At the Foot of Tile Hill
What makes a place ‘home’? How does home make us? What happens to home when we leave it? These are questions George Shaw’s autobiographical landscape paintings seek to answer in The Yale Center for British Art’s (YCBA) exhibit George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field, on view through December 30. The exhibit was organized collaboratively between Mark Hallet and Alexandra Burston at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and Matthew Hargraves of the YCBA. Displaying nearly seventy paintings and over sixty drawings across the building’s entire third floor, A Corner of a Foreign Field spans three decades of Shaw’s life and career.
The exhibit opens with 1996’s “№57,” the first painting Shaw made of his childhood home as a postgraduate student at London’s Royal Academy of Art, and finishes with 2018’s “Mum’s,” a meticulously and brightly detailed return to that same subject. These paintings frame the artist’s obsession with the landscape in which he grew up, the postwar public development Tile Hill, a suburb of Coventry in central England.
A Corner of a Foreign Field surveys Shaw’s career of autobiographical landscape paintings and drawings, tracing the artist’s emotions of loss as his childhood home falls into disrepair before him. The exhibition includes several series in Shaw’s career, primarily landscape narratives which investigate theme of his life and upbringing, including Catholicism, pornography, fine art, decay, and loss. Several of Shaw’s series are temporal, depicting the same locations at different times of day or at different years, leading us through different stages of light and decay to show how locations evolve. Other works comment on the classical painting tradition, their compositions evoking sixteenth century Italian masters and nineteenth century English naturalists. In “No Returns” (2009), Shaw recalls the figuratively pointed skies of classical landscape painters such as Constable and Turner in the flat grey sky above the fence surrounding Tile Hill’s permanently-closed public library. Here, Shaw’s grey sky seems to mourn for his childhood.
Shaw’s paintings focus on the surfaces of buildings and trees with a striking realism, finished in a glossy shine which enhances the artist’s sense of light and shadow, at times appearing wet, as if the artist only just stepped away from his canvas. This glossy finish is not a glaze but instead the result of the artist’s preferred medium, Humbrol paint, a British-made craft paint. In a documentary short film by Lily Ford screened within the exhibition, A Humbrol Art (also available online from the YCBA along with three other short films produced for the exhibition), Shaw reveals his method, tirelessly working the ordinary craft paint — which he says was never intended to create “a masterpiece” — into, in effect, his masterpieces. The humble medium of Humbrol paint is perfectly suited to Shaw’s landscapes of a seemingly unremarkable English town. Shaw’s work depicts a town without an art store in which to buy oil paints, without a museum or gallery in which to learn about fine art, but with a population of people who leave their marks on the changing landscape of their home.
In Graffiti and Abstraction Series, a collection of paintings beginning in 2005, Shaw examines the marks left by locals of Tile Hill on the landscape. In this series, Shaw catalogues graffiti art in Tile Hill, working from photographs to reproduce the images. He explores this relationship between working class communities and fine arts, commenting on the exclusion of these communities from the limited definition of so-called “masterful works.” “Undergrowth” (2008) frames a brick wall and metal door, chipped paint and scratch-like graffiti creating a landscape on the industrial scene. Here, the artist explores the possibilities of abstraction and meta-painting, where the art is not just the realistic landscape painting before us, but the collected marks on the wall.
George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field ultimately comments on the shifting landscape of our world, focusing on Tile Hill as a microcosm of greater trends of simultaneous public disrepair and rising nationalism. The final room of the exhibition covers a series called Paintings of Now in which Shaw grapples with what is left of his childhood home. At its end, the exhibition comes full circle, with Shaw painting a complete portrait of Tile Hill, its forests, homes, closed libraries, and graffiti-covered walls. While critical of Tile Hill, Shaw’s work is never dismissive or resentful. Instead it defends the value of a seemingly unremarkable town and thus, the remarkable man who grew up there.
