George Shaw

I don’t often write about art, partly because I’m totally absent any knowledge of the technical side of painting or photography, and have only a very rudimentary knowledge of art history. So the potential for making either a stonking great howler, or a waffling baffling cloud of guff, is huge. At the same time (perhaps because of that lack of knowledge), I’ve always found at a base level, writing about a visual art (or music) a very difficult thing to do simply in the sense that it is like undertaking complex algebraic equations or speaking fluently a language I’ve never studied. How do you describe a picture, or a sound, in words?

A few weeks ago I went to see two exhibitions of works by George Shaw at the BALTIC, and the images in the larger show have lingered with me in the weeks since I saw them.

It happened that I had not heard of Shaw until days before the exhibitions concluded, and thus I found myself going to see the show on the final afternoon of its final day. This was a Sunday, and an exceptionally Sunday Sunday at that: the entire day was overcast skies and endless drizzle. (But then Newcastle never feels quite right in blazing sun). In retrospect, there seems something fitting about the weather, particularly as the smaller of the exhibitions was “Payne’s Grey”, a series of watercolours, painted in the Payne’s grey of the title. Payne’s grey is, for Shaw, the colour of wet pavement; “the colour of rain.”

The larger of the shows, “The Sly and Unseen Day”, shared much of the same subject matter of Payne’s Grey. It comprised a collection of around fifty paintings Shaw has produced, since 1996, of his childhood estate in Coventry. Shaw based the paintings upon thousands of photographs he has taken over the years on wanderings round the estate’s streets. Indeed, up on the walls of the BALTIC, Shaw’s pictures could have passed for photographs, the gloss of the paint adding a photographic sheen to the detail of the images. The paint used was Humbrol enamel, which the catalogue informs me is more used for the painting of model planes and trains, and unlike the monochrome images of Payne’s Grey, the images of The Sly and Unseen Day included vibrant greens, reds, blues and orange. The pictures were – are - beautiful.

Paintings of his childhood estate, but then paintings of what, precisely? Sean O’Hagan, in an interview with George Shaw published in the Observer, called it Shawland: “that neglected suburban hinterland where nothing – and everything – happens daily.” Which is true - the estate is one of post-war terraces, 1960s new builds, parks, garage lots, and suburban forests. But specifically, the features depicted could be found anywhere: they are the things that we see while we are looking for something else, the mundane furniture of modern life: a bus stop, the shuttered windows and doors of a derelict youth club, daubed in graffiti that is neither visual visually appealing, nor witty enough (nor poignant enough) to capture our attention; brick walls, broken goalposts, railings, fences.

One of the things that had attracted me to the show was a reference to Philip Larkin in the Observer interview. (Larkin is cited more than once in the accompanying catalogue, along with Tony Hancock, Morrissey, and The Likely Lads – how’s that for a supergroup?) Like Shaw, Larkin is a child of Coventry and, indeed, that Observer interview began (a natural starting point, perhaps) by quoting I Remember, I Remember, a poem in which Larkin reminiscences of a childhood in Coventry not so much misspent as unspent. The poem concludes that his uneventful childhood is perhaps not so much “the place’s fault”, for, alas: “Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”

Alan Bennett once claimed that the paintings of Edward Hopper could often pass as illustrations for Larkin’s poems. (Conversely, whenever I read a poem such as Reasons for Attendance, I think of Hopper.) The same could be said for some of the paintings that were on show here, particularly in respect of those Larkin poems where he beautifully, precisely, transformatively, captures (practically dissecting) a moment or a sight so mundane that it might normally pass by ignored: the sun’s light on a frosty afternoon in late February; the “tense, musty, unignorable silence” of an empty Church; the deathly significance of the sight and siren of an ambulance on a suburban street. Or even, perhaps most simply of all, pigeons, on “shallow slates”, “shifting together/ Backing a thin rain from the west/ Blown across each sunk head and settled feather./ … black as their shadows, sleeping so.”

A few years ago, perhaps spurred on by that Bennett claim, I found myself looking at Hopper’s paintings quite a fair bit. One thing I found (and the thing I loved) is that after a while, when I finally looked up from the image on the page or the screen, I realised that he’d started to frame my world: I was now looking at a series of real-life Hopper images. Geoff Dyer talks about this in his extended essay on photography, The Ongoing Moment. “To see his pictures is to begin to inhabit them,” he writes. “You see them everywhere even when you are not looking at them.”

There is something akin to that with Shaw. Stepping outside the gallery on that drizzling Sunday it’s as though my eyes had been more calibrated to noticing the mundane furniture that makes up the vast majority of our environment, and I’ve appreciated seeing it. This has continued to be the case in the weeks since. It’s like a veneer has been stripped away. After The Sly and Unseen Day, the sly and unseen day no longer.