Two artists in mind this week, one I met ten years ago, the other admired, from afar, for thirty.  Kate Bush writes wonderful inspiring songs that are well loved.  But her obsessive search for perfection and her approach to recording music is also extraordinary, even perversely, meticulous.  So when I saw Kate last month, during her first live performance tour for 35 years, there was bound to be something about the event other than a routine bare-foot shuffle through a back-catalogue of hits.  She delivered on all fronts wonderfully, oddly, brilliantly as well as quirkily and - at times - annoyingly so.  Like all great artists, she was the consummate artist live, as on record.  She played a few hits then reproduced two sides of two albums (one of them deliberately obscure) as tightly choreographed theatrical performances, complete with actors, puppets, thunderous helicopters and dead-fish soldiers, before ultimately being transmogrified into a Crow suspended over the stalls.  I couldn’t do justice to my blubbering incoherence at the wonder of it all and will instead leave it to Caitlin Moran, who perfectly summed it up in The Times:  “So what is it just that you know, as you stagger out into Hammersmith – rattled, high and newborn again? This: that you have patiently waited 35 years to be reminded that you are alive.”  

Not 35 years in the past, but ten short years ago I felt much the same in the car on the way back to Dusseldorf airport.  Earlier that day, the air-conditioned cocoon of efficiency and engineering aplomb smoothed away any sense of road surface, through suburb, then country lane, then rough track, on the way out of the city towards Wuppertal. Travelling with another colleague, we were both overly-suited and booted, heading for the hills through a landscape like something out of an episode of Heidi.  Our destination was to meet (and as we discovered, have lunch with) one of the world’s greatest living artists, Tony Cragg.  The experience will live long in the memory.  

Tony Cragg’s artistic CV is phenomenal.  An Englishman from Liverpool he made his home in Germany in 1973 after falling in love with one of its citizens. Even though his brusque reputation was known and we were well briefed by the art-advisor who arranged the trip, nothing quite prepared us for meeting Cragg or seeing Cragg’s vision realised in the enormous scale of his studio set-up in Wuppertal.

For a number of years I was responsible for a small in-house design studio.  Great creative people with enormous Mac ‘cinema displays’ and pens and pads instead of mice.  I think of these designers, turning and turning and turning - adjusting the colour, the background, the font, the pantone - trying to get things perfect, finally hitting save and then, looking again.  In Wuppertal Cragg does the same with materials, metals, plastics, vast organic and inorganic resources that are moulded, shaped, hammered and caressed to his will.  His studio team serve his vision all hours and he was brutally curt with some of them.  They didn't blink.  The Wuppertal studio is a fusion of Xanadu and Wonka's Factory.  Creativity writ large, ambitiously and memorably.  

The piece that we had commissioned was still being hand-polished (is there any other way?) in a nearby steelworks.  It would be another six months before the blackened welded mess of steel would be made to adopt the stunning reflective glory of the finished piece.  It now sits in the lobby of Barclays headquarters in Canary Wharf, or you can catch a close-up glimpse of a copy in the lobby of the lovely Haymarket hotel in London.  

When Cragg flew over to position the piece in the Wharf, he made the enormous crane re-lift it twice.  Each time, adjusting the angle the slightest degree, repositioning for light, or reflection, or maybe, given the mere millimetres it moved, just for effect.  The then un-titled piece was positioned again.  Cragg looked unimpressed, then satisfied he walked away. Onto the next monolith.  

Kate called it Cloudbusting.   Cragg called it Constant Change.