Eliana Willis

Earlier this year, as the Thom Yorke-led trio The Smile was recording its sophomore album, the newly announced Wall of Eyes, a separate, yet related, act of creation was taking place close by.  
In a room at London’s Abbey Road Studios where the band was working on the record, Yorke’s long-time collaborator Stanley Donwood had set up an art studio stocked with easels and canvases. There, over two weeks, the pair would turn out a run of paintings—of fragmented topographies, alien forms—as a live audio feed from the neighboring control room was piped into the space. 
It was a project of “simultaneous composition,” Donwood said over email. “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.” 
“The music and the visual work both matter very much to me,” Yorke added. “One liberates the other a lot of the time.” 
Fittingly, a painting from the session will grace the cover of Wall of Eyes, while all 10 works will form the second part of Yorke and Donwood’s The Crow Flies series, going on view at Tin Man Art gallery from December 6. The new showcase, titled “The Crow Flies: Part Two,” follows the successful debut of the duo’s works at the London gallery in September, which saw Maastricht’s Bonnefanten Museum acquiring one of the abstract landscapes. 
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, Aggag (2022). Courtesy of Tin Man Art.
While the works in part one of the series were created in an Oxford studio in the wake of 2020, Donwood said, “things were much freer, in every way, for the second phase.” He admitted to starting the project with a clear mindset, while the Abbey Road building provided inspiration “in a very vague and non-specific way” (that is, “aside from the ghostly Beatles wandering about”), allowing the duo to work intuitively—or at least attempt to. 
“Intuition is hard to quantify and I think when it genuinely happens, that’s very rare. It’s an excellent feeling when something just goes right; but it’s really, really infrequent,” the artist explained.  
Still, looking at these latest paintings, it’s easy to imagine them emerging from a shared subconscious. Some, like The Lakes, Aggag, and Goom, depict eerie vistas with abstract shards juxtaposed against organic contours. Others, such as Frozen Raw and One of Many, bring the viewer up close to otherworldly silhouettes. Might they be snapshots of exterior as much as interior landscapes? 
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, Frozen Raw (2022). Courtesy of Tin Man Art.
Kind of, Donwood said. He brought up the pirate maps and topographic charts that inspired the first The Crow Flies paintings, which in turn represented arcane, complex navigational aids. These new works, he said, “are pictures of the places you might see if you follow the maps.” 
The paintings were created with egg tempera, with the layers blended to evoke the weathering of centuries-old art or frescoes. The choice of linen as canvas was intended to recall vellum or parchment. In Donwood’s telling, the idea was to recreate the effect of Medieval murals that had been “repaired by considerably less skilled people” (see: the infamous botched Jesus restoration).
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, River Spikes (2023). Courtesy of Tin Man Art.
While the textures of the works in The Crow Flies depart from Yorke and Donwood’s previous outings, the narratives and motifs that fuel them—haunting abstraction, reimagined artifacts, esoteric terrains—are the same that have informed their decades-long partnership.  
Since the early ’90s, Donwood has created the bulk of cover art for Yorke’s musical projects, from Radiohead to Atoms for Peace to his solo work, some of which featured contributions from the singer-songwriter himself. In 2006, the duo’s joint paintings for Radiohead’s 2003 record Hail to the Thief were first exhibited at Iguapop Gallery in Barcelona (with Yorke using the moniker Dr. Tchock). More recently, they curated a showcase of Donwood’s artwork for 2001’s Kid A to accompany a Christie’s auction in 2021.  
In working together, Donwood and Yorke have established a shared visual language, one that is perhaps now tough to tease out from their individual aesthetic. But maybe that’s the point. 
“There isn’t a lot of navigating to be done,” Yorke said about balancing their individual and collaborative creativity. “The effort to understand where someone else is coming from—that’s the point. So then when you look back at what you’ve done, it speaks to you in a way you didn’t expect.” 
Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood, The Lakes (2023). Courtesy of Tin Man Art.
In fact, according to the pair, their collaboration seems to thrive on necessary friction. “Essential interference” is how Donwood characterized it, while Yorke called it “Midi/USB,” referring to the opposite heads of a connecting cable commonly used with musical equipment. 
Yorke’s is an apt analogy. If music is the root and throughline of his and Donwood’s shared visual art practice, it has arguably also served as the glue. 
“It was partly because we both found ourselves making record covers… and then got carried away,” Yorke explained. “And because of what has developed between the two of us. I never expected that to happen honestly.” 
“The Crow Flies: Part Two” is on view at Tin Man Art, 4 Cromwell Place, London, December 6–10. 

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Grammy-winning singer Alicia Keys and her husband Kasseem Dean, the rapper and producer known by his stage name Swizz Beatz, will exhibit their landmark collection of works by Black artists at the Brooklyn Museum. The show, Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys, will run from February 10 to July 7, 2024.
“Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys have been among the most vocal advocates for Black creatives to support Black artists through their collecting, advocacy, and partnerships. In the process, they have created one of the most important collections of contemporary art,” museum director Anne Pasternak said.
The exhibition will bring together works by around 40 artists in the couple’s collection. Known as the Dean Collection, the trove boasts artworks by the likes of Arthur Jafa, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Amy Sherald, Lorna Simpson, Kehinde Wiley, and Esther Mahlangu, as well as the largest number of works by Gordon Parks in private hands.
The show will open with an introduction to the creative lives of the Deans, with sections on different aspects of their collection, such as “On the Shoulders of Giants,” highlighting artists who “have left an indelible mark on the world.” Another section, “Giant Conversations,” will explore Black social issues, while “Giant Presence” will show monumental artworks such as Abney’s Catfish (2017).
Kwame Brathwaite, Untitled (Model who embraced natural hairstyles at AJASS photoshoot) (c. 1970, printed 2018). Photo courtesy of the Dean Collection, Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.
The Fallin’ crooner and her husband, both born and raised in New York, have long been vocal about their support of African American creatives, not least with their art collection.
Speaking to Artnet News in 2019, Dean characterized growing his collection of African American artworks as “building a family I didn’t even have in music, where there’s a little bit of a disconnect sometimes because of competition and wanting to be the best. I felt something different with the artists.”
Dean was on the board of the Brooklyn Museum from at least 2019 until just last month. In an email, the museum confirmed that the couple is “not funding the exhibition,” clarifying that the show is “being produced by the Brooklyn Museum.” The exhibition is organized by the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art Kimberli Gant and curatorial assistant Indira A. Abiskaroon.
“You have to understand that this is a different game than buying a piece of jewelry or buying a car,” Dean said in 2019 about his collecting strategy. “This is actually adding to the conversation.”
See more works in the exhibition below.
Derrick Adams, Man in Grayscale (Swizz) (2017). Photo courtesy of The Dean Collection, Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.
Deana Lawson, Soweto Queen (2017). Photo courtesy of the Dean Collection, Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.
Ebony G. Patterson, . . they were just hanging out . . . you know . . . talking about . . . ( . . . when they grow up . . .) (2016). Photo courtesy of the Dean Collection, Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.
Tschabalala Self, Father (2019). Photo courtesy of The Dean Collection, Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.

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