A brush with... George Shaw

About this episode

George Shaw talks to Ben Luke about his influences—from writers to musicians, and, of course, other artists—and the cultural experiences that have shaped his life and work. Shaw, who was born in 1966 in Coventry, UK, makes paintings and drawings that are a response to a particular place but also a deeply personal engagement with memory. Although his paintings depict identifiable locations within Tile Hill, the postwar housing estate on which he grew up in the suburbs of Coventry in England’s Midlands region—from the houses and garages on the estate, to playing fields, community centres, pubs and shops and the woods beyond—they are steeped in recollection, potent with signs of human presence, including Shaw’s, but barely ever occupied by people, and even then only by the artist. As a result, these paintings have a curious relationship with time, a factor only enhanced by his use of his own photographs as the source image for his compositions. Tile Hill is the setting in which his identity was formed as a young person, in which he became himself, and the hundreds of paintings he has made of it since follow its changing face, moments of aging, destruction, dereliction and renewal. Ove