Above: Violinist by Bill Lewis.
Above: 2003 Stuckist Show.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Lewis
Bill was a founder-member of The Medway Poets and of the Stuckists art group.
In 1979, his interest in Berlin Cabaret, combined with the current punk culture, led him to joining up with Billy Childish, Charles Thomson, Sexton Ming, Rob Earl and Miriam Carney to found the anarchic poetry performance group, The Medway Poets, which he named. The group performed in colleges, pubs and festivals, including the International Cambridge Poetry Festival in 1981. It was the subject of a TV South documentary the following year. In Lewis's performances, he "jumped on a chair, threw his arms wide (at least once hitting his head on the ceiling) and pretended he was Jesus."
In 1980, he had a show of paintings at Peter Waite's Rochester Pottery Gallery, as did Thomson, Childish, Sanchia Lewis (no relation) and Sexton Ming, the last two also founder members of the Stuckist group.
1978-82 he was the CSSD Porter at West Kent General Hospital, which provided subject matter for many of his poems at the time. He knew Tracey Emin and helped edit her short stories for her first book, Six Turkish Tales (Hangman books 1987). Since 198 he has been a full-time artist (though he gave up visual art at this time) with "occasional forays into tomato picking". In 1985, he was Writer-in-Residence at the Brighton Festival. In 1997, he began to make prints and paintings once more.
Top photo : Bill Lewis with the Stuckists group at the Real Turner Prize Show, 2000In 1999 he was one of the founding members of the Stuckist art group along with Childish, Thomson and Ming. Lewis has been featured prominently in all the key Stuckist shows. In 2001, he taught mythology at Kent Children's University. In 2004, he was one of the fourteen "founder and featured" artists in The Stuckists Punk Victorian held at the Walker Art Gallery for the Liverpool Biennial. He was quoted about Remodernism in the book accompanying the show:
"We think with our whole person. The mind is free from the bone prison of the skull. We are intellectuals of the heart. Just as modernist thought was affected by Einstein's Theory of Relativity (as can be seen by Picasso's paintings for instance) the New Paradigm that Re-modernism identifies itself with is one made possible by the discovery of quantum mechanics"
Lewis has published six books of poetry and three of short stories; he has made five reading tours in the United States and one in Nicaragua. His writing is included in The Green Man (Viking Press), World Fantasy Award winner, as well as The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, 1997 and 1998. His work was published in The Grandchildren of Albion, edited by Michael Horowitz.
