Tuesday 6 July 2010

May I Start, May I Finish. Pochade painting of Parkway.















There are some lovely old buildings in Liverpool 8, churches, synagogues, mosques and former embassies. I think you could spend a year around here alone and never run out of things to paint. Found another painter who has painted the urban landscape in the past, George Shaw.

George Shaw paints the Tile Hill estate in Coventry where he was raised in the 1970s. He painted its houses, paths and garages, all with Humbrol enamel model paints – the same he used as a boy on his Airfix models.

'Shaw's previous work has seen him looking back over the scenes of his childhood and adolescence. In this new show we see him looking again at those familiar places as they pass into unfamiliarity. He suspects things are being taken from him and the work is gloomily shadowed by the anxiety of himself being taken; a pub vanishes overnight, a library is boarded up, garages are flattened.

His images a lot more detailed than I normally like but they are strangely familiar. I was raised in the seventies in Huyton so maybe I recognise in his work the disappearance of a mundane past.

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/blogon/art_news/george_shaw_at_wilkinson_gallery_london/5415

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