It’s grim up north they say, but George Shaw’s paintings prove that it’s not much better anywhere else in this country. This group of six small enamel paintings – and a handful of watercolours of flowers – see Shaw returning to his childhood estate in Coventry to continue documenting its long, slow decline into dereliction.
It’s a decline you can take as a metaphor for the rest of England, not just the industrial midlands. One painting shows a shuttered garage, another depicts a rusted shipping container; the plants all around are either overgrown or dying, a fridge has been left abandoned, render is crumbling off the grim, minimal houses as Union Jacks and St George’s crosses flutter in the wind.
There are no people here, only the places they’ve been left to rot in.
But there is light, there is colour: a painting of a rose bush seen through a UPVC window, watercolours of flowers grown from cuttings. They are slices of hope in the darkness.
But that hope still feels pretty pointless. This small show is full of allusions to William Blake and the histories and legends of England, but this is a portrait of a nation constantly treading water, kicking against the sinking, the decline. These paintings are depictions of how we strive, we do our best, but we inevitably all give up.
They are such beautiful, stunningly done paintings. Intricate, precise and obsessively dedicated to capturing every detail of this nation’s crumbling decrepitude.
