'Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habits, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.' Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D H Lawrence
Anthony Wilkinson Gallery presents the 2nd part of George Shaw’s Albion Groans.
Exhibiting in his 60th year the artist reveals no new ideas simply the same old ones crumbling away to dust alongside a weakening soundtrack of pathetic refusal. Like the country he has spent thirty years or so painting the work is not so much in progress but in decline, a robbed grave, a self-portrait in ruins. If anything it is a prophecy that soon enough there will be nothing left to paint.
As in the exhibition Albion Groans in 2024 the work has been made under the shadow of William Blake, who was born in nearby Broadwick Street. His only exhibition was held in the room above his brothers hosiery shop in the same street and was nothing short of an unmitigated failure. Blake himself rose above such ignorance as most visionaries and prophets are wont to do. Contemporary success was to Blake as elusive as the Albion he dreamed of, a land beyond corrupt politics, abused religion and mindless industry, a land of liberation and grace. It is a dream that some of us have today too.
Presently on the studio wall are the unfinished paintings Shaw intends to exhibit in September. There is a small series of minorpieces under the title Small Revolutions which show a world where looking up is looking down, with a sky as dull as a puddle, of potholes and arseholes, of fools in crowns. There is a familiar dead flag, romantic poetry and calls of resistance tagged on walls, an ex-national treasure and a recreation of Blake's final painting in his proposed history of England. One painting has the curious title The Ancient Britons. There is even a faintly optimistic rising sun; nature is always in revolt, it will always have the final word. It all promises to be an up lifting downward glance of a view out of the window we’d rather close a curtain on.
George Shaw writes "The life mask I had of William Blake sat on top of a speaker in my studio. As a consequence of playing some record too loudly it fell off and smashed to pieces on the floor. I took it as an omen though I wasn’t sure of what. This immortal thing had, in a split second, aged, become a ruin. It was now like looking in a mirror. It was the world outside falling apart. Most likely it was some desperate reminder that Blake's image of the human in a struggle for freedom, the romantic liberation of the imagination or the simple escape from social and economic injustice was and remains a futile broken endeavour. Something like listening to the news every morning, then. My sister-in-law who is good at jigsaws offered to try and put it back together which she did and now the repaired Blake sits once again frowning at me as I daub the day away. He’s not un-like Frankenstein’s monster. This is not as strange as it first seems as Shelley’s novel was published a few years before Blake’s creepily similar vision of The Ghost of a Flea. The monster and Blake share a love of Milton’s Paradise Lost and both pass through the world as sad and graceful outcasts, innocent and ageless, truthful and persecuted. In the TV Series Penny Dreadful (2013) Rory Kinnear
plays Frankenstein's creature and goes by the name of another poet outcast, John Clare. Kinnear would make a good Blake if anyone is thinking of filming his life. Given the state of things there could be nothing more timely. At the close of Guillermo Del Toro’s recent film adaptation of Frankenstein are the lines from Byron, 'And thus the heart will break, and yet brokenly live on'. Truth lives in as many strange and common places as does magic and freedom. For the most part it lies in fragments at our feet."
I behold London; a Human awful wonder of God!
He says: Return, Albion, return! I give myself for thee:
My Streets are my, Ideas of Imagination.
Awake Albion, awake! and let us awake up together.
My Houses are Thoughts: my Inhabitants; Affections,
The children of my thoughts, walking within my blood-vessels,
Shut from my nervous form which sleeps upon the verge of Beulah
In dreams of darkness, while my vegetating blood in veiny pipes,
Rolls dreadful thro’ the Furnaces of Los and the Mills of Satan.
For Albions sake, and for Jerusalem thy Emanation
I give myself, and these my brethren give themselves for Albion.
Jerusalem, William Blake
For further information please contact 07980 892 851 or anthony@anthonywilkinsongallery.org
