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From Johannes Vermeer’s music lesson to Piet Mondrian’s tribute to boogie-woogie, with its small bars of colour flitting across the canvas to a radical new rhythm, art and music have made natural bedfellows. Now Peter Doig is celebrating his love of music with an exhibition at the Serpentine in London that pairs recent paintings with his favourite records played through an extraordinary sound system. So we asked other contemporary artists what music means to them.
‘I never tire of Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life’
Harold Offeh
There was a lot of music in my house growing up. It’s only recently I’ve come to appreciate the richness of it. My family is from Ghana so there was a lot of highlife, afrobeat, African gospel – now I think it’s amazing, but back then it was just my parents’ music. One of my uncles lived with us for a little while. He used to play a lot of Grace Jones, and I grew up with the Island Life album, which was the starting point for my Covers series. I decided to restage images of performers from the 70s and 80s. All roads lead to Grace Jones.
Favourite music: I never get tired of Songs in the Key of Life by Stevie Wonder. It’s a double album and the scope is extraordinary. I love As – the soulfulness of it. It’s a ride.
‘My life is pretty drenched in music’
Ragnar Kjartansson
I remember walking to school in Iceland in winter as a teenager listening to the Cure on my Walkman. Plainsong, the first song off their album Disintegration, goes: “It’s so cold, it’s like the cold if you were dead.” That was always fun when it was freezing and I was trying to dress swanky for school, listening to the Cure pumping gorgeous melancholia into me.
My studio by the harbour in Reykjavik is kind of a hangout for musicians. Sometimes I’m painting and my friends are playing Bach on the piano. My life is pretty drenched in music. I listen to it as I work, as I do the dishes. I love listening to it with my teenage daughter, it’s an awesome thing to do driving around in the car. You can imagine how happy a moment it was for us when Olivia Rodrigo collaborated with Robert Smith from the Cure.
Favourite music: At the moment it’s Sabrina Carpenter’s Manchild, but the piece that profoundly affected my approach to art is Dichterliebe by Robert Schumann, deconstructing romanticism at the height of romanticism.
‘I mourn the decline of radio’
Chris Ofili
When I worked in my studio in King’s Cross in the late 90s, playing music would help to drown out the urban soundscape. Now, in my hillside studio in Trinidad, insect wings, raindrops and birdlife are my background music, so I have to choose what I play very carefully. Vocals and sonic arrangements stimulate thoughts and emotions and can be colourful too – all considerations when making paintings.
I’m still mourning the decline of radio across the airwaves, when music permeated for free through tiny speakers, from passing vehicles, shops and cafes, and big soundsystems. Radio DJs introduced me to so much great music. But just as a reproduction of a Giotto fresco doesn’t compare to seeing it in the Arena Chapel in Padua, some recorded music fails to capture the complexity of hearing it performed live. In Trinidad, hearing steel pan music performed outdoors by an orchestra is hair-raising.
Favourite music: These days, I’m listening to Sault in my studio. Interweaving the Black experience, faith, love, spirituality and mystery, their experimental albums ring true for me.
‘Fireboy DML revived me when I was making nudes’
Joy Labinjo
I often listen to the same song over and over again, and I can always recall what I was listening to when I was making a certain body of work. I was obsessed with Peru by Fireboy DML, which came out in 2021, when I was making my nudes for Lagos. It was the height of the pandemic and I had Covid. That song was really helpful. It would bring me alive again after lunch when I was crashing.
When I’m painting, what I’m looking for is a trance-like state in which I’m not thinking about the music too much. So familiar songs are most helpful. I’ll listen to new songs in the car, and then once I’ve got a level of familiarity, I can bring them into the studio where it feels more intimate. My Spotify-liked songs are what get me going.
Favourite music: Right now it’s Sade’s Babyfather, just for the beat and how it makes me feel relaxed. It’s old, but new to me.
‘I listen to people talking about how awful the world is’
Jeremy Deller
I think an artist’s relationship to music is no different from anyone else’s. However much we think we love music, we’ll never love it as much as the Chappell Roan fans I saw on telly at Reading festival this year. Maybe we as adults want to get back to that state of ecstasy. I’ve worked with musicians loads, but I barely have music on when I work at home because it’s too distracting. I tend to listen to people talking about how awful the world is.
Favourite music: John Cage’s 4’33”. It helps me think.
‘Self Esteem’s anthems push me to be braver’
Lindsey Mendick
Before I was thinking of being an artist, I wanted to be a singer. I was a massive Spice Girls fan. When I first started listening to them aged seven, I didn’t realise the world wasn’t tipped in women’s favour. I just saw women taking over the world and being really powerful. My first installation would probably be the shrine to them I created in my childhood bedroom.
My best friend is a pop star. She’s called Self Esteem. We met about 10 years ago in Sheffield; people said we wouldn’t like each other because we’re both strong female characters. Her songs are anthems for women who don’t fit in the box of what you’re meant to be. They push me to be braver. I use music to pick me up – often sad girl bangers. Sometimes in my studio I sing really forcefully, and my assistants are like, “It’s one of these days …”
Favourite music: Beyoncé’s Lemonade. In that album she seemed so empowered, honest and raw.
‘I used to listen to opera full blast’
Tom Hammick
I was artist in residence at the ENO and Glyndebourne, so I’ve had to listen to a lot of opera. There’s a connection between the framing of opera – at night, with a spotlight – and the way that, as a romantic painter, I’m picking up on drama. I’m an expressionistic painter, and you can pick colour out of the darkness in the same way that happens in opera.
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I used to listen to it full blast in my studio back when I was in a field on my own in Sussex. Now I’m in London and I can’t do that so much. But I do play music all the time.
Favourite music: Harvest Moon by Neil Young. That’s the most romantic song you’ve ever heard, isn’t it?
‘A mixtape became embedded in my psyche’
Haroon Mirza
Listening to electronic music as a teenager was a massive shift. I remember being at a house party; a few of us were tripping. As the night progressed, this 90-minute mixtape was playing on a loop, and it just became embedded in my psyche. It wasn’t until later that I realised it was the sound of electricity I was becoming fascinated by.
I used to call myself a composer because my installation and sculptural work is sound-based and unfolds both visually and acoustically through time and space. Then I was asked to propose a commission for the Royal College of Music, and they grilled me. I thought: “There are people who go to music school and train, who can read and write music, who really are composers.” So I realised it wasn’t going to cut it.
Favourite music: My own track: Ceasefire Algorithm. Also, the Korgis’ Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime.
‘I photographed the Clash for their first hit’
Caroline Coon
I’ve always lived on streets annually freed for Notting Hill carnival, where British pop music has been redefined. Early on, the spirit-raising rhythms were steel band calypso and soca. By the 1970s, huge soundsystems blasted out reggae. Naturally, carnival floats and DJ soundsystems appear in my urban landscape paintings.
In 1976, like the Clash’s Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon, I was at the carnival when Black youths rioted. This anti-racist protest inspired the Clash’s song White Riot, which became their first hit single with one of my early punk photos of the band on the cover. For me, music and art are inseparable – I like to feel music rhythms in my painting compositions. Choosing what music to play is part of my daily ritual.
Favourite music: This summer, A Mass of Life by Frederick Delius has been my favourite, played continuously – fabulous sequences of massed choir colour.
‘I love recording dripping and scratching’
Laure Prouvost
Mine wasn’t a household full of music, but there was a lot of nature – the sound of the wind and birds. Where does music start? Is it birdsong in the garden? The sound of a kettle getting madder and madder with boiling water? Music is everywhere, though of course there are moments when it’s intensified and you’re more conscious of it.
I’m from the film and video world, so sound is a material that I work with. I remember Peter Cusack, one of my teachers years ago at Saint Martins, saying, “You have to make your own sound.” I also work with musicians. I’ve worked with people to make a catchy song that takes you galloping through the fields, and to create the sound of a wave splashing in your face. I also love recording things like dripping or scratching on my iPhone. The guts of my videos is sound; the image is the facade.
Favourite music: I Put a Spell on You by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. It’s a classic.
‘I found my way back to art through music’
Mark Leckey
When I went to art school, learning about theory was an obstacle to creativity. The way I found my way back to making art was through music. If I wanted to make a new work, or I was thinking through ideas, I’d start listening to specific songs that I would use as a blueprint. I’d think: “I want to evoke the same things this song is inducing in me.”
What I love about music is that it’s democratic, but it also allows you to access something beyond your own experience. It can be both local and avant garde. Why does art struggle with that?
Favourite music: I used to listen to Trip II the Moon (Part 2) by Acen before I made anything. It’s the most ecstatic record I know, but undergirding it is a kind of melancholy.
