Scenes from the Passion: The Other End

In George Shaw’s Scenes from the Passion series, the painter returned to his hometown of Coventry, and the Tile Hill housing estate he grew up on; in his resonant style, a kind of graphical photorealism, Shaw captured the local landmarks that structured his memory of his childhood and adolescence: pubs, street corners, stretches of terraced housing. In The Other End, from 1999, Shaw depicts the estate’s somewhat unloved football pitch with compositional poise: structured by three horizontal bands of colour – a pitch in subtly undulating greens, ochre buildings, and an infinitely grey English sky – Shaw’s painting is permeated by a stillness that seems to be at once the serenity of nostalgia and a melancholic sense of time’s passage and decay.

Empty of the human form, Shaw’s paintings are nevertheless animated by a profound desire to communicate, and their sense of place is filled by the presence of those unseen: ‘I used to say belligerently that I’d never painted a landscape in my life, in the same way that you never get landscape authors — even though Wuthering Heights is set in a landscape, it’s not a landscape novel, it’s about relationships and ancestry and love’ (G. Shaw, in ‘George Shaw: “It’s the dead I want to impress”’, Evening Standard, 20 May 2015, https://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/exhibitions/george-shaw-interview-it-s-the-dead-who-i-want-to-impress-10262760.html [accessed Mar 24, 2017]).