‘All roads lead to Grace Jones’: visual artists on the music that fires them up in the studio

Chris Ofili loves steel pans. Lindsey Mendick adores Self Esteem. And Ragnar Kjartansson enjoys everything from Bach to the Cure. Artists reveal the bangers that get their creative juices fizzing

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rom 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.

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.