There will be a new exhibition in London…
STANLEY DONWOOD & THOM YORKE
LOGICAL ABSURDITY
TAPESTRIES & PICTURES MADE BY VARIOUS MEANS
TIN MAN ART, 9 Cork St, London W1S 3LL
29th November – 14th December 2024
We will be showing three new tapestries; Goom Threads, Threaded Membranes and Somewhere You’ll Be There In Stitches. screen prints, paintings and mixed media work. The show is on the first floor of 9 Cork Street, Mayfair; the nearest tube stations are Green Park and Piccadilly.
About 20 years ago I made some large paintings for the Radiohead albums Kid A + Amnesiac. They will be exhibited at Christie’s alongside digital work and drawings made at the same time.
Here I am talking to Matt Everitt on the radio about it, at 1hr 43mins 06secs: embarrassing radio interview
Even more embarrassingly, here I am talking on video: video interview
First Open: Post-War and Contemporary Art. Free to view 9th – 15th October at Christie’s, King Street in Mayfair in London
Hello. Ages ago I wrote on here somewhere about a project that I’d started with Robert Macfarlane when we wandered the strange landscape of Orford Ness, a long shingle spit of longshore drift on the coast of Suffolk, in eastern England. We decided to make a book; he would write the words and I’d draw the pictures. I began working with sea-coal, mud and clay to make the pictures, working on the beach of an East Anglian estuary. The pictures were big and messy. When I started to figure out how to actually make the book that I realised I would have to start again; my original plan had been to photograph these chaotic, smeared and scratched drawings, work on the photos by adding other elements digitally and then print the pictures lithographically before adding gilded copper. This would have been quite nice, but when I costed it all it would have meant that the book, when it was eventually a thing would have been a very expensive object. So I had to think again. Which meant I had to start again.
My new plan was that the entire book – text and pictures – would be printed letterpress at Richard Lawrence’s workshop in Oxford; so the pictures would have to be converted into etched magnesium plates, meaning black and white, no grey, which in turn meant that I would have to work in pen and ink. Meanwhile Robert’s writing was approaching completion and it was unlike anything he had written before. I spent the summer in an isolated hut along the coast from Orford Ness with pens and paper and drew the pictures. Such as the one above.
Eventually all of the many strands that had to be found in order to make a book from scratch were woven together, a plan was formulated and a number of beautiful books – 525, in fact, for reasons I can’t quite recall – were printed, bound, jacketed and despatched to a phalanx of readers. Great, hey? But no. Not great. It transpired that in a moment of haste and inattention the books had been printed with the pages in the wrong order. The feelings of the creators of the book cannot be described here as language is insufficient to do so.
And so the process was repeated. Never mind, never mind. All this happened nearly a year ago now.
Another edition, a ‘popular’, ‘mass-market’ edition was proposed by the proper publisher Hamish Hamilton, which is an imprint of Penguin. There were no mistakes with the page order this time. That edition was not limited to 525 copies (sorry, I still can’t remember why it was that number – possibly something to do with the latitude of Orford Ness?) and is available from all good bookshops and also Amazon.
Hello! Like a frequently absent and probably delinquent acquaintance, I have been ‘away’ from the business end of this elderly website for several months, and now that I’m back I’m certainly not about to explain my lengthy disappearance.
At the time of writing (8th October 2018) I have what I’ve called a ‘capsule exhibition’ at Whistleblower Gallery in Brighton. Comprising 10 drawings and 4 paintings made during the recording of Radiohead’s latest LP as well as 4 paintings which are part of my ongoing Language of the Walls project, everything is pretty much monochrome, except one painting entitled Skulk.
These paintings were all made outdoors in the early winter in rural Oxfordshire, and appear to me to have a very different mood to the ones made in early autumn in the south of France. They were made in exactly the same way using the same techniques and materials, so I have to conclude that it was the very different weather conditions that were responsible for the changed atmosphere of the paintings. It’s the same for what I’ve called drawings (they are on paper, rather than canvas) because 9 of them were made in Provence and just one in England, and it’s very different to the French ones. This one’s called Fractured Strata, and it’s one of the drawings made in France:
Whereas, this one, called Poisoned Acres, is the English one:
The other part of this compact exhibition is the paintings from the Language of the Walls, which I’ve written about on this website previously. There are four of these paintings on display, called Solitude, Trickster, Deceiver and Incline.
If you’re interested, in the area or are in Brighton with nothing better to do, the Whistleblower Gallery is at 14 St. John’s Road, BN3 2FB, Brighton and Hove, or you can telephone the gallery on +44 (0)1273 734 295
The exhibition runs until 4th November 2018.
Well, as I said last time on my frequently updated stupid blog I have an exhibition coming along soonish. And here are some fragments of twenty of the prints that will be on show. Of course if I was clever and web-savvy and stuff like that then you would be able to click on each of them to see the whole thing. But I’m not and therefore you cannot. So yes. Invalid Response is what the exhibition is called and it runs from the 7th until the 24th of June in the year of 2018.
I’m currently hard at work on several projects which I am very foolishly doing at the same time. Three of them are books and the fourth is something else. And I will explain about them here in this very place when the time is right, and when I’m not worrying about them quite as much as I am now.
As is evident from the picture just above these words I am having an exhibition quite soon, in the city of London, the capital of the islands of Britain. It’s a show of twenty-seven screen prints, and some of them are now extremely rare. There’s a print that I thought I had none left of at all, called Fuck It, which I made in 2007 in a fit of hatred of those inspirational posters like that one that says something like ‘Go placidly amid the noise and haste…’ It’s kind of pretty with roses twined around the letters.
Happy days. At around the same time I made another print that said Nothing Will Ever Get Better which was unfortunately completely prophetic and came utterly true. I may be going about this art thing the wrong way. Perhaps I should do a print that’s more cheerful, with fluffy bunnies and and uplifting message. Anyway, I’m getting a bit off topic.
Sorry about that. So, yes, I’ve got a show coming up, it’s at Jealous Gallery in Shoreditch.
Hello. I’ve started on a series of small paintings called The Language of the Wall, a title I have nicked from the photographer whose work inspired the series; Brassaï. Brassaï was born Gyula Halász in 1899 in Romania and moved to Paris in 1924. He photographed both the rich and the poor, from slum to opera house, but the pictures he took that interested me were those he took of Parisian graffiti.
In 1956 the Museum of Modern Art in New York held a show called ‘Language of the Wall’, an exhibition of around 120 of Brassaï’s graffiti photographs; pictures of faces, symbols, figures, words and so on scratched into the stonework of the buildings of Paris. I was in Paris a year ago and there was an exhibition of these photographs at the Pompidou Centre, but I had just seen an exhibition of Magritte’s paintings there followed by an exhibition of Cy Twombly’s paintings and I was so sick of it all that I had to leave very quickly and find a bar and smoke cigarettes angrily. So I missed the Brassaï show which, I’m sure, would have pissed all over Magritte and Twombly.
Anyway, I did see some posters advertising the show and when I got on to a computer I looked up Brassaï and the photographs of graffiti. They are really, really great, kind of timeless in that they could have been made any time at all. And you get a sense of how long they took to carve. Here’s an example.
See what I mean? That’s dedication to your craft, I’d say. No sneaking around with buckets of wheat paste for flypostering or mucking about with stencils and spraycans. This must have taken a while. I very much like the idea of a time when scratching or carving your name into a wall could take hours. I’ve seen some graffiti that’s written in letters with serifs, more like something you might see on a gravestone than a twenty-first century tag. Although I do like tags too.
My first idea was to get hold of a load of stone and take it to my studio and start from there, but I found that stone was hard to find and the stuff I did find had been quarried by machine and had no character at all. What I was after was a battered, worn out and re-used look, scratched over repeatedly, both accidentally and deliberately. So I improvised. The first pictures I made were for the covers of a couple of books that Faber Music put out, one of Radiohead’s music for guitars powered by electricity and one for guitars powered by acousticality. They looked like this, once they had writing put on them:
I wanted the pictures to look like sections of an old wall that had been dirtied by soot, muddied, cleaned, dirtied again, accidentally gouged, graffitied over, had the graffiti scratched over, gaffitied again, and so on. I’m working pretty small, on canvases that are 18″ by 14″, although I might make some bigger pictures soonish. So far I’ve made five of these pictures. Here’s the most recent:
I don’t know how many I’ll make or what they’ll look like. So far I’ve been using the easy-to-draw creatures I’ve used on lots of Radiohead artwork because that’s what graffiti usually is – easy to draw (the kind that I’m trying to emulate, anyway).
Anyway, these pictures will be exhibited when I’ve made enough of them. Somewhere in the UK.
A little while ago I did a cover for a book by one of my favourite dead French writers, Pascal Garnier. In a fit of nostalgia for the days when I used to compose English Literature essays very late at night with a bottle of Thunderbird I also wrote an introduction for the book.
Pascal Garnier is a very fine writer (or was, strictly speaking) and utterly under-appreciated by the non-French reading world. Gallic Books, the publishers of How’s The Pain? as well as a clutch of Garnier’s other titles, have done a fine job in translating his sardonic prose into English.
Anyway, if you’re interested you can buy one of only 750 copies right HERE.
There are some forgotten and/or overlooked prints of Fleet Street Apocalypse for sale at the very place where they were printed, ten years ago. St Bride’s Printing Library is the vendor and all proceeds go to them. Click HERE to go and have a look.
By the way, when they describe it as a ‘facsimile’ they just mean that it’s a print, made directly from the giant linocut that I carved. Maybe facsimile is some archaic printing term that means just that. I dunno.
