George Shaw: Nothing happens anywhere

These look interesting: paintings by George Shaw (featured in a Guardian gallery here) of  scenes of typical urban desolation on Tile Hill housing estate in Coventry, where he grew up.  I think they speak  expressively of the landscapes through which we hurry each day, their elements so familiar that they become almost invisible to us.  Look at the metal fencing in the painting above – it’s of a type seen everywhere, like the squat brick block it protects.  Look at the way the brickwork at the corner of the fenced area has collapsed, how the sycamore saplings are thrusting through the bars, and the scrubby, worn grass and sinking flags of the path in the foreground.  It’s all around us, a nothingness that’s everywhere.

Writing about Shaw’s paintings in The Observer, Sean O’Hagan recalled the poem by Philip Larkin, in which memories of his own childhood in Coventry are triggered by his northbound train unexpectedly halting there.  ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere’, concludes Larkin. It’s that sense of nothingness that is captured in Shaw’s work.

As Sean O’Hagan writes, ‘Shaw… records the mundane, the quotidian and the overlooked. In doing so, he somehow renders the everyday mysterious’.  In ‘Landscape with Dog Shit Bin’ (above) we see this clearly, the lingering signs of municipal projects, abandoned or forgotten.  Was this a car park? What happens here now?  Amid the natural browns and greens and the grey of the tarmac, there’s the bright, red flag of the dog shit bin.

Sean O’Hagan again:

Here is a drab lane of graffitied garages ending in an ominous-looking wood. Here is a redbrick wall rising up flat and imposing before a row of council houses. Here is a single tall tree standing solitary amid an expanse of scrubby parkland. All are alive with possibility, aglow with resonance and suggestion. These are paintings that prove Larkin’s point that “nothing, like something, happens anywhere”, while simultaneously suggesting that Tile Hill is one of those places where nothing happening is the norm.

George Shaw grew up on the Tile Hill estate in the early 1970s. The estate his family had moved to in 1968 was built after the war, as part of the nationwide programme to create modern housing for working class families. The estate is cut across by long paths and roads, and edged with woods, a remnant of what was once the Forest of Arden. Shaw has used this suburban environment as the inspiration to paint his highly detailed, photo-realistic works whose vividness derives from his use of Humbrol model paint (the kind used by generations of kids to coat Airfix model planes).  This gives the paintings a surface sheen:  ‘It’s that glow that you only see when you’re walking home from the pub alone,’  says Shaw.  ‘That solitary glow, the glow of a telly though a window or streetlights reflected on rain on the streets’.

The Back that used to be The Front, 2008

He paints the back of the social club in Tile Hill with all the seriousness of Monet painting Rouen Cathedral.
– Gordon Burns

Looking at Shaw’s paintings reminded me of Thomas Jones’ painting – remarkable for 1782 – ‘A Wall in Naples’, about which the late Tom Lubbock commented:

A wall is nothing to look at.  As far as a representational picture can be, this is a picture of nothing. As such, it also faces an important fact – the fact that we spend quite a lot of time looking at not much. It’s a side of our visual lives that the art of painting generally overlooks. ‘A Wall in Naples’ is a tribute to all those non-focal moments, when our gaze does not settle on anything in particular. The glimpse of the world that this painting preserves is one of those occasions, when sight grasps nothing, when sight is simply stopped – comes up against a brick wall.

Sean O’Hagan’s article not only introduced me to the work of George Shaw, but also that of photographer Jem Southam.  There is, writes Hagan, ‘a similar kind of almost eerie atmosphere about British photographer Jem Southam’s series, The Pond at Upton Pyne, which captures the ordinary beauty of a neglected village pond’.

I Remember, I Remember
by Philip Larkin

Coming up England by a different line
For once, early in the cold new year,
We stopped, and, watching men with number plates
Sprint down the platform to familiar gates,
‘Why, Coventry!’ I exclaimed. “I was born here.’

I leant far out, and squinnied for a sign
That this was still the town that had been ‘mine’
So long, but found I wasn’t even clear
Which side was which. From where those cycle-crates
Were standing, had we annually departed

For all those family hols? . . . A whistle went:
Things moved. I sat back, staring at my boots.
‘Was that,’ my friend smiled, ‘where you “have your roots”?’
No, only where my childhood was unspent,
I wanted to retort, just where I started:

By now I’ve got the whole place clearly charted.
Our garden, first: where I did not invent
Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,
And wasn’t spoken to by an old hat.
And here we have that splendid family

I never ran to when I got depressed,
The boys all biceps and the girls all chest,
Their comic Ford, their farm where I could be
‘Really myself’. I’ll show you, come to that,
The bracken where I never trembling sat,

Determined to go through with it; where she
Lay back, and ‘all became a burning mist’.
And, in those offices, my doggerel
Was not set up in blunt ten-point, nor read
By a distinguished cousin of the mayor,

Who didn’t call and tell my father There
Before us, had we the gift to see ahead –
‘You look as though you wished the place in Hell,’
My friend said, ‘judging from your face.’ ‘Oh well,
I suppose it’s not the place’s fault,’ I said.

‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.’

Also raised in Coventry (though not Tile Hill, as far as I’m aware) were Jerry Dammers and Terry Hall of The Specials.  Their song, ‘Ghost Town’, about the decline of the town during the recession of the early 1980s,  spent three weeks at number one in 1981 at the same time as the riots in Toxteth and Brixton.  The lyrics seem germane once again:

This town, is coming like a ghost town
All the clubs have been closed down
This place, is coming like a ghost town
Bands won’t play no more
too much fighting on the dance floor

Do you remember the good old days
Before the ghost town?
We danced and sang,
And the music played inna de boomtown

This town, is coming like a ghost town
Why must the youth fight against themselves?
Government leaving the youth on the shelf
This place, is coming like a ghost town
No job to be found in this country
Can’t go on no more
The people getting angry