Stanley Donwood

Stanley Donwood and Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke met as art students at the University of Exeter.[3] Donwood said his first impressions of Yorke were that he was "Mouthy. Pissed off. Someone I could work with."[4] Yorke wrote: "I met him first day at art college ... I figured I'd either end up really not liking this person at all, or working with him for the rest of my life."[5]

Yorke asked Donwood to produce the cover art for Radiohead's 1994 single My Iron Lung, beginning a working relationship that has continued for all Radiohead's art and promotional material, as well as Yorke's solo albums and work with Atoms For Peace. Yorke is credited alongside Donwood under the monikers "The White Chocolate Farm", "Dr. Tchock", "Tchocky" or similar abbreviations.

For Radiohead's 2000 album Kid A, Donwood produced a series of mountainous landscapes and a series of images centred on mutant bears. Its follow-up, Amnesiac, used a crying minotaur as its avatar. Donwood cites Caspar David Friedrich and Hieronymus Bosch,[3] as well as time spent in war museums and mountain landscapes as influences in its bleak, post-apocalyptic style.

In 2002, Donwood and Yorke won a Grammy Award for Best Recording Package for the Special Edition for the album Amnesiac. Donwood's writings have also been used in his Radiohead album artwork, and frequently on Radiohead's official website.

Nine acrylic on canvas paintings, inspired by Paula Scher's map paintings, provided the basis for 2003's Hail to the Thief's look, creating maps of war torn cities like Kabul and Grozny out of brightly coloured blocks with politically charged words or phrases.

In 2006, Donwood began creating and selling large screenprints. In an interview with antiMusic.com, he explained it as an effort to reconnect with the process of print making and as a means to share his art in a larger format than the small, low quality prints in album cover and insert art, "It's a way of getting pictures out in the way they should be seen; not as 4-colour litho on cheap paper, but as real pieces of artwork that have a much greater visual impact."[6]

In 2006, Donwood's exhibition, "London Views", consisted of a series of fourteen lino prints of various London landmarks being destroyed by fire and flood.[7] The prints were exhibited at the Lazarides Gallery in London that represents the artist. The prints were also used as the cover and insert art for Thom Yorke's solo album, The Eraser.

In November 2006, Donwood exhibited the original paintings and other artwork done by him and Yorke for Radiohead albums, at Iguapop Gallery in Barcelona.[8] The exhibit focused on Kid A, Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief as well as a companion art book called Dead Children Playing which was produced, credited to Donwood and Tchock.

In May 2015, Donwood opened an exhibition of Radiohead artwork, The Panic Office, in Sydney, Australia. Yorke composed an original soundtrack for the exhibition.[9]

• (1998) Small Thoughts – printed on eleven circular cards, housed in a tin
• (2001) Slowly Downward: A Collection of Miserable Stories (ISBN 978-0954417734)
• (2002) Catacombs of Terror! (ISBN 9781507204900)
• (2003) Tachistoscope
• (2005) My Giro – unpublished eight chapter story
• (2007) Dead Children Playing – with Thom Yorke (ISBN 978-1844671700)
• (2011) Household Worms (ISBN 978-1906477554)
• (2012) Holloway – with Robert Macfarlane and Dan Richards
• (2014) Humor (ISBN 978-0571312436)
• (2019) Stanley Donwood: There Will Be No Quiet (ISBN 978-0500-02298-6)
• (2020) Bad Island

• Official website