Artist Charles Thomson lives alone in a small north London house next to the ring road. He paints in a white kitchen overlooking a little yard, and keeps color cards, paintbrushes and tubes near the kettle and stove.
His wistful oil-and-acrylic portraits, often of women he was close to, are done in a Pop Art style, and hauled down from an upstairs room to be shown to visitors.
Though he wishes it were otherwise, Thomson is better known for his activism than his art: He leads the Stuckists, figurative painters who attack what they see as Tate’s excessive focus on conceptual art, both in collecting and in its leadership of the coveted Turner Prize. Clown-like in their top hats, the Stuckists picketed the late September press presentation of the prize’s 2008 nominees (their placard read “The Turner Prize is crap”) and plan another demonstration for the Dec. 1 prize giving.
“Conceptual art is vacuous and pretentious,” says the skinny, bespectacled Thomson, 55. “We think figurative painting with ideas is a really exciting art form.”
“I can’t see that a dirty bed or a dead shark is any more significant in an art gallery than it would be where you’d normally find those objects,” he says, referring to Tracey Emin’s 1998 “My Bed” (a Turner Prize nominee), and to Turner winner Damien Hirst’s sharks in formaldehyde. (Bloomberg)