In September’s British Vogue, between “The season’s new bags” and “The new womanly allure” there is an interview with these British artists famous for their grotesquerie and horrorness. They talk a bit about their childhoods, which is slightly remarkable as they never usually do that, because of its irrelevance to their work. I think irrelevance is another word for something you would rather forget. They grew up in the genteel/downbeat seaside town of Hastings, “which they hated”. This reminds me of what another artist, Tracey Emin, says about growing up in another British seaside town, Margate: everyone thinks living by the sea is all beautiful and romantic, or something, but actually “the sea is just a direction you can’t go in.”

I stayed at a camp site in Hastings once. A drug addict invited himself into my tent. I told him to leave, which he did, and while I then went outside looking for human company, he went back in the tent and stole as many shoes as he could find, and a large kitchen knife. The Dinos brothers attribute the social fall of Hastings to the Thatcher mental institution-emptying era. I don’t know.

After leaving school and Hastings, the brothers spent an inordinate number of years trying to get into art college. Eventually they both got into the Royal College of Art, which they seem to think was not very good, which does not surprise me. The reason there are so many young successful British artists is that whatever you think of them, they are, or at the very least were, outside convention in their thinking. Imposing any kind of petty regimentedness onto that thinking is always going to cause trouble. The best kind of art lesson for those kinds of artists would probably be to give them all an elastic band and tell them to hitch-hike to Japan and give it to a stranger and then make something out of the experience. OK, I did make that up and it’s not a good example, but you know what I mean.

So, eventually the Dinos brothers left art college, and got small jobs in the art world, one for a gallery and one with these guys. When they came up with their first collaborative thing, the gallery agreed to show it. So maybe the way to become a famous artist is to go to art college however many years it takes to get in, so you can get a job at a gallery (I don’t know what kind of job Jake Dinos got) so if you make something good they might show it. Sort of the way making it in Hollywood happens, too- years of mostly irrelevant slogging to begin with. But irrelevant slog informs creativity.

From an artistic point of view, what I like is the way the chapmans went about making that first joint project. They were obsessed with Goya and started trying to reproduce some of his work in 3D using toy soldiers; “they’d take photographs of the etchings into toy shops, and try to match the soldiers as closely as they could to Goya’s work.” I think this is quite bonkers, and very interesting. I have a lot of ideas about why, but they’re too abstract and general to squeeze in here. But I like the idea of pursuing a passion by trying to recreate its object. The best way to understand something is to make it yourself- it’s the practical approach to learning, the only one I believe in, and what good art is all about.