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| Modified Bear logo by Stanley Donwood |
After graduating from the University of Exeter, Donwood worked as a freelance artist in Plymouth, England. Aside from his work for Radiohead, Donwood also maintains his own website,Slowly Downward, where short stories and various other writings are published.
Stanley Donwood and Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke met as art students at the University of Exeter. Donwood was asked by Yorke to produce the cover art for the 1995 album The Bends, which would begin a collaborative working relationship between the pair for various Radiohead art and promotional material. According to an interview, Donwood jestingly said his first impressions of Yorke were that he was "'Mouthy. Pissed off. Someone I could work with.'" Yorke is credited alongside Donwood under the moniker "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 centered around a minotaur. Donwood cites Caspar David Friedrich and Hieronymus Bosch, 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 colored 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."
Donwood's most recent exhibition, "London Views", is a series of fourteen lino prints of various London landmarks being destroyed by fire and flood. The prints are being exhibited in Lazarides Gallery, in Soho, London. The prints are 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. The exhibit focused onKid 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 late 2006, Stanley Donwood, along with Richard Lawrence launched an independent record company, named Six Inch Records.
Only three albums were released on the record label, each with three hundred and thirty three copies of each release. The CD discs were packaged by hand into sleeves that were six inches square. All mechanised operations - printing, cutting and scoring were carried out using a 1965 Heidelberg platen press.
On 18 February 2009, Donwood announced on the Six Inch Record blog that the online shop was to be closed, as there were no more records to sell. Donwood stated on the matter: "Six Inch Records is no longer a going concern, and there will be no more musicians signed, records made, events held."
You can find list of works of Stanley Donwood here.
You can find some information about The King of Limbs newspaper album of Stanley Donwood here.
You can find some of photos in that newspaper album here.
And these are some of photos in the newspaper album:
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