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"These paintings were made in the early autumn of 2015, at La Fabrique studios outside Saint-Rémy in the south of France. During this period I was

working with Radiohead as they began the recording that was to become ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’.

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My idea at the time was to try to remove a certain amount of human agency in the paintings I was making, and to do this I was employing the

weather as a sort of unpredictable and wildly erratic assistant. I constructed large shallow pools outside the recording studios, in a yard that was

dominated by two immense oaks, and poured enamel paint into the ponds. The wind would then shift and blend the colours. I used my canvases to

‘capture’ a snapshot of this movement.

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I continued to work on the canvases, ‘by hand’, in the evenings, in an adjoining barn. It was something of a battle, a process without parameter but

with the intention that the work should visually accompany, or at least be sympathetic to the music which was being composed in the recording

studio across the yard. This process continued - with my weather assistant under the skies by day, in the studio, under a roof by night - for about

two weeks. Then we, the band and I, took a week’s break.

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On my return to La Fabrique, and with a renewed focus on the music, I realised that the work was far too polychromatic, simply too colourful, and I

needed to abandon the vibrant spectrum I had been exploring and concentrate on black and on white.

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The paintings I had made were packed away; in the autumn of 2022 I rediscovered them. 

And so - here they are.''

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Stanley Donwood,

Brighton, UK, 2023