The word ‘pylon’ means ‘gateway’ in ancient Greek. The fact that we called them pylons is probably a lot to do with the fact that the 1920s, when pylons were first introduced, was an archaeologically excitable decade, especially in Egypt. Pylons were what the double towers were called that you found at the entrance to Egyptian temples. I don’t have an entrance – unless you count several hundred fox and badger holes – but I do have three pylons. Am I a temple? I can certainly play that role, if you want me to. People do seem drawn to me, spiritually, although not in any official capacity. I notice that people are often quieter, calmer, when they are on me, sometimes even inspired to find parts of themselves that they can’t quite reach when they are down below, although I can’t take all, or even most of, the credit for that. I feel on the whole that it is less that the entrance, protected by my pylons, is in me, and more that I am an entrance to what resides directly behind me, almost all of which is bigger, taller, darker, more untamed.

When Joyce Nicholas did her painting of me, she chose to leave the pylons off, even though by that point they’d been in me, on me, for a couple of decades. I don’t know if this was a conscious decision. My belief is just that she was seeing what she saw every day, out of her loft window, in her own way, and responding to it, very viscerally and freely, also in her own way. This is what all the best art is: our repainting of the world, in our own individual language. And it’s when that language is least compromised and most individual that the art is less likely to drown, more set to surf successfully across time. But of course it’s also true – and here is the difficulty, and the cruelty – that some of the painting where the language is most truly and beautifully of ourselves, least swayed by a mission to please and be quickly understood, is the kind that can have a very difficult birth, feel like an unwanted, unloved child for a while. But then when, and if, it gets past that difficult stage, the dream life it lives – whether it is a painting, a record, a book, or some other form of creative endeavour – in the minds of those who adore it is astonishingly powerful, arguably no less real and vivid – maybe even more real and vivid – than the thing from the less abstract world that inspired it.