Inspired madness of the artist

The average man sitting on the Tube, according to Gilbert of Gilbert & George, sees nothing but breasts. Now, that may underestimate the range of interests of the average man (though it is entirely consistent with the stratagems used by mass-circulation newspapers to attract his attention). As for G&G, on the contrary, they find ‘ideas blow up’ in their brains – not very nice ones, some people say. But then, as they are proud to acknowledge, they are ‘mad, crazy artists’.

Artists are not, perhaps, the same as you and I. They make unexpected connections. William Blake remarked that where you might see the sun as a disc, something like a guinea, he saw a host of angels crying holy, holy, holy (so obviously ideas blew up in his mind too). And artists are aware of, and interested in, different things. While the average man is preoccupied with mammary glands, house prices, the time of his next appointment or whatever, an artist may be concerned, for example, with shadows.

That is what the American painter Ellsworth Kelly pointed out to me when I asked him a few years ago where the ideas for his pictures came from. ‘Look in the corner of the room,’ he said, ‘between the blind, the ceiling and the end of the wall. There’s something interesting going on there.’ And there indeed, when it was pointed out, was a miniature Ellsworth Kelly – although most of us would find it hard to detect the origins of his paintings, which look like large, simple, geometric abstractions.

John Constable, about whose work I was writing last week, famously expressed his love of ‘the sound of water escaping from mill dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts and brick work’. ‘These scenes,’ he added, ‘made me a painter, and I am grateful.’