"Art is... everything," Alison Mosshart tells us, in the latest episode of our new video franchise, The Art That Inspires Me. As we talk, she's sitting in front of one of her favourite pieces – a painting named 'Untitled #13' by the American musician and visual artist
Don Van Vliet – at the Michael Werner Gallery in London.
She first discovered his work at a young age. "I grew up listening to his music and being obsessed with his record artwork," she tells us. "His music was so unusual and really different from anything else I'd heard." Van Vliet went by the stage name Captain Beefheart, and recorded a total of 13 studio albums between 1967 and 1982. After retiring from music, he pursued a career in art. "I first discovered that he was a painter when I was about 18 years old in the recording studio," Mosshart recalls. "I [remember] finding this gigantic book of Don Van Vliet's paintings and just disappearing into it for weeks."
The American singer-songwriter, whose mother was an art teacher, is also an artist herself, and has painted since childhood. "I grew up around art," says Mosshart, explaining how discovering Van Vliet's work inspired her to pick up the paintbrush again. "He has really inspired me in a million ways. I haven't stopped painting since then.
"He was just one of those special people who made music and sculpted and painted – and there was no line, no difference between these things. Sometimes people have to be told that they can do all of those things. You don't have to be one thing."
'Untitled #13' particularly resonates because it was one of the last paintings he ever did (in 1994), she says. "The first time I saw this piece was actually in a show here [at the Michael Werner Gallery in London] last year. But the first time I actually saw his paintings in real life was at the Michael Werner Gallery in New York. I had never known his paintings to be shown, in the whole time that I was obsessed with him... I sat in that gallery by myself for hours and hours. I thought, surely they're going to kick me out – I'm never leaving!
Mosshart describes Van Vliet as "a painters' painter", and says that ultimately she admires him for his vision. "He was painting his surroundings, he was painting animals and nature, the world around him and the way he perceived it, as fast as he could before it changed."
Mosshart is one of six trailblazing women who featured in the 2024 issue of Bazaar Art – alongside Bianca Jagger and Golda Rosheuvel – photographed in front of artworks that profoundly resonate with them.
Watch 'The Art That Inspires Me' with Alison Mosshart, above.
