Looking at the nominations for the Turner prize this year, George Shaw is the artist that stands out for me, perhaps because his work is so strangely quiet and small. It also feels very human.
In an interview, he comments about when he was in art school how other students described a painting of his house as sentimental, as if it was an inferior emotion or concept for contemporary art. But, we are sentimental and nostalgic. I become attached to places and objects because they hold a memory or are symbolic of a time or place to me. I also make connections between a place and the narrative of my life. In many ways these paintings are are much more like self-portraits than the realistic representations they first appear to be.
Shaw's paintings should be dull, but I find them fascinating and evocative of a particular emotion that I can't quite describe. I think it's a combination of frustration, nostalgia, sadness and boredom.
I probably connect to them so much because they almost perfectly depict the atmosphere of some of the areas I live in. Some paintings even look identical to places I walk past every day. I suppose it makes me interpret them with the feeling of being trapped in a non-descript, provincial town and the sometimes suffocating nostalgia of having lived within it all of my life.
Art can be most affecting when representing a common feeling. It's the same reason I like some of Tracy Emin's work, like her wall hangings. They are unapologetically emotional and sentimental, but I can connect to them because of a feeling or thought I have shared with her. Shaw's paintings also present this. They also prove that small, subdued and banal can have an unexpected, complex emotional power.
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