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PEOPLE who study such things have calculated that the average person visiting an art gallery will spend a total of six seconds in front of each picture. Just six seconds - and no doubt some of that time is wasted taking in the frame.

  This sobering thought put a whole new perspective on his work for English painter Mike Wilks, and it wasn't an artistic one.

  ''As someone who can spend years on a single work, it was galling to think it could be dismissed in seconds,'' said Wilks.

  His indignation prompted him to try to create pictures that would not only force people to look and look long, but to see them as well.

 ''There's a huge difference between looking at something and actually seeing it,'' said 46-year-old Wilks, speaking from his adopted home of France.

  He believes that everyone has the ability to see as a child but modern modes of communication render this faculty virtually redundant and it is lost as a person grows up.

  Reviving the act of seeing is what Wilks' books are all about. He had his first major success in 1986 with his puzzle picture book, The Ultimate Alphabet , and now his new work The Ultimate Noah's Ark has taken the process even further.

  For the reader - or rather viewer - this book is like a grand tour of the animal kingdom. It comprises one incredibly detailed picture containing 707 creatures, 353 of which have been painted twice.

  It's up to viewers to discover which animal is without a partner, and to do that it's necessary to identify and eliminate all the others in the picture.

   This is not an easy task. There's a GBP10,000 prize up for grabs to the reader who manages it (though this competition is only open to people in the UK or Eire) and an indication of just how difficult Wilks believes it to be is that the closing date forentries is not until February 1995.

  To make things a mite easier, the big picture has been divided into 16 details (one to a page) in the book. Wilks' accompanying text provides information on each animal and clues to which is where.

  For added interest, Wilks has also reproduced his ''trademark'' snail in each of the 16 sections - finding the mollusc is a sort of warm-up exercise to get the eyes into training, yet it's a major task in itself on some of the pages.

   Yet for every hour the reader spends poring over the painting, rest assured that Wilks has spent many more working on it. It took four years to complete The Ultimate Alphabet, and even longer for Noah's Ark. All told he spent 6,500 hours in creating andresearching the book.

  He describes Noah's Ark as a visual journey ''unconfined by time or space''.

  ''As well as teaching people to see, it's designed to baffle, bemuse, bedevil, befuddle and generally drive them to distraction,'' he added.

  But the artist hasn't left his readers entirely helpless.

  The book also contains detailed descriptions of all the creatures depicted as well as providing background information on their habitats, eating and breeding habits, and - all important in the environmentally-conscious 90s - how many of each are left in the world.

  The text has been verified by experts at the British Museum of Natural History.

 So is this a labour of love for Wilks, or merely laborious?  ''My friends have started calling me a recluse,'' he admits. ''I spend all my days - seven days a week working, but I do it for fun. I consider myself lucky to be working at something I'd gladly pay to be allowed to do.''  His love of painting goes right back to childhood. At 13, he won a scholarship to art school and spent the next seven years in 60s London learning his craft.

  ''In those days it was full academic training,'' said Wilks. ''We learnt everything from calligraphy through still-life to oils, using every medium.''   He specialised in graphic design and in 1970 co-founded a design company called TWD (''I was the W'').

  By 1975, the desire to be creative for himself had become overwhelming and he sold out his share of the company and started out on his own.

 ''My first two or three books weren't exactly money-spinners,'' said Wilks. ''Then The Ultimate Alphabet just suddenly took off. For some reason it hit that magic note, interest was enormous and it climbed the best-seller lists.

  ''Because of the subject matter, its appeal was obviously confined to the English-speaking world, but other than that the book crossed all borders, all age barriers. People just became fascinated.''    That book comprised 26 different pictures, each of which was packed with objects beginning with the relevant letter of the alphabet.

  Seven years on, sharp-eyed readers still write to Wilks saying they've discovered even more objects in the pictures than he consciously painted.

   He has also been offered barrowfuls of money for some of the originals, including an invitation to ''name your price'' from one fan, but so far he's refused to sell.

  ''I couldn't bear to split them up,'' he said. ''If someone wanted to buy the lot, then I'd certainly think about it, but if the collection was split up I know it would never be put together again and that's a terrible thought.''   Wilks chose the alphabet and Noah's Ark as his subjects because they were the first and second books he remembered being given as a child, and retrieving the childhood ability to see properly was what he hoped to achieve in the works.

   Wilks also chose Noah's Ark because of its ''universality as a story''. The tale of the great flood and near-destruction of mankind occurs in many religions throughout the world.

  He is concerned too with the artistic pedigree of doing an ark.

  ''Animals were the subject of the very earliest paintings found. Cave paintings dated back to 18000 BC,'' he said.

 Those familiar with Wilks' work will not be suprised to discover that this picture too has a self-portrait (see contest question number one).

  Again, Wilks refers to the artistic pedigree for this and points to artists like Durer who always had their own faces ''peeking out from their own pictures''.

  ''I put the self-portraits in for fun, for my own amusement. Sharp-eyed viewers may also notice several homages to other paintings.

  ''For example, [in The Ultimate Alphabet ] for the letter H, a hermaphrodite was based on Michelangelo's David. These again are in-jokes mainly to keep me amused.''   Success has enabled Wilks to indulge his second great love - France.

  He will soon become a permanent resident - ''for the food, the wine and the weather, of course'' - and has already begun work there on his next major project. He could not reveal details, but did say that he's signed a deal with Penguin to do two more ''ultimate'' books.

    ''I bought a 13th-century, stone house and have just finished turning a ruined building out the back into a studio. It's the size of my whole apartment in London,'' he enthused.

  Into this studio he's installed GBP100,000 of state-of-the-art computer equipment ready to embark on ''the most exciting period of my artistic life''.

  ''I've abandoned painting on canvas because you can't paint small enough on it. The size of the weave dictates the intricacy of the detail.''   Now he's working on specially prepared hardboard panels bearing silky smooth finishes on which brush strokes are virtually invisible.

   That is still not detailed enough for Wilks, however, who then intends to scan the paintings into the computer and enhance them graphically, blowing up different parts of each picture to work on the merest fragment.

  ''It will be finer than anything I've done, the results should be quite phenomenal,'' said Wilks.

  Yes, but will anyone be able to see it even if they are looking at it correctly?   ''Ah, well they'll just have to get very, very close,'' said Wilks. ''And it'll take them a lot longer than six seconds.''  The Ultimate Noah's Ark by Mike Wilks (Michael Joseph $225) 



Mike's menagerie