‘From the blue Mundane Shell even to the Earth of Vegetation, Throughout the whole Creation, which groans to be deliver’d, Albion groans in the deep slumbers of death upon his Rock’
The title of this exhibition of paintings and watercolours comes from William Blake’s epic poem, ‘Jerusalem’. For Blake, Albion is both a character and a place. It is both man and woman, human and metaphysical, both Britain and the wider western world, a city and a land. Albion is an ideal, a lost innocence, a trampled dream.
Blake was born and lived and worked a stones throw from the gallery here in Lexington Street. In 1809 he staged a modest exhibition of his own work in response to years of neglect above his brother’s hosiery shop in Broad Street (now Broadwick Street). A contemporary reviewer of the exhibition described him as an ‘unfortunate lunatic’ and Blake’s own accompanying descriptive catalogue a ‘farrago of nonsense.’ He was a working class artist in a world of gentleman artists, his boots too soiled to darken the doorstep of the Royal Academy. He has become a figurehead for the downtrodden, the ignored, for individual thought and political and religious dissent. As out of step with his times as Blake seemed in the nineteenth century he is very much in tune with the sound of Britain in 2024.
The creaking rooms of Georgian Lexington Street could not be more different than the rooms in which I was raised. But the same ghosts haunt the doorways, the stairs and the corners of each room. The same ghosts of injustice, poverty, greed, the same spectres of prejudice, ignorance and hypocrisy. But perhaps we should remember that ghosts, like politicians and those in power, were human once.
The paintings in this exhibition see Shaw return again to the streets of his childhood. The personal mythology of his work now becomes weaved with a wider story of national decline and dissidence. Patriotic flags fly above suburban neglect, the sun sets on an abandoned fridge freezer, a stunted oak struggles against a brick wall, a shipping container sits unmoving and mute on a patch of overgrown grass. And yet in another painting red roses grow outside a UPVC window in a garden where time seems to have stood still.
In a suite of watercolours Shaw paints studies of the roses that have bloomed from the cuttings taken from his family home. He planted them in his garden in Devon. Lately he has returned to the Midlands and cuttings from those cuttings now grow there. We could read them as a hopeful coda to the contemporary rot of the other paintings. But if we read them as a prologue perhaps they hint at the world before the fall and of what was lost.
Each painting in the exhibition is a little groan really. For how things have turned out and are turning out. It sounds less bleak than you’d first think because painting goes on and continues as an act of resistance to the mess we make of life around us and times inevitable and dreadful work. As Blake says elsewhere in ‘Jerusalem’, ‘Continually building, continually decaying’.
