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Shaw has wanted to paint since he was a boy. 'Of course, I was totally convinced I was a genius at a very early age. I couldn't decide whether I wanted to be Jimmy from Quadrophenia or John Everett Millais ... or Francis Bacon ... the list was endless and I couldn't decide which messiah to follow. All I could really do was draw quite well.'
It was a start. Working conscientiously at drawing, Shaw read James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and D H Lawrence on the burning ambition of the young artist. He took the train to London and tried to visit Francis Bacon for an artist-to-artist chat. 'I banged on the door really loudly and demanded an audience, like with the Pope. A window slid open and a little head popped out, and looked at me, and told me to fuck off.' So Shaw went back to Tile Hill and counted the weeks till he could go to college.
But art school was a sad disappointment. 'They asked you to draw with a great big piece of charcoal, or draw with your eyes closed ... it was like learning the violin up to Grade 8 and turning up at the Royal College of Music and being asked to bang on a biscuit-tin for the next three years.' He flirted with video art, but after graduating he realised he had no passion for 'making arty statements with no narrative'. Dishearteningly, he could no longer work out what he did want to make.
Shaw spent his 20s in creative limbo, working as a teacher. But a powerful frustration was building up inside him. 'By the time I was 30,' he says, 'I felt that if I didn't start making things again, I would destroy things.' Shaw therefore went home to Tile Hill and started making drawings and paintings of the places around him while he waited for a 'big idea'. None came. So instead, he carried on painting scenes from his childhood – but with an intensity. And he discovered what he could do with Humbrol enamels. Their colours and smell evoked his childhood. Their glossy surface acted like a mirror, reflecting glimpses of the present back from the past.
Shaw realised that he had found his subject. 'Those places ... trees and houses and things I was living with as a kid, they were mute witnesses to my early sentiments.' Working from photographs (he has now taken more than 10,000), he embarked on the project that still grips him: to recapture those images, and all that they evoke, in paint.
Looking for evidence | The artist as a young man | Life and death in Tile Hill | Find out more
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