Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood open The Crow Flies in London

The Crow Flies Part One, a show of new paintings by Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, opens today at Tin Man Art, 4 Cromwell Place in South Kensington, and runs until Sunday. This time the two painted each canvas at the same moment, side by side and often in a tiny studio. Their work together goes back to 1994, when Yorke asked Donwood, whom he had met as an art student at Exeter, for the sleeve of the My Iron Lung EP, and until now it had mostly gone back and forth by fax and notes.

The series began as the cover art for A Light for Attracting Attention, The Smile's first album, and the pair kept painting in Oxford and Brighton from 2021 while the band wrote, recorded and toured it. The sessions produced more than 20 works, too many for one show, so the rest follow in a second part at the end of the year. The title comes, like the band's name, from Ted Hughes's 1970 collection Crow.

The paint is gouache, egg tempera and powdered mushroom where acrylic used to be, and the pictures are much lighter than the Kid A Mnesia work, with bursts of blue and a great deal of gold borrowed from the gold leaf of old maps. Maps run all through them: the Bodleian Libraries' Islamic pirate maps, early drawings of the British Isles and 1960s American military charts. The way mapmakers once worked on vellum shaped the method, and the digital processing much of their earlier work went through was set aside. The gallery traces the maps back to the Hail to the Thief artwork of 2003.

A Flemish woven tapestry of one of the key paintings, commissioned for the album's first anniversary, hangs with them. The canvases share a set of signs and symbols the two invented between them. At first they drew objects from the album's lyrics as a map legend, then gave that up for something more abstract, and some of those drawings still show under the paint.