to look honestly at ourselves, the deeper we drive the poison and the worse the problem gets. To protect our children we need to listen to our children. We need to become good friends with our children, and to respect our children. Driving our children to school is not the way to show we care for them. To quit running after money and be there for them is." Although he is no longer a Stuckist, Childish stands by the "Remodernist" manifesto. But three years after its publication, he doubts whether many artists have risen to the challenge of renewing spirituality in the arts. Besides, he reflects, it's impossible to manufacture a spiritual renaissance. An artist can only point out what's needed and continue to work with honesty and belief. After 25 years of intense creativity, Childish remains relatively unknown and unacknowledged in Britain. But as he knows from his Bible study, a prophet is not honoured in his own country. As Childish explains in the poem, "i am the strange hero of hunger", written in his distinctive uncorrected dyslexic style, he has chosen to live for spiritual truth and not for recognition and reward:
i am a desperate man who will not bow down to acolayed or success
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