Thom Yorke has shared that he is “still struggling” to be creative following the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Radiohead and The Smile frontman opened up about his creative process in a new interview, and shared how he has seen his approach to art evolve over the years.
The discussion came in celebration of the new exhibition ‘This Is What You Get’, which is open now at The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, showcasing the artwork of Radiohead done by Yorke and the band’s longtime artist Stanley Donwood.
Speaking with The Art Newspaper, the singer shared how he found a new flow towards painting during the lockdown, and has struggled to adapt to switching back after restrictions were lifted.
“Suddenly we could spend a week together just working on these things without the studio being involved, without me having any other distractions,” he recalled. “That was eye-opening and deeply therapeutic.”
“When the pandemic finished, a lot of creative people were paralysed by the flashing lights starting again,” he added.
“I’m still struggling with that now. Everybody talks about the flourish of anxiety, but I think there’s more to it than that. I really valued that time, and it’s hard to come back to whatever that was.”
Recommended
Yorke went on to add that he is still determined to spend more time painting in his studio. “That’s our priority, because we’ve both been skittering around a lot, and I’ve not had a place to work,” he explained.
Also in the interview, the singer shared insight into how he felt “resistant” to calling himself a visual artist after he left art school in the late ‘80s, and then found it daunting to go back into the field around the time of ‘Kid A’s release.
“It was absolutely terrifying,” Yorke said, adding how Donwood had started to use Artex, applying the material to canvases with a palette knife to create a surface of peaks and troughs.
“We weren’t even painting for the sake of painting,” he continued. “We were painting to build texture, things that we would then scan, because we understood that scanning and photographing dynamic actions was more exciting.”
Around this time, Donwood would create the paintings, while the Radiohead star would manipulate the digital images.
In the new museum collection, the three-decade-long collaboration between the band and Donwood is carefully documented through various personal archives, providing insight into both their creative processes.
Over 180 objects are on display, including the original paintings that later became iconic album covers, unpublished drawings, lyrics in sketchbooks, digital compositions, etchings and more. Visit here for tickets and more information.
The exhibition comes as rumours are swirling that the band may be gearing up to hit the road again and have supposedly “placed holds in select European cities for a run of residency gigs this autumn”. Yorke previously put a dampener on the hopes of a comeback, saying he “really doesn’t give a fuck” if people want Radiohead to return.
NME spoke to Donwood about his time working with Radiohead in 2022, saying: “For a long time, Thom and I would work alongside each other or almost despite each other. We’d work on the same thing for a while then we’d take turns on a picture.
“I’d usually win and take over and it became mine because he doesn’t have as much faith in his abilities as an artist as he does as a musician; which is fair enough because he is quite good at the old music!”
Outside of his time with Radiohead, Yorke has been turning his sights to The Smile – the side project he has with Radiohead bandmate Jonny Greenwood and Sons Of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner.
Last year, he also went out on the road as part of a solo tour, and that included dates across Singapore, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, and this year he adapted Radiohead‘s pivotal 2003 album ‘Hail To The Thief’ for a new production of the iconic Shakespeare play Hamlet, which saw him collaborate with Tony and Olivier Award-winning directors Steven Hoggett and Christine Jones.
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.