In my poems Back Alleyways of the West Midlands and The Secret Commonwealth I was trying to convey the same quality which Shaw manages to get across in these paintings. Or as Shaw says in his commentary on the exhibition:
All these things that had been familiar to me gradually became strange and part of another world and yet still so ordinary.
That's how I felt a few years ago when I went back to the estate I lived in as a child, or back to my grandmother's house. These paintings show the intense presence of litter strewn areas and working class buildings, and wet sky glowing full of dense clouds. They are somewhat like pre-Raphaelite paintings, in their overwrought colour and thickness. Shaw has shown the places without people, and with all signage and text removed, apart from graffiti.
Here is an article in the Guardian arguing that Shaw should have won. I didn't have strong feelings about this until I saw the actual paintings. Now I agree.
The secret commonwealth
How shall I define the secret commonwealth?
By black eel-lightning
stabd my path
striving for that damp ditch to take a breath
so furtive ugly and surpassing strong.
A teenage girl, barely awake, too drunk to feel the cold
listening, in the freezing dark, on Newton Lane
to an old woman's cough, cough from a bedroom window.
Apron of pale gravel
in front of garage doors
innocent of human act.
Those features of the land that are not mapped -
Pornography that has been thrown away -
Rope swings across the overspilling beck -
Pink jays and rhododendrons that nobody loves -
Carers in washed-out overalls await the early bus.
What is it, by these indices demarked?
A commonwealth of that which is not named,
not lovely, and not bound to time and space.
(This poem was not written about the pictures. I wrote it several years ago, but I was trying to write about the same subject as the pictures.)