BILLY CHILDISH: NOW PROTECTED, I STEP FORTH
Lehmann Maupin present now protected, I step forth, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Billy Childish. Each canvas is imbued with a sense of remoteness and removal, reflecting Childish’s enduring interest in the natural world as a space of respite from modernity.
July 4 - August 17, 2024
The presentation features a series of quietly beautiful landscapes, including peaceful spring forests, dark moonlit waters, and heavenly snow-capped mountains. Devoid of any human presence, the scenes in now protected, I step forth feel timeless, equally likely to depict the far past as the distant future.
Based in Chatham, Kent, Childish’s artistic practice is all encompassing, spanning poetry and prose, punk rock music, and photography, printmaking, and painting. Known for his vivid, emotionally charged work, Childish’s career has been prolific. Over the last four decades he has recorded more than 170 LPs, published several novels, and written more than 40 volumes of poetry in addition to creating numerous paintings, prints, and multiples.
While his music and writing are often frank and confrontational, Childish’s paintings tend more towards the sacred than the profane. Painted on warm linen canvas, the artist works quickly and intuitively to realize each work, sketching the underlying composition in charcoal within a hand-drawn frame and using a rich palette of oil paint to render light, shadow, volume, and form.
The subjects in Childish’s paintings are often taken from his immediate environment—the River Medway in South East England, self-portraits, the chalk cliffs of Margate, and images of his wife and children make frequent appearances. Childish’s work also veers into the imagined world, with the artist finding inspiration everywhere, from film scenes, to historical photographs, to his own internal dreamscapes.
In now protected, I step forth, Childish’s suite of ethereal mountains, dark forests, and serene wooded landscapes feel both tangible and surreal at the same time. In seen across water, a mountain appears to rise out of the sea, blending into the skies above almost to the point of dissolution. In tahoma at nite, Childish bisects his canvas evenly, with the mountain’s vaulted form reflected in the near-motionless waters below, a thin, dense line of trees separating the heavens from the earth.
Childish has long believed that the purpose of creative inquiry is to forge a connection between this world and beyond, and throughout his painting practice has sought to fuse the spiritual and material. Across the exhibition, the artist remembers that connection with the transcendent is often most accessible through the direct experience of beauty—in each of the landscapes in now protected, I step forth, Childish paints towards the sublime.