brudnopis

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/shaw-scenes-from-the-passion-late-t07945

Shaw grew up in Tile Hill, a post-war housing estate on the south side of Coventry, where his parents still live. He decided to be an artist while he was still at school, but became disillusioned during his BA in fine art at Sheffield Polytechnic (1986-9) and abandoned art for a few years. He returned to it in 1996, completing an MA at the Royal College of Art in London 1998. During this period, he made a trip back to his parents’ house and began photographing the landscape of his teenage years. These pictures became the starting point for the ongoing series of paintings titled Scenes from the Passion. The title is a reference to the biblical series of moments in the suffering and death of Christ, also known as the Stations of the Cross. Shaw’s use of the Christian story provides echoes of the melodrama and self-importance often characteristic of the adolescent, while undercutting them with the quiet, nostalgic and poetic mood of his pictures. He has explained:

I started to make these paintings out of a kind of mourning for the person I used to be: an enthusiastic, passionate teenager who read art books and novels and poems and biographies and watched films and TV and listened to music and dreamed. They are paintings of places that were familiar to me in my childhood and adolescence, places in which I found myself alone and thoughtful. They are places in which I forgot things. … I paint the paintings of all the times and all the thoughts I lack the language to describe. For the one single moment that I can recall, I feel a dull sadness for the thousands I have forgotten.

The Old Religons, 2017

Shelterbelt, Orido, Shimizu, Shizuoka, 2025