Philip Selway's Strange Dance paintings go on show in Bristol

Strange Dance, an exhibition of the paintings Stewart Geddes made with Philip Selway for his third solo album, opens today in the Kenny Gallery at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol and runs until 1 May. The paintings had a first week at Tin Man Art in London from 28 February, just after the album came out.

One of them, Canaro, is what the two call a band portrait. It came from a day Geddes spent with Selway and the musicians at Evolution Studios in Oxford. Its orange is the red hair of Hannah Peel, who plays on the album, and its streak of pink is the shirt Selway had on.

Selway and Geddes began in lockdown with weekly video calls, Selway playing early versions of songs from home in Oxfordshire and Geddes panning his camera round the canvases in his studio in Bedminster. Geddes painted to the tracks, often before they had words, answering their mood rather than illustrating them, on square canvases laid flat just off the floor. Selway calls it a kind of remote synaesthesia.

A linear way of working inhibits everything. If I can step out of it, the music flows more easily. Stewart’s work enabled that.

Philip Selway²

Selway chose four of the eight paintings for the record. The cover is Finnador, two figures leaning in as if in conversation. The Bristol show also has a dance piece and a video loop with a short film of the two men talking and an animation of Sakram, the only rectangular one of the four, which Selway says holds the whole of the album's music.