'Music and art are inseparable'

From Bach to sad girl bangers, visual artists reveal the soundtrack to their lives and the music that inspires them to create their own unique works

- Chloë Ashby

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 Songs in the Key of Life'

Harold Offeh

There was a lot of music in my house growing up. 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. 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 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.