Shaun Morris: 'A Little Bit Back From The Main Road', At Evesham Arts Centre

Shaun Morris, 'The Street (The Ship)', Oil On Canvas, 2018

The Half Term break from my school employment afforded me time to set my own work aside for a few guilt-free hours, the other day; and so I pootled over to Evesham, to see the latest exhibition of work by my friend, Shaun Morris.

‘Just A Little Bit Back From The Main Road’ is a relatively small display, in the cafe/bar area of Evesham’s dinky little Arts Centre (which is itself an annex of the town’s Prince Henry’s School), but Shaun has done well to squeeze a significant selection of his recent paintings onto a single wall, without it all appearing distractingly cramped.  Whilst taking them in, it occurred to me that he’s pretty diligent about sniffing out venues, (of whatever profile) and consistently seizing opportunities to show work in a variety of contexts.  It certainly makes my own rather more diffident exhibiting history feel a bit lazy in comparison, which is definitely something to think about.  And Shaun’s determination seems to have borne fruit in recent months, in terms of a few notable sales, and the attentions of at least one collector, in recent months - I believe.

Shaun Morris, 'A Little Bit Back From The Main Road', Evesham Arts Centre,  June 2018

I’ve had a connection with Shaun and his work for some years now, and always take an interest in what he’s been up to. I’d seen many of the new paintings on his website, but this was my first chance to see them properly, and to enjoy the materiality of Shaun’s consistently impressive paint handling skills.  I had another ulterior motive, as he, Andrew Smith and I will be staging another joint exhibition, in Nottingham, later in the year.  This trip was a chance to gauge how well our respective current bodies of work might sit together – something I came away feeling pretty confident about, in the event.

Anyway, as I’ve often done before – here’s a selection of random thoughts that occurred, both as I viewed Shaun’s work, and on further reflection over subsequent days.  So, in no particular order of importance…

Shaun Morris, 'A Little Bit Back From The Main Road',  Evesham Arts Centre, June 2018

• There's perhaps an inevitable tendency for a fellow practitioner to home straight in on how things have been done - even as the emotional/intellectual implications of an artwork are unfolding, so let’s start with that already mentioned paint handling.  In Shaun’s case, the manipulation of oil on canvas rarely disappoints.  It may be true that some of these new pieces take half a step back from some of the bravura effects of earlier work - but, if anything, this reigning-in of overt showmanship just seems to reaffirm his facility with the plastic qualities of oil paint.  There's still plenty to excite the eye in his brush work, but also a quiet assurance about many of these new pieces.  

• In reality, there’s an unlaboured deftness of touch in so much of Shaun’s painting, which allows him to capture the specific qualities of individual subjects, often with little more than a few sweeps of a loaded brush.  And it’s rarely all of one consistency.  Lightly scrubbed areas, and evidence of fluid staining, coexist with more buttery paint, to breathe extra life and depth into these canvases, and betray his confidence with a range of application techniques.  This is doubly important, given the nocturnal context of these images - which can bring a certain claustrophobia to any subject.  Shaun's handling of variable opacity, and of dragged or veiled passages of paint work hard to evoke the effects of limited illumination, and of suggested hinted-at details subsumed in coagulating shadows

Shaun Morris, 'The Street' Paintings, 'A Little Bit Back From The Main Road'

• This kind of painting can be especially hard to pull off on a small scale – and several of the pieces in this show are of relatively minimal dimensions.  There’s always a tendency for free marks to tighten up as wrist movements replace the flex of a whole arm.  Shaun seems able to sidestep, with ease, the potentially deadening effects which can often result.  Whilst he successfully paints at a variety of different scales, his ability to get on top of the easily overshadowed (apologies) small stuff is impressive.

• Various other artists kept springing to mind as I viewed Shaun’s work.  One is George Shaw (about who – more in a minute), but the another, perhaps more surprisingly, is Lucien Freud.  There’s an aspect of Freud’s work, which I’ve always enjoyed – in which specific contours and forms (the descriptive elements of representational painting, if you like) are carefully described with brushwork that still manages to energise the canvas through gestural dynamism and a sense of unceasing motion.  In certain passages of Shaun’s painting it feels like he’s getting pretty close to something similar.

Lucian Freud, 'Standing By The Rags', Oil On Canvas, 1988-89

Shaun Morris, 'The Street (Empty Boxes)', Oil On Canvas 2017-18

• This marrying of the expressive potential of paint (the hand), with the careful scrutiny (the eye), and analysis (the brain), in an instinctive balance is intrinsic to much of the greatest  painting of course.  It goes back though such giants as Manet, Rembrandt, Velasquez, et al – and might seem quaintly archaic to some.  My own inability to get to grips with it probably explains my own need to evolve different methods of expression, or more systematic approaches.  However, when done well, this way of working is still just as immediately captivating (if not more so) as anything else on the wall.

• And yet, pleasing though it may be to witness someone still unashamedly engaging with the timeless fundamentals of painting – it would be foolish to conclude that Shaun’s work is just all about ‘The Tradition’.  His subject matter tends unerringly toward the contemporary - be it in the case of the elevated roadways, heavy goods vehicles and commercial infrastructure of recent years, or the forlorn and fly-tipped suburban street visions of this current suite of images.

Shaun Morris, 'The Street (The Cooker)', Oil On Canvas, 2018

• There’s nothing grand about these environs.  Shaun’s milieu may be slightly further out from the centre of town from the shabby environs that trigger my own work, but it's clearly populated by many of the same discarded cardboard boxes, abandoned white goods, hired skips and sentinel wheelie bins.  This is a landscape so many of us now inhabit: one in which even our limited aspirations come with a slew of unwanted packaging; where those places not in a state of neglect are in one of almost unceasing re-fit; where calculated obsolescence renders the accoutrements of modern live less and less durable by the year; and where civic pride is little more than a quaint memory.  The source locations may be specific and parochial, but they seem to hint at a wider context, both geographical and societal, in which we wander untethered and despondent through the gloom of Austerity and Brexit.

• There’s always something a little cinematic about Shaun’s painting too - it seems to me.  This might be due in part to his habit of working largely from photographs in recent years. It’s probably almost certainly to do with the fact that he continues to represent his scenes at night.    There’s an inevitably noir-ish  flavour to be extracted from this, along with associated memories of Edward Hopper’s melancholic and distinctly filmic painted visions of the city after dark.  Perhaps, (and possibly because of the suburban setting), there’s even a slight Lynchian flavour too?  That might be my own pre-disposition, but I could definitely imagine David Lynch’s camera resting with trepidation on Shaun’s eerie, red window, or closing-in slowly on the shadowy interior of his discarded cardboard cartons.  Either way, the work seems redolent with contemporary cultural associations beyond the field of painting, as well as within it.

Shaun Morris, 'The Street (Title?)', Oil On Canvas, 2018

• There’s generally a little less overt spectacle in the subjects too - as well as in their  handling.   The subject matter is less forbidding or suggestive of implied dynamism or threat.  Sure, scary stuff happens in suburban streets too – but here there’s a sense that the drama is more internal.  It’s perhaps more likely to play out behind the red curtain of his startling red window, than necessarily in the shadows of the abandoned street outside.  It all just feels a little closer to (hopefully) relatively unthreatening home (as indeed, I believe it is - quite literally).

Shaun Morris, 'The Street' Paintings, 'A Little Bit Back From The Main Road'

• Despite the aforementioned painting's slightly infernal glow, and the acidic greens creeping into ‘White Goods’ (which might be my favourite, by the way – both for its subject matter and Diebenkornesque formal tendencies) it’s fair to say that Shaun seems to have desaturated his palette to some extent, of late.  In the past, he has proved himself a master of the lurid colour effects conjured by artificial lighting in urban or industrial settings.  His characteristic  bitter oranges, toxic limes and shimmering magentas are in fairly short supply here, to be increasingly replaced with a more tawdry palette of murky, submarine greens, dull blue-greys and pinkish browns (as in the splendid ‘The Street (The Ship')), or one which is just more generally tonal.  Is this another reflection of the slightly more domestic settings, I wonder – or perhaps because (as he has implied in his own blog) he is beginning to tire a little of his nocturnal meditations, and to yearn for a bit more daylight , and slightly less melodrama?  Time will tell, no doubt.

Shaun Morris, 'White Goods', Oil On Canvas, 2018

• Which brings me back to George Shaw – superficially because that artist’s last major cycle of paintings displayed a similar retreat from luminosity or heightened colour, but for rather deeper reasons too.  It’s certainly not the case that Shaun is merely aping Shaw.  In fact, in purely painterly terms, he would seem to have a wider vocabulary, and be prepared to take greater pictorial risks than the often relatively straightforward (as well as excellent) Shaw.  But it’s impossible not to remark on the depth of downbeat poetry each artist is able to extract from similarly quotidian subject matter.

Shaun Morris, 'The Street' (Negativeland)', Oil On Canvas, 2017

George Shaw, 'The Living And The Dead', Enamel On Canvas, 2015-16

• Shaw can provoke profound nostalgia for a lost youth, in any viewer of a certain age who might have shared a similar provincial upbringing, and consistently extracts an emotional frisson from the least promising sources.  And there’s little doubt that Shaun is doing something equally affecting with these deserted refuse-strewn street scenes.  There’s an equally strong sense of loss, although in Shaun’s case it feels more rooted in the present.  To me it feels more suggestive of the detachment and lost bearings we all increasingly experience in a society somehow cast adrift from old certainties.   We can walk past these windows, and along these familiar streets each night, and yet, it seems, there may no longer be any way home.

Shaun Morris, 'A Little Bit Back From The Main Road', continues until 30 June 2018, at Evesham Arts Centre, Prince Henry's School, Victoria Avenue, Evesham, Worcestershire. WR11 4QH

Disclaimer:

I compiled the details of specific images in this post from Shaun's website, having neglected to record them on the day.  It transpires the painting of the red window is yet to appear on there - leaving me unsure of it's exact title.  Likewise, I have a feeling the title of 'The White Goods' may have now changed.  Possibly, 'The Street (Figures)' now -  Shaun?  I hate my middle-aged memory!

  

…And The Day After

Washingborough, Lincolnshire, December 2014

We had a little fall of snow on Boxing Day evening this year.  It was a few hours too late to allow for much sentimentalising over white Christmases, and didn’t hang around very long, - at least where I was.  Nonetheless, this being Britain, a few centimetres of the white stuff quickly became inflated in the media imagination into a major weather event.  There were numerous weather and travel warnings, shading into implications of infrastructure breakdown and societal collapse.  Apologies to anyone who may have experienced the odd closed road or cancelled bus service, or who may have lost control on a slippery road, but really I’m baffled by how easily we get ourselves into a national tizzy about so little in this country.  Like most Brits, I retain a race-fascination with the weather, but this affected mild helplessness is something else again.

Washingborough, Lincolnshire, December 2014

Anyway, it was pretty enough for a few hours on 27 December, and I'm always intrigued by how a fall of snow can affect the quality of illumination and general appearance of the most familiar surroundings.  Finding myself at my parental home, just outside Lincoln, I took a couple of shots of melting snow in the placid housing estate where my Mother and Stepfather live.  I won’t pretend this is normally the most stimulating environment, (visually or otherwise), but after its dusting of snow, I was immediately reminded of George Shaw’s lovely painting of a similar situation, ‘Scenes From The Passion: The First Day Of The Year’.

George Shaw, ‘Scenes From The Passion: The First Day Of The Year’, Humbrol Enamel
On Board, 2003.

I’ve outlined my enthusiasm for Shaw’s work before, and always respond to his ability to mine a rich vein of melancholy visual poetry within the mundane surroundings of his childhood home in Coventry’s Tile Hill.  I don’t have the same emotional memory-connection with my Mother’s current home, so this time it was really a case of reality taking on greater resonance through the imitation of Art.

Ermine Estate, Lincoln, (Photographer Unknown)

Coincidentally, I'd earlier taken a little car journey of reminiscence around Lincoln’s Ermine Estate, on the city’s northern fringes.  The Ermine is a post-war housing development with a certain nostalgic resonance for me, being a place I, and my friends would often wander around aimlessly during our Secondary School lunch breaks.  We were searching for some undefined excitement beyond the school gates I suppose, but never really found it.  Strangely though, for all its suburban blandness, the estate always had a sense of slightly alien potential in my mind, - a frisson of stimulating unease.  Perhaps, I should undertake my own visual exploration of that peripheral territory of the imagination some day.

Grayson Perry: 'The Vanity Of Small Differences' And 'New Art West Midlands' At BMAG

Grayson Perry, 'The Annunciation Of The Virgin Deal', Digital Tapestry, 2012, (Detail).

I seem to be pretty much living in art galleries at the moment, so it was no surprise to find myself walking into Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery yet again, the other day.  This time I even got paid, as I was accompanying a group of GCSE students, from the school where I work, on their trip to view the exhibition, ‘Photorealism: Fifty Years of Hyperrealistic Painting’.  I’d already spent some time with that show, (and reported on it here, at some length), so stationed myself near the nearest main exit as ‘back stop’, for the first part of the visit.  However, once the students emerged to explore the rest of the building, I got the chance to take in a couple of other attractions at the same time.

Grayson Perry:  ‘The Vanity Of Small Differences’.

Grayson Perry, 'The Adoration Of The Cage Fighters', Digital Tapestry, 2012

Many people in Britain will have seen Perry’s entertaining TV programmes about the mores of taste within the British class system [1.].  If the subject seems like an easy target, it should be remembered that class-consciousness still casts a massive shadow over British life, and Perry deals with the matter entertainingly but without condescension, generally.  He is indeed a regular and amiable presence in the British media, and I’ve already discussed his delivery of the '2013 BBC Reith Lectures'. It might be easy to dismiss him as a Media luvvy, but he is, above all, a working artist with a recognisable sociological agenda, as well as an obvious mission to communicate.  His cheerful, public embrace of a somewhat unusual brand of transvestism, (even by normal cross-dressing standards), is both psychologically revealing, and evidence that his fascination with the intricacies of social display goes beyond the merely voyeuristic.

Grayson Perry Dresses Up For A Night Out With The Girls In Sunderland.

This show provided an opportunity to view the six large-scale tapestries that Perry designed as the culmination of his project, alongside the TV shows and evidence of the research and development phases that support it all.  The three broadcasts each dealt with one of the traditional class divisions within British society, Working, (a label possibly now in need of reinterpretation), Middle, and Upper, (be it old aristocracy or new money,), but that model is, as Perry points out, too rigid and simplistic a way to view the matter in reality.  Instead, taking Hogarth’s 'Rake’s Progress’ as his inspiration, (and transforming the original protagonist, Tom, into his own Tim Rakewell), he depicts our hero’s progress through the competing tribes and shifting strata of British society and the complex distinctions and contradictions that characterise them.

Grayson Perry, 'The Agony In The Car Park', Digital Tapestry, 2012, (Detail Below).

Perry posits Tim as a bright, Working Class lad from Sunderland who, through diligence, education and aspiration, achieves success and wealth as a software tycoon.  He eventually acquires the trappings of a quasi-aristocratic lifestyle but ultimately crashes his Ferrarri, to die in a street in the homogenised, media-fixated, (and supposedly classless?) landscape we all increasingly inhabit.  If the six finished pieces could be said to fit nominally into the three basic social groupings, they also demonstrate how it is through their overlaps, and the subtle nuances within each, that the true story of contemporary social taste and expectations lie.  This is most fully appreciated whenever aspiration is given free rein or some degree of social mobility is achieved.  Borrowed from Freud [2.], ‘The Vanity Of Small Differences’ proves an apt title indeed.

Grayson Perry, 'Expulsion From Number 8 Eden Close', Digital Tapestry, 2012

Grayson Perry, 'The Annunciation Of The Virgin Deal', Digital Tapestry, 2012

There is far too much content in the six tapestries to start listing their subject matter in detail.  However, I would mention the messianic Social Club singer; complete with crucifix-like shipyard crane, meat raffle and car park boy racers, from ‘The Agony In The Car Park’, as particularly memorable.  Its sense of guileless sentimentality and tribal communality suggest that traditional Working Class ties are as deeply rooted and proudly felt as any.  I’m also rather taken with the setting for Tim’s demise in ‘♯ Lamentation’, with its petrol station, McDonalds and retail park.  It seems ironic that having climbed so high, Tim should be brought back to earth amongst the signifiers of Global Capitalism, (paradoxically, a great leveler of taste, - even as it magnifies inequality).  To close one’s eyes for the last time on such sights seems almost too cruel.

Grayson Perry, 'The Annunciation Of The Virgin Deal', Digital Tapestry, 2012, (Detail).

I think it’s fair to say that the various elements of the project, including the research phase, (or ‘Taste Safari’), the broadcasts, and the finished tapestries themselves, all play an equally important role in the overall project, demonstrating the importance of working across various platforms for many artists today.  It might also be argued that the different stages involved actually reflect the content rather cleverly.  TV is still often regarded as passive entertainment to distract the lower classes.  Research and study, (including an extensive process of drawing), might represent the process of achievement and betterment through learning and hard work.  The Tapestry is itself a traditional status symbol of the Wealthy, once being immensely expensive and labour intensive to produce, but also redolent of the elegant decay with which we might associate old aristocracy.

Grayson Perry, 'The Working Class At Bay', Digital Tapestry, 2012, (Detail Below).

Perry’s use of modern CAD/CAM techniques to realise his final pieces adds another interesting layer of context, both in further investigating the relationship between traditional craft and contemporary art, prevalent in all his work, and in symbolising how digital technology has become a significant driver of 21st Century social mobility, and transmitter of social mores.  Whilst still not cheap to produce, most of the labour and time in a digital tapestry is now spent preparing the digital files, with all that implies about artisanal status.

Grayson Perry, ‘♯ Lamentation’, Digital Tapestry, 2012

I’m impressed by the way Perry pulled off his complex compositions, packed with wonderfully observed details and clues.  If some of these seem stereotypical at first glance, it should be remembered that he observed everything first hand, during his research trips to Sunderland, Kent and The Cotswolds.  Are such clichés, clichés for a reason, or just inherently self-perpetuating?  I can also appreciate the way he has incorporated various art historical and quasi-religious visual quotations from Renaissance paintings into his composite images.  Perry wryly points out that this is a deeply Middle Class thing to do, whilst illuminating how the construction of a class-based taste identity is as much an act of faith as the religious frameworks within which all social assumptions once operated.

Grayson Perry, '‘♯ Lamentation’, Digital Tapestry, 2012, (Detail).

The concerns and modes of Grayson Perry’s work are a world away from my own, and his ‘not-really-naïve’, cartoonish, figurative style and narrative approach are unlike anything I have attempted myself, or am ever likely to.  Nonetheless, I do find his work both engaging and thought provoking.  Above all, there’s a lot of fun to be had from viewing our tribal eccentricities in his tapestries, just as there was in viewing his TV shows.

Grayson Perry, 'The Vanity Of Small Differences', continues until 11 May 2014 at: Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Chamberlain Square, Birmingham, B3 3DH.

‘New Art West Midlands.’

‘New Art West Midlands’ is a group show of work by a selection of recent graduates from Birmingham City, Coventry, Staffordshire, Wolverhampton and Worcester Universities.  It is actually part of a programme of exhibitions spread around a number of regional galleries, and it would take quite an effort to get round the whole thing, I suspect.  I may try to visit more of it at some point but, for now, had to be satisfied with a brief scan of the work on show at BMAG.  Such shows are inevitably a mixed bag and I didn’t have time to really find out what was going on with a lot of the work in depth.  However, two artists did stand out as being of real interest at first glance.  Both are painters, which says something about the power of immediate visual arrest characteristic of the medium, I suppose.

Santhanha Nguyen:  Nguyen is a skateboarder who uses her chosen means of transport to explore abandoned or out-of-bounds urban spaces.  Her painting ‘13’ (2012), appears rather traditional in its loose(ish) handling, veils of fluid oil paint and earthy palette; which is actually refreshing as an alternative to the predictable post-punk or wild style tropes usually associated with that scene.  It depicts the abandoned top deck of a multi-story car park, closed under H&S regulations (!) after becoming a favourite suicide venue.

Santhanha Nguyen, '13', Acrylic On Board, 2012

To be honest, much of the interest in the piece may lay in that knowledge, but Nguyen does convey something of the detached desolation of the location, predominantly by building her composition around a wide expanse of nothing very much.  She claims Casper David Freidrich as an influence, but I was also reminded of George Shaw’s ‘Back Of The Club 2’ (2001), which also dares to focus its attention on bleak architecture and a tract of empty tarmac.

George Shaw, 'Back Of The Club 2', Humbrol Enamel On Panel, 2001

Nguyen’s art practice, and her involvement with skateboarding, clearly overlaps with the concerns of other subcultures such as Urban Exploration and Parcour.  All attempt in some way to redefine our relationship with urban spaces and to interrogate the systems of power and access control applying to them.  I am also reminded of the recent dispute between the skateboarders of London’s South Bank cultural complex, and the architects and planners keen to clean up the organic, unofficial aspects of its terrain in favour of yet more bland ‘retail opportunities’.

James Birkin:  The influence of George Shaw seems even more overt in the painting of James Birkin.  He also derives subject matter from apparently mundane locations in Coventry, and I was immediately drawn to his depictions of the city’s disused ‘Mustard’ nightclub.  In ‘Seating Booth’, ‘Office’ and ‘First Floor’, (all 2013), he employs a slightly naïve brand of Photorealism to depict the desolation, and squalor of the club’s abandoned interior spaces, focusing particularly on the tawdry décor, superficial damage, and the accumulations of detritus that lend the place a Marie-Celestine quality.

James Birkin, 'Office', Acrylic On Canvas, 2013

Birkin works from flash photography and does manage to evoke the strange, artificial objectivity of such illumination in his paintings.  There’s something affecting about the shabby incongruity of such nocturnal leisure zones viewed under functional white light, and his chosen method pushes this even further.  In fact, paradoxically, the apparent prioritisation of factual investigation over subjectivity, creates a particular set of atmospherics all of its own.

James Birkin, 'Seating Booth', Acrylic On Panel, 2013

These slightly wonky attempts to faithfully describe the subjects’ complex detail reminded me of Shaw’s own faltering early attempts to master Photorealist methods.  I wonder if this is a conscious strategy or simply indicates a young painter still striving to refine his chosen style, and also, if it would be going too far to see signs of a nascent ‘Coventry School’ emerging in Shaw’s wake?  I had paused to view one of the latter’s refined mature works, just the previous day, at Cov’s Herbert Gallery, and noticed the garish exterior of ‘Mustard’ on returning to the car.  That, and the presence of the ‘Photorealism’ show, downstairs at BMAG, makes me reflect that, often, the more you see, the more things connect up.

'New Art West Midlands' continues until 18 May 2014 at: Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Chamberlain Square, Birmingham, B3 3DH.  Also at other regional galleries, (dates vary).

[1.]:  Grayson Perry, ‘All In The Best Possible Taste’, Channel 4 Television.  Three Episodes.  First Broadcast: 05 June, 12 June, 19 June 2012.

[2.]:  “The phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and ridiculing each other.”  From:  Sigmund Freud, ‘Freud Library Vol.12: Civilisation Society And Religion, Group Psychology, Civilisation & Its Discontents, And Other Works’, London, Penguin, 1987.