Winterlude

Today I photographed the pot of snowdrops that sits outside my back door.  There’s not a lot growing in my back yard at present but these keep going year after year.  They always give me a boost when the year is at its lowest ebb and I like to see them through the kitchen window when I’m washing up.  They seem such fragile little things but they emerge into the coldest darkest days and thrive somehow.  It makes me feel it’s worth persevering for another year despite my various aches and pains and the perennial madness of the wider world.

Seeing them reminded me of a photo I took last year when they sprouted through snow and into a bitter winter that felt like it would never thaw.  The surprising mildness of this year feels like a much needed respite even if the wider implications for the global climate are a bit terrifying.

In turn, this triggers a phrase in my mind that I’ve been toying with just lately, - ‘The Current Climate’.  Some of the loaded words or phrases in my recent paintings have come from the mouths of politicians, pundits and journalists and via B.B.C. radio news programmes.  This one seems to be a favourite sound bite at the moment and I like the implication that the current fears for the economy feel like struggling through a long period of hostile weather.  Weather is a standard metaphor for any all-encompassing situation beyond the control of the individual of course.

I fear the phrase is even more portentous when it stops being a metaphor and just refers to the actual climate.  It makes me reflect on what that comparison reveals about our own priorities.  It’s pretty ironic that the standard economic model calls for growth as an urgent remedy when that very growth could be the thing that brings environmental collapse even closer.  More than anything, I’d love to think the Twenty-First Century might see some viable alternatives to our standard model(s) emerging.  Anyway, I’m always drawn to terms or phrases that can have more than one interpretation or be ‘spun’ in different directions.  I think ‘The Current Climate’ might be appearing in a new painting fairly soon.

Sorry, - that last part is nowhere near as cheerful as the first bit.  For now, we’d better just enjoy the snowdrops…

September: The Success and Failure of Gerhard Richter

Probably like most other folk interested in painting, I made it to the Tate for the Gerhard Richter show – ‘Panorama’ recently.  However, as I went right at the end of the exhibition’s run, it’s also likely that anything intelligent (or otherwise) that I might have to say about it has already been said by others over recent weeks.  I’ve heard him described as ‘The most important painter of our age’, amongst various epithets.  I’m not sure who decides those things and what the exact criteria would be but it does seem impossible for contemporary painters to get round Richter.  There’s a feeling you probably have to go through him and absorb the implications of his vast output to work out where we are and how we got here. If that’s true, the Tate show presented a vital opportunity to experience a major retrospective of key paintings from the different phases of his career with each phase hung in chronological progression.

Instead of rehashing the usual generalities about Richter, I’ll use this post to discuss my feelings and ideas about one particular painting from the show.  I’m hoping to find time soon to follow this with another one discussing my responses to a small selection of further works that particularly caught my eye for whatever reason.

Gerhard Richter, 'September', 2005

‘September’ is Richter’s attempt to engage with the horror of what we are persuaded to call ‘9/11’,  (Grudgingly, I’ll allow the Americans the right to their own date numbering system for that one).  I was already familiar with the painting in reproduction from Robert Storr’s essay ‘September, A History Painting By Gerhard Richter’ [1.], but was definitely in two minds about the piece.  Storr’s slim volume usefully brings us the insights of a curator who has exhibited Richter’s work himself, (including the controversial Baader-Meinhof related ‘October’ paintings), but also of someone who witnessed the events at first hand.

The big question is - can painting deal meaningfully with such an era-defining event, particularly in the age of mass media?  It would always be a massive ask but given his previous intelligent and effective engagement with the themes of Nazi Germany, World War Two and the demise of the Baader-Meinhof terror group, – if Richter wasn’t going to do it, who would?

Having seen the painting now, it seems the answer to the first question is - possibly, but only on certain specific terms.  For me, the painting is a strangely underwhelming expression and lacks the immediate impact and resonance of many media images from the event.  I also feel it lacks the power to startle of those earlier German History works of Richter’s.  However, this might be to misunderstand the terms on which he attempts to investigate his subject or even what the real subject actually is.

Generally, Richter’s approach to troubling themes of politics or history has been singularly lacking in passion yet also unsettlingly personal at the same time. Often, his subject matter has been figurative but depicted in a manner that emphasises banality, both in context and depiction.  The classic example would be ‘Uncle Rudi’.  Though dressed in the uniform of the Wehrmacht, Rudolf is depicted in unremarkable surroundings and mostly resembles the type of image that must have haunted many German family albums after the the war.  Richter’s own family were largely sympathetic to the National Socialist cause but paradoxically, an Aunt, (also famously depicted), was a victim of sterilisation and euthanasia.  More disturbing still is the knowledge that, unknown to Richter, his Father in Law was a gynaecologist directly implicated in such actions under the Nazis.

Gerhard Richter, 'Uncle Rudi (Onkel Rudi)', 1965

Through his dispassionate portraiture he engages not with the actual atrocities of the period but with their traumatic legacy for future generations of Germans like himself.  He has also spoken about the difficulty of dealing with a subject like the Holocaust in painting without resorting to an appalling spectacle. [2.]  I once leafed in bemusement through a coffee table volume of beautiful, artistic concentration camp photos in a bookshop and thus have immense respect for his restraint.

Gerhard Richter, 'Mustang Squadron (Mustang-Staffel)', 1964

Gerhard Richter, 'Bombers (Bomber)', 1963

Gerhard Richter, 'Townscape Paris (Stadtbild M2)', 1968

At other times he has produced paintings dealing with the Allied bombing raids suffered by the Germans, yet again with considerable detachment and in two different ways.  The first group depict planes releasing bombs or squadrons of Allied fighter planes in battle formation.  Here we see the instruments of war at work above vaguely delineated landscapes but nothing of their actual effects.  Elsewhere, he gives us cityscapes, often in aerial view, which imply the wartime destruction, (and reconstruction in Cold War conditions), of urban centres.  The Allied obliteration of Dresden is the example he seems to allude to, - it was Richter’s birthplace and the city to which he returned to study after the War.  However, the action is only obliquely referenced and then, perplexingly, from a bomber’s distanced viewpoint.

Gerhard Richter, 'Confrontation, (Gegenuberstellung)', 1988

Later on, the pictures of the Baader-Meinhof group were derived from news and forensic photos taken during and after their demise and they appear as unremarkable blurred presences in mundane surroundings, (even when lying dead!).  We see nothing of their actions or their victims and, certainly, to fully appreciate these paintings we need to know the back-story of events leading to and surrounding the situations they depict.  Once we are thus equipped, there is no doubt that, for all of Richter’s detachment, their power to arrest us is immense. My own feeling is that they appear like ghostly manifestations, hovering between life and death.  Richter received much criticism for supposedly sympathising with Marxist Terrorists but this is to ignore the artist studious refusal to ally himself either with the murderous ideology of the group or the authority of the State, (that may have caused certain members to meet a mysterious end).  He mourns the folly of the World as an impartial observer, never as an involved participant.

Photo: Richard Drew

The same sense of impartial witness is attempted in Richter’s depiction of the World Trade Centre attack.  If a major function of the action was to create an unforgettable symbol of Islamic Fundamentalist opposition to Western Civilization, the artist’s task becomes a particularly dangerous one.  How is one to work without risking the propagation of such symbols?  Richter is open about his desire to drain any sense of drama or obscene beauty from the scene and an earlier vividly coloured version was apparently scrapped for this reason.  As a result, and also due to the pre-existing formal abstraction of the image, what remains is little more than an obscure configuration of tonal blocks and smoky smudge.  There is little detail of the moment of impact and none of the human dimension contained within news photos of falling figures or survivors on the ground with which we all became familiar after the event.  This shouldn’t really surprise us in the light of his earlier images of aerial attack already discussed

Those media images that did work in more oblique terms did it, I think, in one of two ways.  Some showed the buildings on fire but at some remove as components of a much wider skyline view, much as a Renaissance artist might depict a small battle scene in the background of an otherwise serene religious painting.  Others played on the incongruous contrast between the blue sky of a diamond-bright autumn morning and the livid inferno of flame and filthy smoke imposed upon it.  This latter group may fall into the trap of conjuring spectacle but for me they also capture the surreal horror (to a Northern European eye at least), of any atrocity carried out in sunshine.  ‘September’ is too close-in a view of the subject and, despite a passage of blue sky, is too greyed out and lacking in tonal impact to emulate either of these approaches.

 Another quandary with the painting is it just seems too modest in scale.  In his attempt to avoid the over-sized melodrama of much History painting or any interpretation of the atrocity as a grand art work in itself, Richter also dispensed with any sense of the bland monumentality of the towers under attack, and hence, of the Western, Liberal Capitalist values they represented.  Again, perhaps we can see Richter’s scrupulous even-handedness at work.  To play on the ability of a small group of low-tech fanatics to strike at the heart of such a monolith might be seen as telling too much of one side’s story.  Instead, we have a modest painting that I still find rather too easy to disregard altogether.

In one major sense, and perhaps this is Richter’s real agenda after all, the painting succeeds admirably.  His familiar device of arbitrarily scraping paint across the surface of a representational image here works as well as anywhere to signify the impossibility of his task.  It is a partial cancelling of an already obscure representational depiction – a further move towards the painterly and abstract.  So often he has set out to ask ‘Could a painting be this, or do that…?’ What it can’t and shouldn’t seek to do, he seems to suggest, is to identify with the participants in an historical event by presenting a captured or repeated moment.  That is the role of photography and television.  They may supply powerful and memorable images to haunt our nightmares but they are also quite likely to become propaganda for one side or another.  In their immediacy and desire to pursue the specifics of a moment, they become simplistic and deny the viewer any opportunity to meditate on the multiple possible interpretations of World events.

I think the best word to describe ‘September’ is ‘Vaporous’.  Richter’s plume of dark smoke appears to diffuse throughout the entire canvas and impedes our ability to discern anything with clarity.  It may compromise visual impact but does relate to a feature of 9/11 that few other images may have accounted for.  Robert Storr describes vividly the smell and taste of toxic fumes that pervaded New York after the towers burnt and fell,

“The smell of burning bodies was masked by the smell of burning plastic and other inorganic substances, but one knew that the nauseating scent was a composite including the odours of a crematorium.  Pictures have no smell, but in a synesthetic sense, Richter’s rendition of 9/11/01 has the taste of ashes.  To be sucked into this picture also entails breathing its atmosphere”. [3.]

Under such total erasure and chemical amalgamation of individual lives perhaps it becomes almost impossible to focus on the personal or identifiable at all.  Perhaps Richter was wise to focus instead on the polluting legacy of 9/11 that will be falling out for decades to come.  To some extent, we all now breathe that atmosphere.  Like no other pictorial medium, it is painting with its necessary period of reflective gestation and the ability to operate in simultaneous representational and abstract modes that is best suited to playing the philosophical long game.

Much of my initial dissatisfaction with the picture remains but I do admit that, rather than an inadequate testament to the moment of 9:11, ‘September’ might actually be an important study of both the limitations and unrivalled abilities of the medium in relation to the history of our times.

  

[1.]:  Robert Storr, ‘September, A History Painting By Gerhard Richter’, Tate Publishing, London, 2010

[2.]:  ‘I Have Nothing To Say And I Am Saying It’ (In Conversation With Nicholas Serota), From:  Mark Godfrey & Nicholas Serota With Dorothee Brill & Camille Morineau (Editors), ‘Gerhard Richter Panorama’ (Exhibition Catalogue), Tate Publishing, London, 2011, pp. 24-25

[3.]:  Robert Storr, ‘September, A History Painting By Gerhard Richter’, Tate Publishing, London, 2010

Haunting My Own Life

I spent a couple of days in my home town of Lincoln over the recent Christmas period.  As usual, by Boxing Day I needed fresh air and the chance to walk off the previous day's food intake, (and to escape from festive T.V. for a while).  For a few hours I took a stroll around the more picturesque parts of town and revisited a few old haunts.

Lincoln Cathedral from the Castle Walls

It's something I've done increasingly of late after living away for over thirty years and paying relatively little attention to the place for much of that time.  It's probably inevitable that we start to re-evaluate the past more as we move into middle age.  As a young adult, there’s an impetus to move forward in search of experience and the chance to construct a life on our own terms.  Geographical relocation is obviously integral to this process for many people, myself included.  At a certain point though, there’s a growing temptation to reach back toward some of our formative experiences, and a realisation that they stay with us, despite the person we may have become.  I think we should all guard against the seductions and delusions of self-indulgent nostalgia lest it rob us of our remaining impetus to embrace future experience.  For anyone engaged in creative work, this is doubly important.  Nevertheless, I believe to open-mindedly revisit those locations haunted by revenants of our earlier lives can be a healthy and instructive process.

It always strikes me on these trips how much we can take for granted when growing up in a place, and how much is left behind without a second thought as we reach escape velocity.  It may not feature on anyone's list of top global locations but parts of Lincoln are undeniably charming, evocative, and, in certain cases, genuinely spectacular.  Most obviously, what the place has is history - centuries worth of it, right in your face and with people still living and working amongst it.  I was talking to a work colleague recently about my abiding interest in History and realised that one reason may be that I grew up in a location where it is so palpable.

Newport Arch

The Castle from Castle Square

The relative compactness of the city’s oldest quarter and my home’s geographical proximity to it brought me into routine contact with the past.  My daily journeys to infant and junior schools took me past medieval buildings, under an ancient stone arch and along a street that still follows the Roman street plan.  It was possible to see cobbled circles set into the road to mark the position of pillars in the original colonnade.  To this day, you can still drive a car through Newport Arch - originally an aperture in the Roman wall.  Every 15 minutes, the Cathedral bells tolled the hour - reminding us of its centuries-old presence looming over the rooftops.  I have clear memories of staring out of classroom windows at the massive walls of the Norman Castle immediately across the road.  At the foot of the embankment stood the Strugglers Inn.  Supposedly, those prisoners condemned to death at the Crown Court within were often dragged for a last drink there, and then back to the castle  gallows above.  Coincidentally, one of the hangmen associated with the Castle was one William Marwood.  William was the inventor of the 'Long Drop' method and a possible distant ancestor of my family. 


The West Front of the Cathedral

Of course, our school teachers were keen to use much of this heritage as an educational resource but in time, inevitably, much of it became a mere backdrop for the dramas of our teenage lives and the struggle to grow up and discover exactly who we were going to be.  After spending an immensely enjoyable Foundation year at the local Art College, my greatest priority was to leave what often felt like a quaint backwater and find out what life, (and Art), was really all about in a bigger city.  However, in retrospect, it seems significant that the place I chose to continue my studies wasn’t London or one of the large Northern, industrial conurbations.  Instead I chose Bristol - a larger, edgier city than Lincoln with a dynamic cultural life, for sure but also one with plenty of historical architecture, obvious heritage, and picturesque locations.  Perhaps growing up in Lincoln had conditioned my responses to those things more than I realised.

In the intervening years, my own story unfolded away from both Lincoln, and indeed Bristol, and much of my stored experience is associated with other locations.  Nevertheless, on recent return visits I’ve been increasingly thrilled by the way that my own personal history is now ingrained into the very fabric of streets and walls that had witnessed the passing of so many generations and events before. On this last occasion I took my camera on the walk in an attempt to document a particular set of related memories attached to very specific locations.

During the year I studied at Lincoln School of Art & Design, (since incorporated into the more recently established University), My morning walk in took me right past the foot of the Cathedral’s Eastern end.  Of all the city’s notable features the most impressive are the Cathedral itself and the steep escarpment on which it is built.  The latter is a surprisingly steep natural rampart rising dramatically above the, (more recently built), Southern and Western portions of the city.  It provided the perfect elevated site for the Normans to build both their ecclesiastical status symbol and the adjacent fortified citadel.  Consequently, from various directions both edifices dominate the town visually and psychologically.  Indeed, the Cathedral’s visual presence actually extends over many miles of surrounding landscape.  The building is impressive both in the quality of its Gothic architecture and in sheer physical scale.  Travelers approaching the City Centre from the South along Broadgate gain an uninterrupted view of the building’s entire side elevation rising above them.  It is so much larger in all dimensions than any other visible structure that I can never quite believe it is a single building.  This scalar disjuncture is sufficient to make one question the known rules of perspective.

Architecturally, most attention gets paid to the Cathedral’s vertiginous West Front.  It clearly reveals the development in building styles from Romanesque through to Perpendicular Gothic modes as it extends outwards and upwards and is surmounted by three towers of startling height and verticality.  Often, such Medieval architectural statements are described as ascending towards heaven but my overriding impression, conversely, is often of an incredible stone waterfall cascading to the ground. 

A walk along the building’s length from West to East is to travel further through time and changing architectural styles.  The East End was completed in a more decorated high Gothic mode, complete with florid spires and outstretched gargoyles.  The multitude of empty plinths and niches suggest it was once further complicated with hosts of watching statuary before Cromwell’s iconoclasts got to work.  This portion of the Cathedral has always felt darker and more atmospheric to me.  In practical terms this is because less concerted attempts have been made to clean the stonework here of centuries of accumulated pollution.  But, expressively too, there is more forbidding quality to these stones. There is a dark intensity about the immense East window and the complexity of decorative motifs and competing spires evoke the more twisted corners of the medieval imagination.  The sense of entanglement in stone is exacerbated by the adjacent Chapter House with its radiating flying buttresses.  To me, walking beneath and amongst them feels rather like entering the mechanism of an immense stone machine - perhaps a generator of superstition or a mill for grinding the souls of the impressionable.  In retrospect, I suspect such flights of fancy must have been a valuable imaginative workout prior to a day’s artistic study.  I've given the photos I took there a bit of moody Photoshopping - just for the pleasure of it.

There are delightful, modest, spiraling iron handrails nearby to either side of the steps exiting the Cathedral site.  They punctuate that section of the journey perfectly and I remember drawing them while still at school.  The rest of my journey to college involved descending the hill below the Cathedral and entering through a side entrance.  Viewing the Art College’s Greestone Centre from the front however reminds me of the first times I ever entered the building through the main door.  It all seemed both atmospheric and momentous and a world away from the shabby modernism of our secondary Comp.  It was definitely a world I wanted to inhabit.  The building itself, built in red brick and terracotta, is a rather ostentatious Victorian Pile - originally an up-market girl’s school I believe.  It features high windows, a grand assembly hall, (complete with stage and balcony on three sides), and endless nooks, alcoves, passages and twisting staircases.  It felt like exactly the kind of building I could let my imagination run riot in and whilst full of practical, endeavour and academic routine, it took little effort to daydream myself into my own version of Gormenghast.  It was an ideal location in which to play out my overly romantic notions of what it meant to be an Art student.

Lincoln College of Art & Design, Greestone Centre

Usher Art Gallery

Usher Gallery Grounds & Bishop's Palace 

Next door to the college was, conveniently enough, the Usher Art Gallery - with its own sense of architectural grandeur and set in steeply landscaped grounds.  Though lacking much in the way of a contemporary collection, the Usher was where I first experienced real artworks and was the venue for occasionally stimulating visiting exhibitions.  I remember looking in amazement one day at the tortured paint, inches deep, on a large borrowed Auerbach.  I probably spent as much time wondering round the picturesque grounds as I did inside the gallery.  I particularly loved the view up the hill to the Medieval Bishop’s Palace with the Cathedral above.  It was inaccessible to the public in those days and thus became a partially ruined forbidden zone of the imagination.  Another favourite spot was one of the small arched side entrances.  It impressed me enough to form the subject for my A level exam painting - a fact which gains extra resonance on seeing the view through into the Usher grounds.  The eye is led along a path towards the red bulk of the Art College beyond.  One thing leads to another.

Entrance to Usher Gallery Grounds

Usher Grounds & Art College

I now appreciate just how many of these locations acted as triggers for my young imagination to project itself forward, either into pure fantasy or, (often, equally romanticised), aspirations for the future.  I must have spent a lot of time mooning around these picturesque corners.  Maybe I was responding in part to the imaginative historical vibrations of what is now labeled Psychogeography.  Certainly, much of the time I was wondering “what is it like in there?”.  In the same way, I felt the future held an, as yet inaccessible, realm of possibility.  Significantly, these very same locations now serve as triggers for memory and project the imagination back into my autobiographical history.  More intriguingly they serve to way-mark my own ‘future past/passed’.  They are like portals of a personal form of hauntology.

My Boxing Day Walk took in one final such example a little further back up the hill.  Towering above charming old Danesgate, sit two imposing Victorian villas.  They are accessed by steps behind high-walled street entrances and so feel remote and, again, resistant to casual visitors.  They enjoy an incredible elevated perch that must result in a fantastic view over the rooftops.  Part of me always yearned to live in such a place one day, (and even now I wouldn’t say “no”).  Twice, in more recent years, I’ve had vivid dreams featuring these houses.  Interestingly, both dreams involved me climbing up to one of the buildings and discovering a fantastic zone of further impressive houses and interconnected walled gardens beyond.  Google Maps reveals this to be a purely imagined, impossible location, yet it seems no less real in my mind for all that.  With the emotional intensity of dreams, on both occasions I have felt a strong sense that “this is where I want to stay”.

Lottery wins aside, it seems impossible I will ever fulfill those dreams in either of the actual buildings.  Furthermore, I have no hard evidence to suggest the prophetic power of dreams.  However, I do wonder if the resonances I respond to in these locations might still point forward as well as back.  For decades I wouldn’t have even considered it -these days I wonder if, maybe, one day I might end up living in the old place again…

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.

...Feels Like A Brand New Day

I often feel quite optimistic and creatively energised on New Year’s Day - providing I’m not suffering too much from the night before of course.  It was a pretty quiet one this year.  In fact, I was painting at midnight and put down my brush to toast the New Year, which must mean I’m either very dedicated or a complete sad-act.  Must remember to socialise next year.

Anyway, with a pretty clear head, I took the camera for a walk around my local area today and, true to form, came back with some great visual material, including several possible starting points for future paintings.  In the pleasingly named Frog Island quarter of Leicester I found these lovely trashed billboard hoardings.  It’s far too early to tell where these images might lead but the tattered layers of colour, printer's dot patterns and text fragments feel like a real gift.  There’s not much else to say at this stage so I’ll just put a few images up as a marker - and for the sheer pleasure of looking at them…

Happy New Year