Food can be nothing, and everything. It can be fast, a culinary one-night stand, evanescent as a drunken midnight feast. Or it can be slow, slower than paint: that special bottle cellared for so long it's older than your grandchild.

Whether to cook fast or slow was just one of the questions I took to each of the artists. I wanted to know things such as: Are artists as creative in the kitchen as they are on canvas? Does good taste in art follow through to good taste in food? Will the maxim 'tell me what you eat and I'll tell you who you are' hold true?

Asking all of these questions posed some challenges. An alternative title to The Artist's Lunch could have been Talking With My Mouth Full. When I played back the interview tapes I'd surprised, and a little embarrassed, at how much time I had spent eating on the job. The discovery that I'd been noisily demolishing a piece of English shortbread throughout the course of an earnest discussion with Jeffrey Smart about the incontestable virtues of table manners, made me subsequently wary of steering the conversation too far in any self-defeating direction.

Whichever direction the journey took, there were flashes of insight. John Olsen interrupting a brilliant disquisition on Spanish cuisine to remark that paella is like the sun; Mirka Mora explaining how she reads recipes as though they are ballets; Allan Mitelman pointing out which Polish polka should accompany the making of flaki wolowe. Most people don't know what they eat ... much less who they are. The artists' conversations invariably circled back, from the belly to the eye.

Cornucopias of fruit and flowers, still lifes of pheasant and hare, idyllic picnics of bread, wine and cheese - what is it about artists and food? We don't immediately associate musicians with the good life. Nor do we connect architects with appetite or filmmakers with fine dining. Writers and liquor is a natural combination. Artists, though, seem to have a thing for food. Is this symbiosis hard-wired? After all, cave paintings show us lunch on the hoof long before they show us religion. Or is it just this: artist's know how to have a good time, and eating and cooking promise the very best of good times.

While some lunches seemed to drift on into a glorious, endless afternoon, like with Michael Zavros, Margaret Olley was determined not to stop work for lunch at all. The delight, of course, lay in the differences. The artists' approaches to food and drink, work and pleasure, turned out to be as various as their art. The culinary arts and visual arts are linked by colour, texture, form and taste, and to see the process by which each artist combined these elements was captivating and revelatory.

For me this has been an extraordinary journey and I'd like to thank everyone I visited for inviting me into their studios and their kitchens - their secret sensory worlds.

What follows in these pages are eighteen invitations to dine with the most surprising and engaging selection of bon viveurs. Like that game about who you'd like to invite to your ideal dinner party; forget the high-minded nonsense about wanting your companions to be Aristotle, Voltaire, Jefferson, let me assure you that you want to dine with artists. Artists do it better.

Alice McCormick