George Shaw

Paintings from his home town estate in Coventry:

"A postwar council estate on the edge of Coventry, with trees, grass and loads of woodland just beyond. The last built-up area before the countryside took over. I don't think it has ever left me, that sense of possibility and familiarity and possible danger lurking out there somewhere beyond. I haunted the place and now it haunts me."- George Shaw, in an interview with The Guardian in February 2011.

British painter George Shaw is recognized for his simple yet extremely realistic paintings of his hometown in Coventry. The scans shown above are all examples of his work. I originally began to look into Shaw's work after a seminar with my tutor and fellow students. After showing them the work I had produced so far, they instantly recognized the similarities between my own photographs and Shaw's paintings. When I researched Shaw, I was quite surprised at just how similar these works are, and even more so the concept behind them. Shaw makes paintings of his hometown of Coventry, and in particular the Tile Hill estate in which he grew up in the 1970s. It is interesting to me that this is exactly the same concept I have taken for the project I am working on this term, except instead of painting, I am making photographs. I like this work, perhaps because of it's similarities with my own ideas, and because of this, it means I can understand to a certain extent Shaw's intentions and feelings behind creating it. Although this is not a place I know, or will ever know, I somehow feel close to it through Shaw's paintings, it is almost as if I am recounting a memory. This memory may well be a memory of the place in which I grew up, as many if not all of Shaw's paintings of this place show a surprisingly similar estate to the one in which I also grew up. Previously, I have mentioned Barthes idea of the "punctum" as an image or part of an image that wounds you, and only you. This work is something that does this to me when I view it, it seems so personal to me and yet I cannot explain what the exact thing it is that affects me so much. It would be interesting to see how someone else views it from an outside perspective, would it still reignite a lost memory with somebody who did not grow up in an area similar to this?

I find all of these paintings interesting, not just because of their concept, but because they are so realistic. When I first came across them, I thought they were photographs, the amount of detail in them is incredible and the scenes depicted are something that is so simple, so normal in everyday life that it is almost as if Shaw has captured a glimpse of reality, a glimpse of the truth as photography is argued to portray. This is something I will continue to explore in my work, and particularly that this work has shown me just how effective an ordinary scene can become with the right amount of detail and use of composition.