Running joke
Shaw’s phallus-themed gag is far from a one-liner. Here, the landscape painter is the wag scrawling penises on the landscape – a tradition that surely goes back aeons.
Sylvan scene
What about those other old masters, though? Shaw’s 20th-century backwoods are a tatty double of the painted rural idylls where sylphs of yore romped.
The home county
Famously, Shaw almost exclusively paints the landscape of his youth – a Midlands residential suburb called Tile Hill – from memory, using humble DIY shop enamel. Be it garages or low-rise redbrick dwellings, those scenes are as distinctly British as it gets, but rarely celebrated.
A kind of magic
In his nature paintings, Shaw imbues the brambly copses – where his boyhood self would find discarded porn mags – with something bigger. With their suggestive stumps and nooks, his trees might have been worshipped by an ancient fertility cult. Partly, it suggests a satire on an Olde England fantasy enshrined in new age folklore. Yet, as old and new worlds collide, a hidden magic is revealed.
Included in George Shaw: My Back To Nature, National Gallery, WC2, to 30 Oct
