Stanley Donwood on Bristol Ideas

Stanley Donwood starts with the artwork for The Smile's first record, on his stated principle that whatever he did most recently is always the best thing he has ever done, unless it is bad.

He knew the band had been recording before the pandemic and, by his own account, spent time in the studio doing nothing at all. Then everything stopped, and then the record was suddenly finished and imminent, which left the usual immovable problem. Artwork has to be delivered about three months before a release date, whatever else has happened to the world.

He talks through slides of his work on stage, with an interviewer who knows him well enough to keep interrupting. The canvases are enormous and painted in blackboard paint, and the landscapes rest on a simple inversion he keeps coming back to, with the dark colours gathering in the valleys and the light on the high ground.