Sent To Coventry (George Shaw Woz Ere)

I drove over to Coventry’s Herbert Gallery recently to see George Shaw’s exhibition ‘I Woz ‘Ere’.  It was a suitably dull, overcast day at the very fag end of last year, - just the kind that features in so many of Shaw’s paintings.  It proved to be a great chance to see a pleasing selection of his paintings of the local Tile Hill Estate, (where he grew up), and I was cheered to find that The Herbert has been impressively remodelled since my last visit some years ago.  Evidently, there are now impressive public galleries a few miles from my Leicester home - in Nottingham and Coventry, even if our own provision is slightly underwhelming.

George Shaw, 'Scenes From The Passion: The Hawthorn Tree', 2001

2011 must have been a pretty good year for Shaw.  He just missed out on the Turner Prize, (surely no disgrace), but his profile still rose massively.  This is the second full show of his stuff I’d seen in a few months in addition to the small selection included in the last British Art Show.  Surprisingly, given the subject that has made his name, this is his first solo show in Coventry.  On the evidence of various conversations I overheard, the locals have been intrigued by the depiction of the dull, (at first glance), housing scheme on their doorstep.

Superficially, Shaw’s work could seem either a Post Modern stylistic appropriation of Photorealism or a smart demonstration of a chic ‘drab for drab’s sake’ aesthetic.  Further meditation reveals that there is actually much here to interest other painters technically and pictorially.  However, what is most significant is that, beneath their glossy enamel surfaces, these paintings are deeply heartfelt and personal too.  Shaw is quite open in his commentary about his desire to arrest time through these Tile Hill paintings.  His stated agenda is the exploration of locations from his own past in an attempt to salvage any remaining signifiers of his receding youth - something that makes his use of hobby modeller’s enamel paint both clever and appropriate.  Having left the estate where he grew up, his relationship with the place and, by association - a significant phase of his autobiography, is at the remove of the curious visitor.

“All these things that had once been familiar to me gradually became strange and part of another world, and yet so ordinary….The paintings that I have made since 1996 of Tile Hill have become a kind of I woz ere – my name written all over the estate in a futile attempt to stop time slipping sadly through my fingers”. [1.]

The insensitive, (or the young), might cynically dismiss the whole project as little more than a mid-life crisis in gloss paint.  Shaw even describes his own surprise at finding himself,

“…a middle aged man locked between sentimentality and anxiety”. [2.]

Personally, I would counter that the conscious examination of one’s own life is a perfectly valid project for an artist.  To question one’s own reactions to lost youth through creative practice is far a more dignified approach than the alternatives of living in denial, wearing trendy hats indoors to hide a bald patch or buying a Porsche.  Of course, I would say that wouldn’t I? – I’m a middle-aged painter; I often find myself reviewing my personal history and my own relationship with my home town …and I drive a Skoda.

One striking way that Shaw captures the sense of locations haunted by a younger self and of time re-wound is through the absence of figures in his scenes, despite plentiful implications of lives unfolding behind walls and curtains.  Doubtless estates like this can seem eerily quiet at certain times of the day but surely, never are they so totally devoid of animation.  Perhaps it’s easier for him to re-inhabit his own past in this landscape of memory and recollection without the distraction of other’s wandering into the frame.

George Shaw, 'Scenes From The Passion: The Goal Mouth', 1999

George Shaw, 'Scenes From The Passion: The Middle Of The Week', 2002

Of course, time must move on in reality.  Shaw works from photos taken on his return visits and is inevitably forced to consider the changes that have occurred in his absence. As he notes, some locations have changed further or been lost altogether since he recorded them.  Hence, his work takes on aspects of an historical chronicle as well as a personal reflection.  There is a certain jolt to the first realisation, in middle age, that one’s own early life must now be seen in the context of history.  In Shaw’s case, as in mine, this could trigger a meditation on Britain’s own journey from loose political consensus in the immediate post war years; the growth of public housing, (including 1950s ‘Bevan Estates’ like Tile Hill), and state welfare provision; the idealism and prosperity of the sixties; the subsequent sense of disillusionment with a failing social experiment increasingly perceived in the seventies and beyond into the post-Thatcher market-driven free for all we have inhabited since.

If one accepts 1979 as the pivotal year of economic and attitudinal change it now seems, places like Tile Hill are strange reminders of a very different, almost foreign, land but also stand as physical testament to changing attitudes towards social consensus, property and the privileging of  private over communal interests.  However botched, such Utopian schemes to relocate and improve the quality of so many lives now seem quaint in the context of the subsequent sell-off of council housing and the growing disparity between those who own and those who can't.  Coincidentally, I recently read ‘Estates, An Intimate History’ by Lynsey Hanley [3.] and would recommend it to anyone interested in reading around this subject.  It is a fascinating historical survey of public housing provision and an affectingly personal account of a life lived within it.  Shaw's work receives specific mention in the text.

For all of that, I would maintain that Shaw’s own motivation is primarily personal and actually rather Romantic.  It is Psychogeographical, more than Social-Historical I believe.  Looking past his dead-pan realism one finds a surprisingly emotive melancholy poetry in the skeletons of winter trees, the fallen leaves in neglected open spaces and the forlorn Modernist pubs.

George Shaw, 'Scenes From The Passion: Ten Shilling Wood', 2002

George Shaw, 'Scenes From The Passion: Hometime', 1999

One giveaway is just how much care and attention he pays to the atmospherics of illumination and climate.  Shaw is a master of the un-modulated, featureless sky.  Often, it is a gloomy, slightly yellowed grey ceiling of solid cloud that just screams “Midlands”.  Sometimes it evokes the dying fall of twilight, - possibly the most emotionally powerful hour of any day.  Only occasionally is it the sunlit blue of a summer’s day.  One of the most lyrical of Shaw’s paintings, ‘Scenes From The Passion: Ten Shilling Wood’, is drenched in a limpid rose-tinted sunset or dawn light that transforms the mundane surroundings into something magical.  Our gaze is drawn to distant blue, (remembered), hills in an overt piece of Romanticist mood manipulation.  If his skies are supremely empty, his depictions of wet tarmac and standing puddles are full of visual activity.  Very often in Shaw’s Tile Hill it is either raining or has recently done so.  ‘Scenes From The Passion: Hometime’, perfectly captures the route home taken by an adventurer beyond the fringes of the estate along a muddy track which is transformed into a shining path by a chain of silvery puddles.  Could this image be seen as symbolic of Shaw’s own return from the wider world to the inwardly-facing environment of the estate I wonder?  At first glance, one of Shaw’s bleakest images - ‘Scenes From The Passion, Back Of The Club And The Bottom Of The Steps’, is dominated by a flat expanse of empty wet car park.  It’s a bravura lesson in how to invest the dullest subject imaginable with a wealth of painterly invention.  These paintings are reflective in every sense.

George Shaw, 'Scenes From The Passion: The Garages', 1997

Although Shaw has depicted his subject in every season, it is to the chilly atmospherics of Autumn and Winter that he most often returns.  His trees, (with whose depiction he sometimes struggled early on in the cycle), are often skeletal against the empty sky or else have strewn drifts of surprisingly vivid leaves across the ground.  For all that, Tile Hill is a zone of pavements, walls and rooftops it is a rather verdant environment too.  Shaw points out that beyond the Estate’s fringes lies the remnants of the ancient Forest of Arden, - truly the archetype of the English ‘Greenwood’.  Shaw’s work is full of trees. Indeed, it seems that his secondary concern might actually be that most resonant interface between the built environment and the imagined pastoral idyll so beloved of the British imagination.  Tile Hill starts to appear like those transitional ‘Edgelands’ recently eulogised in print by Paul Farley and Michael Simmonds Roberts [4.].

When not engaged in these wider scenes, it is in his focus on achingly mundane fragments of the human World that Shaw finds his most tragic expression.  One recurring motif in the paintings is graffiti.  Inevitably, this tends towards the old-school stylelessness of initials scratched or penned around love hearts or to ‘So and so is gay’ modes.  Shaw’s own approach is to calmly reproduce it with careful brush stokes.  Resisting the indulgence of an occasional drip or splatter of his own, he merely records them verbatim.  In so doing he allows them to speak all the more powerfully of uninspired lives and squandered youth.  Elsewhere, in his images of derelict garages or in ‘While No One Was Looking’ the scattered results of fly tipping lie around in equal rebuke to a failed Utopia or a consumer society that promises much but habitually disappoints.

George Shaw, 'Young Lovers Don't', 2010

George Shaw, 'Detail Of Untitled', 2010

There have been recent indications from the Artist himself that he may be nearing the conclusion of his Tile Hill project.  Who knows if in doing so he might leave behind the “anxiety” of middle age?  It is my opinion that whatever the personal ramifications for Shaw himself, we will be left with one of the more powerful and impressive cycles of work in recent years.  The accusations of conservatism and conventionality sometimes levelled at him are short sighted and irrelevant and outdated themselves in my view.  Shaw may be playing out a by now well rehearsed dialogue between photography and representational painting but he does so in a manner perfectly suited to his specific project.  The idea that only certain media or modes of expression are allowable just will not do.  More than ever, it seems wise to simply disregard those ideologues who still trumpet the death of painting.  Just as serial prophets of Armageddon must repeatedly revise their deadlines, the anti-painting lobby must find it inconvenient that so many artists still insist on finding challenges within the medium in the new Millennium.  For many, like Shaw himself, this in no way precludes the deliberate involvement of newer media in the overall process. 

George Shaw might just be exactly the kind of painter from whom the rest of us can take heart.  Simultaneously, he is; firstly, contemporary both in his critique of the historical Modernist project and conscious employment of a painting ‘strategy’; secondly, deeply rooted in the tradition of representational painting; and thirdly, timeless in his investigation of themes that are both deeply personal and universally human.  He also pulls off the trick of being credible to many art insiders without alienating people like the current inhabitants of Tile Hill Estate - regardless of their general interest in painting.

The day, and indeed the year, were running out rapidly when I left the Herbert but one day soon I plan to go to Tile Hill and have a look for myself.  I wonder if anyone at The local Council has considered liaising with Shaw to devise a walking tour of some of the locations he's depicted? (-a bit niche, perhaps?). 

 As I drove home in the late afternoon the rain was sheeting down on Coventry from a dense grey sky and the daylight was fading fast.

[1.]:  ‘George Shaw Woz Ere’ (Exhibition Pamphlet), George Shaw, 2011, Coventry, Herbert Art

Gallery & Museum

[2.]: ‘George Shaw Woz Ere’ (Exhibition Pamphlet), George Shaw, 2011, Coventry, Herbert Art

Gallery & Museum

[3.]: ‘Estates. An Intimate History’, Linsey Hanley, 2007, London, Granta Books.

[4.]:  ‘Edgelands. Journeys Into England’s True Wilderness’, Paul Farley & Michael Symmons

             Roberts, 2011, London, Jonathan Cape.