Charles Thomson (born 6 February 1953) is an English artist, poet and photographer. In the early 1980s he was a member of The Medway Poets. In 1999 he named and co-founded the Stuckists art movement with Billy Childish. He has curated Stuckist shows, organised demonstrations against the Turner Prize, run an art gallery, stood for parliament and reported Charles Saatchi to the OFT. He is frequently quoted in the media as an opponent of conceptual art. He was briefly married to artist Stella Vine. Early life Charles Thomson was born in Romford, Essex, and educated at Brentwood School, Essex, where he was a classmate of Douglas Adams. While still at school, he organised mixed media arts events and contributed to Broadsheet, a magazine edited by Paul Neil Milne Johnstone and published by Artsphere, a school arts group. Outside school, he started the Havering Arts Lab. this resulted in a headline "Sex Orgy Tale—Group Banned" in the local Havering Express newspaper. In 1970 he produced a satirical magazine, called 'Lubricant', which ran for 10 issues. In 1971 he stood (unsuccessfully) as a Dwarf candidate in the Havering council elections, and was involved in anti-pollution protests. He distributed "underground" magazines around London, including "Schoolkids OZ". In 1975 he went to Maidstone College of Art, where he was the only person in ten years to fail the painting degree. 1979–87 he worked part-time as a telephonist and receptionist at Kent County Ophthalmic and Aural Hospital. 1987–99 he was a full-time poet, with work in over 100 anthologies. The Medway Poets In 1979, Thomson was a founder member of The Medway Poets, a punk performance group, who read in pubs, as well as the Kent Literature Festival and the 1981 international Cambridge Poetry Festival. There were, however, personality clashes in the group, particularly between Billy Childish and Thomson, who said, "There was friction between us, especially when he started heckling my poetry reading and I threatened to ban him from a forthcoming TV documentary." However, a TV South documentary on the group in 1982 brought them to a wider regional audience. According to Childish: "Me & Charles were at war from 1979 until 1999. He even threatened having bouncers on the doors of Medway poet’s readings to keep me out." Thomson has said this period was "an incredibly pressured and creative time and established the basis on which we are still working." Other members