ith, family, passersby, they are all in there somewhere, embedded in the paintings³.”
It’s a landscape most are familiar with, evoking a remembered experience of what it is to be a working class teenager, waiting around. His works captures memories and moments from adolescent life.
He reinforces this feeling of nostalgia with his choice of paint, his favourite medium is Humbrol enamel paint, the very thought of which conjures up images of teens concentrating on getting that Airfix plane just so, sitting in their bedroom of a terraced house. Almost photographic in style, the enamel paint gives the paintings a unique flavour of a particular era yet raises it from a purely representational state, its old fashioned but somehow timeless at the same time. He elevates this bland suburban places into something more important, in the same way that Lorrain elevated beautiful landscapes from the background of historical genre paintings.
For the exhibition “George Shaw: My Back to Nature”, Shaw spent a lot of time in the National Gallery studying the old masters. He studied the clash of cultures, linking classical stories to the modern world and religion.
Painting his home town of Coventry he said, “the work came out of an abandonment of plans. It was not just about going back to a place physically, it was a return to a metaphorical place where I existed as a positive, passionate adolescent, unhampered by the history of my ideas or other people’s, a place where I did what I did because it grew from me – and didn’t question it. If you can’t find yourself in your own backyard, you’re not going to find yourself in the Serengeti, are you? So for me, it was taking those clichés of epiphany and the sublime and putting them in a place where great thoughts aren’t rumoured to happen³.”
His work is often described as sentimental, but are devoid of people, perhaps they are more nostalgic, although as he says “I don’t know why sentimentality has to be a negative quality. What I look for in art are the qualities I admire or don’t admire in human beings. And very rarely do I meet people who aren’t sentimental.” (4)
In his exhibition My Back to Nature, he painted a series of woodland landscapes, described as scenes of intense human drama. the moment has just passed, is about to happen or is happening now. Even though we don’t see any signs of people there, they have clearly been there, marks made on the ground, a page left behind, red paint dripping on a tree trunk. Shaw’s woods are like scenes from a movie, with the possibility hinted that maybe you are not alone, the feeling of anticipation that anything could happen.
The tree is humanised, cut down, lying on the ground, one end charred by matches as if tortured. His trees almost have faces.
Trained as a scupltor, Woodfine’s landscapes are imaginary worlds, evocative of familiar childhood memories and fantasies. Her drawings are monochromatic and very precise and carefully considered, lending an almost sinister atmosphere. Everything might appear to be magical and dreamy but there is a slight apprehension evoked by the lack of colour.
Drawings form the main body of work but, extending the miniature worlds she has also created 3D scenes housed in cases and glass domes. She considers drawing a form of scuplture, creating the illusion of three dimensions, worlds that exist on their own.
Even some of her pencil drawings look like miniature scenes, and slightly foreboding in mood, The Crypt, 2010, perhaps because of the subject matter.
Whilst creating realistic worlds, she has also created surreal, dreamlike ones, always depicted in moonlight, reinforcing that other-worldly feel, with a sense of threat.
In conclusion, landscape is a huge and diverse topic, which will take you on many winding pathways but all of them manage to convey a sense of place and time, which is pretty remarkable.
2. Winterson, Jeanetter, June 13, 2013, L.S. Lowry’s Rage Against the Machine, The Guardian, accessed 20th June 2017
3. O’Hagan, Sean, February 13th 2011, Sometimes I Look at My Work and its Conservatism Shocks Me, Th