Yorke and Donwood show The Crow Flies Part Two, painted at Abbey Road

Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood's The Crow Flies Part Two opens today at Tin Man Art, 4 Cromwell Place, London, for five days to 10 December. Its ten paintings were made at Abbey Road Studios earlier this year, while The Smile were recording Wall of Eyes, and one of them is the album's cover.

Donwood set up easels and canvases in a room beside the band's control room, and for two weeks the pair painted to a live feed of the session. I find it very useful to listen to the music that will be associated with the artwork while the music is being made, while the artwork is being made.¹

Wall of Eyes was announced in November for 26 January. The series began with the cover art for The Smile's first album, A Light for Attracting Attention, and it ends with this one.

Part One, shown at the same gallery in September, was painted in Oxford in the years after 2020, and Maastricht's Bonnefanten Museum bought one of its landscapes. Donwood tells Artnet News that apart from the ghosts of the Beatles the building inspired them only vaguely.

The new pictures are in egg tempera, the layers blended to look like weathered frescoes, on linen chosen to recall vellum or parchment. Donwood wanted them to look like medieval murals that far less skilled restorers had touched up. The Lakes, Goom and River Spikes are among the titles, and a second Flemish woven tapestry, commissioned by the two of them, hangs with the paintings.

They first showed paintings made together in 2006, Artnet says, the Hail to the Thief pictures at Iguapop Gallery in Barcelona, with Yorke signing as Dr. Tchock. Donwood now calls their method essential interference¹, and Yorke calls it Midi/USB¹, after the two different ends of a cable. The music and the visual work both matter very much to me. One liberates the other a lot of the time.¹