“I came to the Holburne with the aim of growing its contemporary programme and the George Shaw retrospective – for which we are the only UK venue – seemed the perfect fit, as he is a modern painter who has a deep engagement with artistic tradition.

Ever since he was a student at the Royal College of Art, London, he has produced pictures of Tile Hill, the estate in a suburb of Coventry where he grew up and where his mother still lives.
Each picture is a celebration of the ordinary, with layers of autobiographical detail, the most mundane subject elevated to the status of fine art. Over those 23 years, his relationship with the place has obviously changed. He has left it behind personally and socially, but there remains a deep fondness for the utopian ideals underpinning the construction of those postwar estates even though successive pictures document Tile Hill’s decay.
This was the wonderful setting of an idyllic childhood, since declined as a result of political change. I didn’t notice the absence of people in Shaw’s work until someone pointed it out. But there are traces of humanity; there’s a sense that something may have just happened, as Shaw depicts detritus of all kinds, such as pages from porn magazines in the undergrowth.

Shaw uses enamel paints, the kind favoured by DIY enthusiasts and model-makers. Once again, he takes a non-fine-art material and turns it into fine art. He works meticulously, building up detail with the paint providing a glow that gives a jewel-like appearance to a down-at-heel subject.
The sky in this picture is flat and the rising sun appears through what looks like an urban smog before bursting through the municipal railings. There is a naturalness that invokes the style of the 19th-century landscape painter  JMW Turner.
The setting is Shaw’s old school, but seen through his now middle-aged gaze, finding beauty in the mundane and the everyday.
There are, however, some subtle literary and cultural references buried in this landscape. This seemingly prosaic view of the pavement with its no-parking zig-zags has religious associations. Shaw grew up as a Roman Catholic, and there’s a tower in the distance that could be a church and the spidery tree looks to be in anticipation of the crucifixion.
The title of the painting also refers to Shaw’s attempts to mirror the writer James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses, in that he was also aiming to capture the events of a single day.  
Indeed, Shaw originally intended to produce a painting to record each half hour of the single, significant day, the beginning of Lent, but apparently he’d had enough by 9am.”
 
Interview by John Holt. George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field is at the Holburne Museum, Bath, until 6 May
 
Chris Stephens is the director of the Holburne Museum in Bath