George Shaw (He really should have won…)

We didn’t watch the Turner Prize on TV last night, I couldn’t bring myself to listen to the swooning over and post rationalising to some supposed state of importance of the usual piles of risibly thin and weak kaka presented as this years Emperors New Clothes…

With one notable exception that is…

I’ve been meaning to write about George Shaw, a Midlands lad like myself, for a while now.

Shaw is a painter, a painter of seemingly everyday and mundane landscapes that, from what I can gather, are never very far way from his place of birth, Tile Hill in Coventry. I use the word seemingly, as upon closer inspection, Shaw’s pictures are neither mundane, nor everyday, offering as they do a rich and sometimes unsettling take on suburban life, raising issues amongst other things of decay, exclusion and alienation.

Working mainly from photographs in his studio, Shaw’s chosen media is Humbrol paint, those small tins of enamel that 40 somethings like me are instantly familiar with from a hundred Airfix kits put together on rainy day’s in the 70′s. I’m not totally sure why he chose Humbrol, but there’s no doubt that they give the finished surface of the works a hard, almost lacquered quality unusual for landscape paintings. They also allow him to use fine brushes which give the works an amazing level of detail. In fact some of his works are so “lifelike” that it’s not easy to be 100% sure the reproductions on line are not actually photos.

A recurring theme within Shaw’s paintings, is the inclusion, usually across the centre of the picture, of a physical barrier: railings, Heras fencing, hedges, walls, and in many of the works, this barrier is so total, it almost completely masks whatever is beyond, allowing us to either imagine it ourselves, or accept it simply as a record of what the artist saw. Either way, there is a strange feeling that more’s going on than at first glance; someone’s just left the frame perhaps, or is hiding, waiting until the watcher has gone to carry on some unspecified business… In fact it’s interesting that Shaw never seems to include people within his work, an act which certainly heightens the sense of dislocation of these very human habitats…

When we go home to see my M&D over Xmas, we’ll definitely be making the short trip over to Coventry, as the list of things to see is growing: Bill Mitchells’ mural at the Three Tuns Pub, Spence’s Cathedral (again, I can never get enough), the Donald Gibson 1940′s town centre redevelopment and the Belgrade Theatre (to take photos for  future posts) and now a trip to the recently refurbished Herbert Art Gallery to see the current exhibition of George Shaw’s wonderful paintings…

Lucien Freud

Possibly the greatest British portrait painter died last week, 20th July aged 88.

Despite his worldwide fame and the astonishing value of his work (in 2008 his life size work “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping”, sold at auction for £17.2m setting a new record for a work by a living artist) Freud was a reclusive and withdrawn man, and I thought it very telling that in the various TV news articles reporting his death, there was hardly any actual footage of him, just some stills and the usual platitudes from a collection of talking heads.

Freud’s mature style is immediately recognisable; heavy swathes of layered paint and a strong use and understanding of shadows, depict with an apparently uncanny ability, the very essence of his sitter.

Freud was renown for making his sitters (almost always people he knew) sit for extraordinary periods of time. I have come across this story which suggests that Freud and his female model spent a staggering 16 months producing the painting below. Between April 2006 and August 2007, they met seven nights a week for about five hours each night, taking only four evenings off throughout this whole period. This represents a total of about 2400 hours work, which quite frankly is crazy… who on earth has got that much time to lie naked on a couch…

Never one to shy away from painting exactly how he saw his model, the portrait of the Queen is a typical case in point, and although time and familiarity have softened its effect to some degree, it is still a very striking and original work, and one that was not particularly appreciated by Her Majesty (I wonder how long she sat patiently for Mr. Freud.. I can’t imagine it was as long as he would have liked…)

Quite rightly regarded as one of the greatest British Artists of all time, he was also one of the last of the great figurative painters, someone for whom craft and effort were always more important than financial reward and fame.

Chuck Close

I came across the work of Chuck Close recently, whilst watching an extraordinary TV programme about Oliver Sacks and face blindness. Chuck Close (who paradoxically for a portrait artist also suffers from face blindness) is an American who made his name in the late 60′s, early 70′s painting huge hyper-realistic portraits, that are so unbelievably lifelike, that the image I’ve used here on the left (Big Self Portrait from 1969) simply looks like a photo, when in reality it’s a canvas about 1.5x 2m, with every hair, smoke curl and skin mark painted with a brush…

Despite suffering a collapsed spinal artery in 1988 that left him paralysed and wheelchair bound (what he now refers to as “The Event”) he has continued to paint. His condition has meant that, unable to paint in the very detailed styles that made his name, he has had to adapt, and has developed a very beautiful and unique approach to portraiture.

Photographs of his subject are divided by his assistants into a diagonal grid, which Close then translates, square by square, with a paint brush tied to his hand, into truly stunning images. His use of block colour and shapes, in small controlled areas, maximises his limited physical ability and has undoubtably allowed a genuinely remarkable gift to develop.

His work, always on a large scale, is produced and exhibited through a variety of mediums including his brush painted canvases, fingerprint painted canvases, daguerroetype and photogravure photographs and tapestries.

What I think shines through, especially in his more recent self portraits is the sparkle in his eye, the feeling that despite his unimaginably difficult condition, he his a man at peace with himself and absolutely at the top of his game…

Quite by coincidence, Wikipedia tells me that it’s his 71st birthday in three days time, so Happy Birthday Chuck, I think you are one amazing human being…