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Anything But Dull: the Life and Art of Jeff Nuttall reveals the life lived and the art created by a visionary polymath whose generosity of spirit defined his character. From childhood traumas to revolutionary acts, through triumphs, defeats and resurrections Jeff Nuttall’s story is told here for the first time in all its richness and singularity. Based on over eighty interviews and meticulous archive research Anything But Dull shows just what made Jeff Nuttall such pivotal, provocative and important figure in twentieth century life and culture.
Performer, poet, artist, writer, musician, teacher, film actor, bon vivant and hell raiser. Throughout his life Jeff Nuttall was always getting into scrapes, provoking outrage, drinking, fighting, falling in and out of love. Those intense experiences became the inspiration for his art. Almost no form of creative expression was foreign to him and within these nothing was forbidden – except, of course, to be dull.
“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
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.