Ash Wednesday Mark Hallett introduces examples of the work of George Shaw, the subject of a forthcoming exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art.
Ash Wednesday: 8:00 am. A tree rises up out of a sun-dappled patch of scuffed grass, casting its shadows against the golden expanse of a gable-end wall. The painter’s brush dwells with loving detail on the wrinkles and fissures of the tree-trunk, and on the intricately interlaced pattern of the shadows that flicker across the wall’s surfaces. It is 8:00 am on a chilly but blueskied winter’s day, and the tree itself, its branches reaching up into the air, seems almost to be stretching out its arms with an early morning yawn. In the background, behind the hedge, light shines on the bedroom windows of some neighbouring houses, and onto their frosty roofs. The Midlands council estate of Tile Hill is waking up, just as it does every morning; but it is waking up, in this instance, to a different kind of day: Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, and an important moment in the Catholic religious calendar. This painting by the contemporary British artist George Shaw, is one of the highlights of the forthcoming exhibition of his work at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven and the Holburne Museum at Bath. The picture is one of a series of seven pictures entitled Ash Wednesday, painted by the artist over a twelve-month period between 2004 and 2005. Each work in this sequence depicts a scene in Tile Hill—the council estate on which
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Shaw had grown up—at a particular time of day, and at half-hour intervals: the first is set at 6:00 am, the last, at 9:00 am. The series was inspired in part by the temporal structure of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the actions of which famously take place over a single day. Following this model, Shaw went out early one February morning, and spent the whole day on a long, slow walk around Tile Hill and the nearby woods, taking hundreds of photographs. The day, though cold, was bright and sharp and Tile Hill looked uncommonly fine. The artist ended his walk confident that it would provide him with a good body of source material for his new, hour-by-hour, pictorial chronicle of the estate and its surroundings. Soon afterwards, he realised that the day he had chosen for his walk—25 February 2004—was actually Ash Wednesday that year, which he instantly recognised could provide his new project with a supplementary, and highly resonant, religious theme. Shaw, a lapsed Catholic, was fully aware that the day carried a powerful resonance, as one set aside by many Christians for fasting and repentance, and one marking the beginning of the forty-day period that saw Christ being cast into the desert, and that ended with his crucifixion and resurrection. But it was also a day that, for the artist, was
