Obsessions- on Art and Music

If Visual Art has been my way of expressing who I am since I was a teenager, (pop) music has been the other constant companion and great love in my life.

I am not a musician at all- I couldn’t hold a rhythm or sing in tune if my life depended on it; I have never played any instrument. But music has always been as great an obsession as visual art and I devour both with the same ravenous appetite.

With both, I am a collector, buying and archiving images and songs, and revisiting them time and time again.

With both, I am an historian, discovering as much as I can about the artists and the movements I love, learning stories and theories.

With both, I am an explorer, going to museums and concerts as often as I can, immersing myself in the worlds of the artists and of all the fans who inhabit them.

With both, I am an addict, constantly chasing that high, the punctum in an image that hooks me, a note, a voice, a lyric in a song that breaks me.

Music and art are connected of course. I have discovered visual artists because my favourite musicians loved them (for example, I first discovered the work of Aubrey Beardsley when I first read Oscar Wilde, and I first read Oscar Wilde because of the Smiths), and I have got into bands because of their connections to visual artists I loved (I loved Andy Warhol before getting into the music of the Velvet Underground).

I recently read the wonderful book “How Art Made Pop” by Mike Roberts, which talks of all the fascinating connections between visual arts and pop music since the 1950s. It is an enthralling read, whether you are familiar with all the artists or not. From bands started by art school drop-outs to relationships between artists and musicians, from the elevation of the record sleeve to the status of artwork to the reinvention of concerts as performance art, I don’t think there are many disciplines that got as intertwined and tangled as these two.

So there is definitely an intellectual curiosity in looking for these connections, learning of the many ways that artists and pop starts have embraced the space in between their two disciplines, and forever transformed both in the process. I loved reading of connections I had never envisaged before between both disciplines, and I loved reading about the works of my favourites through the prisms of their inter-disciplinary influences.

But for me the connection between the two is a lot than just intellectual. I see both art forms are two faces of the same coins: two different approaches to the same preoccupations, two ways of answering the same questions. And I seek out the same sort of vision in both: Something that talks of the sublime as much as the profane, of the mundane as much as the perverse.

The twisted line of a drawing speaks the same language as the words to a song, the colours in a painting bloom like the instruments behind a melody, the form of a print resonates like the rhythm of a bass line; the emotions they stir echo and mirror each other; and both have the power to deliver me to other worlds, both feed my imagination, soothe my pains and intensify my joys.