These are the words and pictures we are left with as the hours withdraw, the sediment and scum left once gentleness fades.
- George Shaw
This is my book of the decade, and probably the one I’ve been waiting for my whole adult life. It’s just a shame that I needed confirmation that I was right all along, and that it should come so late in life. Published four years ago to coincide with a gallery showing of his work in Dundee, George Shaw’s What I Did Last Summer is like an x-ray of my core brain once the years of poisonous influences from comics, television and American films have been scoured away. Everything that I’m obssessed with, everything that shapes my prejudices and perceptions is given form within the pages of this book.
I’ve discussed his artwork before, and there’s plenty of solid examples featured therein, but what’s just as interesting for me are images taken from his life, his studio and screen-shots of films and television programmes – Scum, The Likely Lads – that have left a significant mark on him. As I glance along his bookshelf I see several titles – Prick Up Your Ears; Beyond Belief; Somebody’s Husband, Sombody’s Son; Mist Over Pendle – that sit right behind me on my own shelf as I type these words. Images of Tony Hancock and Frankenstein are propped alongside a traditional saucy seaside postcard. There is a power here, garnered from the accumulation of detail and the resonance of memory.
A pinboard of images featuring everyone from the childcatcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to Elsie Tanner and Sam Fox says more about our country than any amount of words that This Septic Isle’s most “cherished” authors could ever hope to vomit up. You sense how important all this is to George Shaw, how they serve of talisman’s reaffirming his understanding of the world which, from some of his own writings, remains an ongoing process.
What’s that line from the film Magnolia? “We may be done with the past, but is the past done with us?” This question seems entirely applicable to George Shaw’s entire reason for creating. Partly it’s an act of rememberance for a period in his life that he admirably refuses to turn away from, but it’s also a refusal to accept the meaningless monoculture that seeps into our consciousness, but can never quite overcome the simple but glorious reality of walking down a street in late afternoon winter sunlight and watching fallen leaves skitter around the foot of the wheelie-bins.
When any artist creates a significant body of work, it’s always useful to understand what forces shaped their creation. That way, I find the connection is strengthened and the understanding more profound. It’s useless trying to define exactly what George Shaw is communicatiing in his work, because you either get it or you don’t. If, like me, you think he’s the most important British artist since Francis Bacon then I suggest you move mountains to obtain this book.
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