GEORGE SHAW PAINTINGS OF NOSTALGIA AND PATHOS
‘Has the world changed or have I changed?’
It can be odd going back to a place you’ve been away from. You know the street names, the shortcuts and yet feel like a stranger. Places that you hold in your memory pale somehow when you see them again, like hearing a song you once loved and not being sure why you loved it. I don’t know if this is a good way to introduce the work of George Shaw. His paintings of the council estate in Coventry where he grew up are soaked in a feeling of nostalgia and pathos that draws you back to those days of trudging to school, when dog shit was white and there seemed to be tiny red spiders on every wall you sat on.
Anyone who’s spent time kicking a ball against a wall or stumbled across a copy of Razzle while out playing will feel instantly connected to George’s work. The paintings are quite universal in their appeal and yet they have a quality that anyone who grew up in the Midlands will recognize straight away. I interviewed George live by telephone from his studio in Nottingham.
George Shaw: I’m meant to be in Coventry today helping my mom and dad decorate but I can’t be bothered, I’ve got my own painting to get on with.
You use enamel paints to make your paintings. My dad wanted to know if you use Humbrol or Airfix paint, he gets excited about those kinds of choices
Oh yeah, it’s definitely Humbrol. It’s funny; it’s such an evocative word. Quite often when it’s credited as a medium people will write Humbrol enamel in a way in which they wouldn’t write Windsor and Newton oil. It’s quite horrible stuff to use. There’s no real logic to it. Sometimes it’s too thick to use and sometimes it’s like water. As a medium to try and make a tree out of it’s quite preposterous really. But I seem to have worked out a technique over the years that I’m reasonably chuffed with. I originally chose it as a medium because it had no artistic associations; it was about amateur hobbyists, blokes sitting in a shed. Humbrol’s a nice word. It has a nice ring to it. It sounds a bit like humble.
When did you start making images of Coventry?
I started the enamel paintings in 1996 but I’ve been taking photographs ever since I could use a camera really so that’s where it all came from. The paintings are all places where I originally started to think about art; places that I could use as a way of thinking.
The places you paint seem very familiar…
Yeah, it’s that sort of time when, as a kid, all the other kids have run off and you’re left on your own. The sense of a solitary contemplation is very important. I want the paintings to be quite lonely, like those moments when you’re off from school. The solitude of those scenes is important. How you perceive things, particularly as a child, is often on your own, even when you’re in a group. It’s that solitude that actually stays with you. The first time you start thinking about the bigger things in life, whether that be death, life, God or whatever, it happens in the strangest of places: at the foot of a slide or hiding behind a tree, when everyone’s run off or you’ve just been bullied.
Do you have a favourite band?
It’s a good job I don’t have a pint in my hand otherwise we’d be here all day and all evening. I suppose the Smiths would have to be the most influential. They came at a time when I was starting to think quite seriously about music. When you hear them the whole thing feels like ‘ have you been looking over my shoulder and reading my diary?’ They’re making songs out of something you didn’t even think you could make a life out of.
Did they make you want to start a band?
No, God no, because that would have meant actually talking to some other human beings which filled me with great trepidation. I would have been mortified if someone suggested I be in a band. What would I have done? I didn’t drink when I was in Coventry. I took on the enigmatic position of not drinking. I thought it would make me more interesting but it just made me sober and presumably uninteresting.
Having grown up in Coventry have you encountered many people who claim to have been in The Specials?
Yeah, I have encountered that, people who claim to have been to various gigs which they couldn’t possibly have because they’d only have been four. But the Two Tone thing is something that the people of Coventry have clasped onto like a life buoy. I’m quite proud that it coincided with the time I became interested in music. My art teacher at school knew The Specials, which proved to be underwhelming. You should never meet your heroes because they have a tendency to fart. But I’m quite a realist so I like all that stuff.
Do you feel quite rooted in a British cultural tradition?
I suppose I do. The physical act of travelling is not something I find that interesting. I’m having enough difficulty dealing with the things that are happening right now in front of my face in a town which looks pretty similar to the town I was brought up in without complicating things by going half way across the world. But I don’t sit in front of a three bar fire with the net curtains pulled in a Midlands town reading Philip Larkin.
I’d like to say thanks to George Shaw for being so free and open in talking about his work, and to finish this piece with one of my own personal favourite Smiths lyrics: ‘I lost my bag in Newport Pagnell’.
Originally appeared in Fused Magazine issue 16
