Stanley Donwood

Stanley Donwood is the pen name for the English artist, Dan Rickwood. He is well known for his close association with the British rock group Radiohead having created all of their album and poster art.

He graduated from the University of Exeter and went on to work as a freelance artist in Plymouth. Alongside all of his work for Radiohead, he also maintains his own website where he publishes short stories and other writings. 

His work is dark, mysterious and strange however, interesting. There is depth to his work in which his personality is shown. Not only is he a skilled drawer and painter, he has skills in printing. A lot of his work is black and white. This makes his work unique to his style, it keeps it simple and effective and appealing to look at. His more coloured pieces are also interesting, I especially like his oil paintings/graphite drawings of trees and forests, they are unique in style and use a wonderful range of colours that really make the pieces work. I already liked this style of work as I think that they make beautiful pieces of artwork, as they can be bare and simple, or full of life and detailed. It can be what you want it to be and there is an endless amount of options and outcomes that you can create just from this style and the choice of subject. He is talented when it comes to drawing and painting, he knows how to get correctly proportioned shapes and has a skill in shading appropriately and realistically. He can put in a lot of detail but also, he can use a little and make it still look as effective. I took these images from his personal blog. 

He has also worked on last years Glastonbury Festival 2011, as he has since 2002. I like the 2011 design, there is a lot of attention to detail and a rainbow of colour. I love the aspect of it; the way in which it was designed is clever and very eye catching. There is even detail that probably wouldn't be seen unless you looked closely into the design and that's what I like about it. Donwood himself said, 'as usual it was difficult to get it right and some of the pictures I made whilst trying to get it right were so bad they suprised even me, and I'm used to the sorts of horror that I'm capable of.' I like how he admits that it was difficult to think of an appropriate idea for the design and that even he, a well known designer can mess up. Overall I think that his work is very good, I love his style and how he can flexibly create different designs and how he likes to experiment, he is unique, successful and a very talented designer.