By Brian McDaid
WE are sitting in the reception area of the Station House Hotel in Letterkenny on a Saturday night.
One of its residents here for the weekend has taken time out from a family function to have a chat about his connections with the town. It has been eight years since he was last here.
Back then he made the journey with his late mother Elizabeth, also known as Eilis, who was originally from Letterkenny. She was one of the Keys family from Sentry hill.
Johnny Keys and his nephew George Shaw and Eileen and Liam Doherty back row include George Logue, John Keys, with Tony and Teresa Gorman.
Eilis passed away six years ago so his journey back to her home this time has been tinged with a bit of sadness. The weekend family function, a 25th wedding anniversary of his cousin Louise and her husband Stefan lifted his heart and he was bemused that he was continually recognised and mistaken for someone else that lives in Letterkenny, which meant that he felt very at home in his mother’s hometown.
George Shaw talks about his mother leaving Letterkenny in the late 1950s and heading to Germany, before moving to London where she met her future husband, also called George. The couple moved to Los Angeles for a few years before returning to settle in Coventry, England.
The couple had four children and reared them in a council house in Tile Hill. Even though they didn’t have much money, they were very focused on the education of their children.
They knew from an early age that George was very much into his art so they sent him to college to study the subject closest to his heart.
After graduating, he worked in a few different art-related jobs before focusing on a journey of painting the places around his home in Coventry where he grew up.
It was a focus on very ordinary subjects, images of his home on the council estate where he lived, the places around his home where he played football on rough ground, places where he smoked his first cigarette, where he first kissed a girl, where he had his first drink.
He painted images of the simplest subjects in his home, like the view looking down the stairs, a view the family members would have seen a hundred times a day.
He painted the view of the corner of a sitting room of his home where their telly once stood. If you had an aerial and a telly that was your internet, that’s where you learned everything about the outside world. When his father George and mother Eilis passed away, their council house became home to a new family. And they looked into the same corner of the same living room.
George’s parents had a few of his paintings in their home. His dad would joke that the paintings of the house hanging on the wall were more valuable than the house itself.
Johnny Keys and his nephew George Shaw, along with Eileen and Liam Doherty. On the back row are George Logue, John Keys, with Tony and Teresa Gorman.
A piece out of the Guardian Newspaper in 2011 gives us a feel of this artist’s rise to fame and his nomination for the coveted Turner Prize:
‘Shaw’s world of small miseries looms large’
‘In the compact surrounds of Gateshead’s Baltic gallery, George Shaw’s miserabilist suburban brand of metaphysical painting marks him out as a strong contender for the 2011 Turner prize.
‘His paintings depict places you want to escape from. You can take Shaw out of Tile Hill, Coventry, but you can’t take the post-war housing estates out of Shaw.
‘This is his perennial subject, with its abandoned 1950s follies, the Barratt homes and 60s semis, the scruffy woodlands and graffitied shop-fronts. Where Constable might paint a distant farmboy in a red shirt, to counterpoint all the bosky greenery, Shaw gives us a red-painted dogshit bin.
‘Shaw is popular because he speaks about his corner of England – though it could be anywhere – with a kind of melancholic truth. Shaw’s art chimes in with an England of Tony Hancock and Philip Larkin, Orwell and Morrissey’s Every Day is Like Sunday.
‘Shaw’s is a miserabilist suburban sort of metaphysical painting. The paint itself has a nothingy, curdled quality, like the place and the weather it depicts. It’s all atmosphere, or the lack of one. And his art is always the same, everything just getting slowly worse and unloved and a little more embittered, just like England itself.’
Sitting in Letterkenny on Saturday evening George tells the story of convincing his mother who was getting on in years to make the journey to Geneva where his work was on exhibition.
His mother made the journey, settled herself and headed to the exhibition. She took a look at the work on show and said: “I left my home in Coventry and made this long journey to Geneva in Switzerland and now I’m standing here in this great gallery looking at a painting of my own front door back in Coventry”.
George loves that unique Donegal humour of the generations in which his mother grew up.
That humour that his mother had was one of the few things that he still recognised when he was back in Donegal this week.
The town itself, he feels, has completely changed. Landmarks like his aunt Monica Murphy’s petrol pumps and bed and breakfast on the Port Road are gone.
As a boy on his holidays he climbed the old rocks beside Sentry Hill where his mother’s home once stood in the Cathedral car park. That spot is now overgrown.
Louise Lamotte with some of her best friends from Letterkenny, Tara Gildea and Bridgeen Kelly.
He went for a coffee to the Quiet Moment, a place he went when he was last back in Donegal with his mother.
He walked up to the cathedral and lit a candle.
He crossed over to Sentry Hill and went on up to St Eunan’s College, places that his mother always talked about. He walked up Glencar to visit his cousin Anthony Gorman. He walked up to the home of his uncle Johnny Keys in Lismonaghan and looked back into Letterkenny. It was where his grandfather would have farmed the land.
Slowly that internal map of familiar places started to come back.
George and his wife Catherine were guests at the wedding anniversary celebrations. His cousin Louise and her husband Stefan now live in France and a large connection from their home town of Biarritz joined them in Letterkenny for the weekend.
If the Guardian linked the artist George Shaw with household names like Constable, LS Lowery and Morrissey, the Donegal News can only report that over the weekend George Shaw was like someone who lived in Letterkenny all his life and was out for a drink on a Saturday night with fellow town folk.
A full circle journey that his late Letterkenny born mother Eilis would have been so proud of.
