Continuing the theme of approaches to landscape, in preparation for my forthcoming abstracted landscape photography solo show...
Recently have been enchanted with the thoughtful stillness of George Shaw's Coventry landscapes, peopleless and often read as melancholic because of the run-down nature of the postwar, post-energetic subject matter. The colours are made from a limited palette designed not for the landscape but for painting model airplanes, Humbrol enamels which imbue the surface of the canvas with the gloss of childhood memory, or the embalming of death. Shaw uses a soft touch and resists the urge to overpaint details with these hobbyist hues: the smallest branches of bare trees become a hazy halo consistent with brushwork elsewhere.
For me the most exciting thing about the paintings is the compositional balance so many of them exhibit: large squares balanced against small, each building becoming a network of squares dividing the canvas like the sections of a Mondrian. Often the foreshortened perspective of the ground, such as broken concrete slabs or a strip of paving, draws the eye in to the main part of the picture, where abandoned buildings crumble, or cookie-cutter suburban houses rest, all in a surprising luminous beauty enhanced by their mathematically precise geometrical structure that is the world of Shaw's paintings.
Seeing one in Cardiff at the National Museum Wales was a timely pleasure.
More info: Tateshots' George Shaw interview for the 2011 Turner Prize http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tateshots-turner-prize-2011-george-shaw
George Shaw's 'The End of Care' is displayed at 'Wales Visitation: Poetry, Romanticism and Myth in Art' at the National Museum Cardiff, until 7 September 2014, admission free. http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/whatson/?event_id=7012
Photos: George Shaw 'The End of Care', 2013 (installation view and details). Photos by Indigo Violet Larkin 2014.
Indigo Violet Larkin's exhibition 'land water darkness' opens at Gas Gallery / Oriel Nwy, Aberystwyth on 4 September. Private view 5 September 6-8 pm, sneak preview video screening as part of 'Stories by Gaslight' 3 September. Admission to gallery free; tickets for 'Stories by Gaslight' £5.
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