George Shaw
George Orwell once gloomily prophesied that the future of England would be in the “light industrial areas and along the arterial roads . . . everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great towns.” This depressing vision of modern suburbia has been given a powerful expression in the paintings of George Shaw, who for the past two decades has taken as his subject the unlovely Tile Hill postwar housing project in the British city of Coventry, where he grew up. Human presence is limited to graffiti, littering, and traces of vandalism; the mood is one of bleak melancholy. Depictions of painfully ordinary residential streets appear alongside views of the surrounding nature in scenes that bring to mind Philip Larkin’s observation, in a poem about his own upbringing in Coventry, that “nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”
Some forty of Shaw’s paintings were gathered together for the artist’s first major exhibition, which opened at BALTIC in Gateshead; a pared-down version was subsequently presented in a smaller, single room at the South London Gallery. Shaw’s vital gambit is to use a type of enamel paint manufactured by an English company called Humbrol and intended for model makers and hobbyists. (The Humbrol factory in Hull was recently closed and has now fallen into vandalism and ruin, it might be added.) Enamel dries to a smooth, glossy surface, and gives tonal rather than chromatic effects (not “color and luminosity,” as the exhibition catalogue suggests), a characteristic that Shaw exploits to evoke the dull aqueous English light of late-winter afternoons, low gray clouds and dark puddles, wet concrete and damp tree bark, for example with Scenes from the Passion: The Library and the Back of the Triple Triangle Club, 2000, a view of a desolate concrete civic setting after rain, a study in dankness and the long littleness of life. This is not the sharp Photorealism of Richard Estes, or the spectacular blur of Gerhard Richter’s photo-painting; like the architecture he paints, Shaw’s style is functional and seemingly without any grander ambition.
Comparisons in the exhibition catalogue with twentieth-century landscape painters such as Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland don’t quite capture the spirit of Shaw’s paintings. His roots are, rather, in the 1800s. There is a kind of neo-Victorian pessimism in his work, evoking the imagination of Thomas Hardy. One of the best paintings in the London display, The End of Time, 2008–2009, whose title could be that of a Hardy poem, shows a patch of what appears to be wasteland behind a pavement and a single road line marking, surrounded by dark bare trees masking shadowy suburban dwellings. The scene is dark but the gloom is comforting. Although there is no nostalgia in Shaw’s work, there is redemption, and a strong undercurrent of religious feeling that is also evident in many of the titles he gives to his works. Other paintings make more of this redemptive quality, in particular the “Ash Wednesday” series, 2004–2005, Shaw’s breakthrough works (first exhibited in 2005 at Wilkinson Gallery in London), comprising views of the Tile Hill estate at intervals throughout a single day. Ash Wednesday: 8.30 am, 2004–2005, is among the best of these, showing a patch of radiant dawn light filtered through iron fencing. The artist’s seriousness, which sometimes threatens to tip over into sententiousness, is balanced by the vein of dark comedy that runs through his work. A painting of a deserted graffitied alleyway disappearing into the distance (on view in Gateshead only) is given the sardonic title There Goes Everybody, 2010; the joke, of course, is that they have already gone.