Being wholly unconnected to the previous entry, thereby establishing the pretty much random pattern of everything that comes afterwards

A while back I was asked by a newspaper to name the five books which have influenced me most. It was a tough question. Some of the books which have influenced me are those which have disappointed me, the books which showed me the artistic potholes which I wanted to avoid. It seemed churlish to list them. Moreover, I have a very poor memory (of which, more later). I recently reread Gravity’s Rainbow, which seemed to me like a work of unassailable genius when I first read it, but which had been replaced by an entirely different book in my absence. Again, I didn’t want to list books about which I could remember absolutely nothing.

I can’t recall the four other books I chose (they may have included the Selected Poems of R S Thomas and Patrick White’s Voss, which convinced me, at 14, that literature could be as interesting and complex as mathematics and the study of fossil man). But my fifth choice was The Impact of Modern Paints by Jo Crook and Tom Learner:

I picked it up in the Tate Gallery in St Ives (one of my favourite galleries, incidentally, not least because I am the father of two small boys and it has an excellent café and sits beside a fantastic beach).

The premise of the book is simple. From the 1930’s onwards, some artists began using synthetic, non-oil-based paints: nitro-cellulose paints, alkyds, PVAs and acrylics. The book examines how these new paints affected the work of ten artists (Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, David Hockney, Bridget Riley…). There are interviews with the artists and their assistants. There are preparatory drawings, close-up photographs, photographs in raking light and on infra red film… In short, you get to see how the paintings were made. And it’s a revelation.

Most of all you get to see the messiness beneath the perfection. Bridget Riley’s underdrawing and retouching. The lumpiness of the housepaint in Patrick Caulfield’s early work. The way Mrs Clark’s head is painted over the shutters in Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy.

More than any other book, Modern Paints taught me how to look closely at contemporary art (David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge did the same for many earlier paintings).

And the way it influenced me…?

Artists (and writers) are often asked about the meaning and intention of their work. Their answers are almost always evasive and unrevealing. It’s the wrong question. Artist (and writers), in my experience, rarely think about meaning and intention. Mostly they are trying to solve practical problems (What is the next word? Where should this line go?). Meaning and intention are things which happen while these more concrete problems are being solved.

If you want to understand a work of art (as opposed to just saying clever things about it), you have to look at how it is put together. You have to ask specific, detailed questions about the process (when he was editing my poetry, Don Paterson asked, on several occasions, ‘What is the organising conceit of this poem?’, a phrase I have shamelessly stolen and reused many times). You have to look at draft versions, close-ups, editorial notes…

I have spent many years looking for books which do this (the Paris Review interviews comes close, albeit sporadically). Having found very few (none of which deal with more than one kind of art) I have begun to harbour a (possibly fruitless) ambition to write a book in which I interview a group of artists (a poet, a novelist, a painter, a musician, a composer…), each of them about a specific work, getting them to talk only about the process itself, and putting the interviews alongside sketches, photographs, scores, early scribbles, old drafts…

Thinking about it now, the book may have to come with a DVD so that readers could see artists and musicians working and listen to individual music tracks before they are Pro-Tooled into a seamless whole. In fact, the whole thing might work better as a DVD with a book attached. You can see the publishing problems…

Oh well, maybe when the kids have left home.