James Charnley is the author of Creative License and Art and Adversity. He studied Fine Art and Art History at Manchester, Chelsea and Leeds Polytechnic. During a peripatetic career he learned furniture making and set design, worked in broadcast television and film animation, scripted and produced videos and, most recently, worked on joinery commissions. Such occupations funded his writing and other creative projects. James Charnley lives in Preston with his partner Louise and a lazy, ginger cat named Rodger.
"What art of any value has ever been produced by craven
conformists?", asks James Charnley in this engaging biography of
extravert polymath artist and activist, Jeff Nuttall. Charnley
attends to this question through a detailed exposition of his
subject's morally-charged philosophy of art and life, showing that
Nuttall's visceral, aesthetic insurrection simply knocks the spots
off the work of many of today's so-called radical artists. If you
want to grasp the whys and wherefores of the Counterculture and of
one of its seminal contributors, Anything But Dull is the book you
need to read. --Peter Suchin, Artist, Critic and Curator
It is impossible to imagine telling the story of Jeff Nuttall
without giving at least some offence, for that is what Nuttall's
entire life was about. Offence without defence. Truth without
regret. Life without looking back. This book is a must for anyone
interested in understanding the motivations of the legend that was
Jeff Nuttall. A Herculean and much needed book you won't want to
put down.--Rozemin Keshvani, author-curator, Better Books Better
Bookz, Art Anarchy Apostasy
Jeff was a teacher with a schoolboy's naughtiness, conventionally
unconventional, who gave me the hat off his head but never paid the
rent, the funniest man I have ever met. Charnley has perfectly
pinned down the big butterfly that Nuttall was, feeding on the
flowers of art and literature, and thereby adding to the colour and
movement of life.--Patrick Hughes, Artist
Nuttall was a paradoxical figure of great complexity and
contradiction. James Charnley conveys this with alacrity in this
extensively researched biography, through an exhaustive excavation
of Nuttall's personal and artistic relationships alongside
political and cultural contexts. Moreover, Charnley draws out the
raw physicality and obsessional transgressive sexual intensity (and
often purposeful obscenity and offensiveness) of his subject's
extensive body of artworks, writings and performances, whilst never
flinching from its vulgarity or, indeed, the accusations of
misogyny and sexism that troubled Nuttall in his lifetime. --Dr
Gillian Whiteley, Loughborough University
This is an unflinching biography. Anything But Dull uncorks an
irrepressible anarchist who charmed with his overwhelming talents
and broke all boundaries as artist and writer, poet and teacher.
Nuttall led a life fuelled by booze and sex, yet was ruled by a
critical intellect that set him apart from fellow conspirators.
James Charnley writes with a deep admiration for his legacy in all
its provocations. --Jan Herman, Writer and Editor
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