Stanley Donwood

Stanley Donwood answers a run of short questions over Zoom in March 2020, for the gallery showing StrangeNESS, his pictures of Orford Ness made with Robert Macfarlane. The questions are cut out and only his answers remain. He used to wear a hagstone, small as a rabbit's heart, found while making those pictures, until the string broke. The first artwork he bought, in Rotterdam around 2007, was a big photograph of three dead rats in various states of decomposition, which he took as a metaphor for late Western capitalism.

The King of Limbs began with a plan to paint the band, whose faces he had never used, as blurred oil portraits. He did not know how to paint in oils and is, he says, an appalling photographer, and the canvases came out brown, like a dirty protest. Depressed, he went over to the barn where the band were recording, sat under its centuries-old beams while they played him the music, and felt he was in a cathedral of trees. He ran back and painted over the lot in acrylic.

Red, black and white are his colours because of a paper round. The tabloids were light, went to houses that tipped at Christmas, and had a black headline and a red masthead. He does not trust taupe. He grew up in East Anglia knowing Orford Ness as a secret, forbidden stretch of coast, and as a former CND campaigner he found the post-nuclear site weirdly fascinating, though he was told off for going into buildings even their party was barred from.