LINKS
George Shaw is, and always has been, represented by Anthony Wilkinson and the Wilkinson Gallery.
As I write in the spring of 2013, George is painting in his studio, working towards a solo show at Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin, 15 November 2013 - 15 January, 2014. He also has a fifth solo show coming up at Wilkinson Gallery in 2014.
George Shaw’s Tile Hill is twinned with Paul Noble’s Nobson Newtown, at least in my world. Noble and Shaw have much in common. They were born in the mid-60s and are just as turned on by literature and music as by visual art. Both abandoned the abstract/modernist styles they developed at art school, in favour of a realism that they felt stood more chance of communicating to a wider audience. Both add a unique twist (Nobson font and Humbrol paint, respectively) to the conventional media they employ, drawing and painting. Both depict ostensibly empty but actually much lived-in streets and buildings. And both have been pursuing their vision since the mid-90s, not long after which I first caught sight of (and wrote features about) the multi-layered work they were/are doing.
Paul Noble, Nobslum, 1996, pencil on paper, 150x170cm. George Shaw. No. 57, 1996. Enamel on board, 43x53cm
Actually, that could be better put by simply quoting the invite to George Shaw and John Strutton’s ‘The Land of Nod’:
’Born in 1966 these highly strung fools returned to Ithaca burdened with one sexual disease and not a foreskin between them, an etch-a-sketch, a postcard of the mappa mundi, the complete works of Norman O Brown, Richard Allen and the Marshall Cavendish Encyclopaedia of the Great Artists.’
Information on my various writing projects can be found at: www.duncanmclaren.co.uk But I’ll point out here that the main section of www.enidblyton.me.uk is an exploration of a utopia. I took leave of Enid’s fictional Peterswood - where Fatty and the Find-Outers live - so that I could immerse myself in Nobson Newtown for a week or two. That went on for a solid month and I left there only to get trapped in a virtual Tile Hill for two months. Not sure if I’ll be able to find my way back to Enid again that easily. Especially as I choose to go via my partner’s MFA experience: www.strangebundle.co.uk