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From: Jenet Piumpton Category: Art Date: 06 March 2009 Time: 06:09 AM Review: http://www.wilkinsongallery.com/ Shaw has become well known for his meticulous landscapes of suburban gloom painted in grays and greens and with a touch of graffiti or an old tin can showing grit. They seemed when you first saw them to be showing something you hadn't looked at in painting, namely grim scenes of the Midlands painted realistically. And that made them a good thing. These paintings don't seem to have extended much except for the size of the canvases (boreds), they have become less detailed, fewer careful leaves, and there are larger areas of empty or glazed or brushed paint without relief, these "abstract" bits, vogueish in contemporary descriptive painting, are boring to look at and decrease the intensity of the experience. Perhaps they are metaphors for life up norf, or perhaps Shaw has tired of the scene.