Unpleasant Nightmares: Stanley Donwood discusses finding inspiration in bad dreams

“I think I’ll probably end up as one of those shouting old men in slippers in front of Newsnight yelling ‘Go on Paxman, grill him, he’s lying!’ Because ultimately these politicians are mendacious, lying fucking bastards – there’s no other way of looking at it – and I do spend a lot of time ranting about them.” Stanley Donwood is sat at a table in his Bath studio working through an enormous pot of coffee, puffing absent-mindedly on an e-cigarette. The surrounding walls are laden with his work; images of Los Angeles succumbing to floodwater and battered by meteor showers, huge multi-coloured canvasses full of aggressive single-word slogans and eerie prints of mysterious woodland landscapes. At a table to his right are the beginnings of a new piece, “a giant picture of the Houses of Parliament having a very bad time” – the discussion of which has prompted his outburst. After nearly two decades creating the album and poster artwork for Radiohead, a band notoriously vocal on the subject of their politics, he’s got a reputation for being outspoken about what he perceives to be a world in moral, political and environmental turmoil. It’s a preoccupation so large it’s necessitated an alter ego through which a daily barrage of doom and gloom can be channelled without taking over his day-to-day life. “The alias came about when we were doing The Bends. At the time I had really young children and the nappy-changing-washer-upper-putting-little-plastic-spoons-of-food-into-unwilling-mouths was very different to the person doing artwork about existential ruin. On the one hand I felt very happy to have little children and on the other I felt very worried about the world generally, so I wanted to separate out who I was.” And so Dan Rickwood became Stanley Donwood. Since The Bends he’s created nightmarish Ballardian visions of suburbia for OK Computer, barren winter landscapes for Kid A, and for Hail To The Thief produced maps of cities associated with the War on Terror, composed from giant capitalist slogans borrowed from billboards in Los Angeles. It’s a pretty bleak body of work for someone who, in person, maintains an incredibly sunny disposition. But these collections of images have served a dual purpose, providing both bold visual accompaniment to a body of music renowned for its innovation and serving as a kind of artistic therapy for Dan, allowing him to let go of preoccupations that weigh heavy on his mind. “I don’t think I could maintain that level of fury with any sort of degree of mental health,” he says. “I think I’ve kind of worked out that if I carve an enormous picture of the Houses of Parliament being destroyed by fire and flood, meteor storms and atomic explosions then I’ll feel a lot better about certain politicians and the general destruction of western culture, which is in a far more fucking shit state than it was when I was doing more overtly political work… anyway, don’t get me started.” In a bid to move away from creating political images he’s spent the past five years doing something altogether more relaxing. “I’ve just been drawing trees to try and calm myself down. Just twig after twig after twig. It’s a bit like meditation.” The trees have formed two enormous bodies of work; one for Radiohead’s eighth studio album The King Of Limbs, and the other a collaboration between some writer and artist friends that focusses on the holloways of Dorset. His interest in trees was piqued while visiting the recording sessions for In Rainbows in Wiltshire – he lives and works alongside the band throughout the recording process in order to collaborate with Thom Yorke on album art. “There was this weird little book that we picked up which was an old visitors’ guide to Savernake Forest. Inside was a picture of this mad tree called the King Of Limbs – this ancient, ancient tree – and then things just kind of assembled themselves really.” Hurt Hill, Giclee Print Nether, Giclee Print When he first started work on The King Of Limbs, Dan had the idea of creating full-face, oil portraits of the band in the style of Gerhard Richter. It would have been the first time a Radiohead album had included pictures of the full line-up, but the idea faltered early on. “It was a huge mistake because Gerhard Richter’s a brilliant painter; I’m not. He can paint very skilfully in oils; I can’t. In fact I’ve got no idea how to paint portraits either, so I started to get very depressed after six months of producing what was really terrible work.” But then he want to the studio to listen to the first recordings of the album, “and it kind of suggested a cathedral of music, as if the sound was bubbling up from the ground and reaching over. But not a white, Puritan, post-Reformation cathedral. A more pagan, Catholic, brightly-painted cathedral where the fluted columns are the trunks of the trees and the tracery is the branches, the twigs and the leaves.” So he went back to the studio and started painting luxuriously-coloured forests in oil, a me