SCENES FROM THE PASSION: THE BLOSSOMIEST BLOSSOM

© The Artist. Courtesy Wilkinson Gallery, London

SCENES FROM THE PASSION: THE BLOSSOMIEST BLOSSOM 2001

George Shaw (1966 – )

Details

Dimension
43 X 53 CM
Media
HUMBROL ENAMEL ON BOARD
Accession number
P7370

Summary

This painting comes from an on-going series subtitled Scenes of the Passion that record the places, rather than specific incidents, in Shaw’s growing-up. Although they have the look of photo-realism, they have been altered through rigorous act of recall that renders them altogether different. The title of the series refers to the Stations of the Cross, and in a most literal way, the locations around the Tile Hill estate that he paints, are sites of Shaw’s becoming himself, of separating himself from a place that he can neither leave not stay in. But the real subject of Shaw’s paintings is the weight of memory. Working meticulously in model-makers enamel, Shaw paints from his snapshots of the places of his childhood on a council estate near Coventry in the post-industrial Midlands. Always empty of people, Shaw’s minutely detailed landscapes trace the artist’s determination to reconstruct not just the look, but the emotional charge of his memories. A far cry from a British landscape tradition in painting, this work does not glorify a rural idyll; instead it draws the viewer into the unremarkable, melancholy spaces between suburb and countryside – a geography familiar to adolescents wandering around the margins of their neighbourhood.

Micro/Macro, British Council and Mücsarnok, London and Budapest 2003