Francis Bacon once said that he would have liked to have painted a smile, but could not. It always ended up as a grimace. I like this ambivalence, of an innocent smile that transforms into something ominous. These grotesque, grinning, laughing heads and chimeras form part of a Bestiary and are a  family portraits. Johnny Green and the ‘little girl doll’ annie were my Grandmother’s ventriloquist dummies. Tommy was my Mother’s dummy. Grandmother, Annie Howarth, stage name Josephine […]

From 7th February 2012. Admission free – during opening hours! Browns Independent Bar, Earl St., Coventry. [tel 02476 221100] Statement: My paintings of these dolls are in between autobiography and fiction. The ventriloquist doll is a fake human being, it is a fraud, it is artifice, like a three dimensional caricature or cartoon that comes alive. Thus a painting of a ventriloquist doll is a fiction of a fiction, a copy of a copy, a fraud of a fraud, that is, […]

.. review by John Yeadon for the Morning Star, Friday 16th December 2011.   As Coventry Council refurbish the roads and paving, tarting up the city centre prior to the Olympics, the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry celebrates images of the city of  gloom and decay. Turner Prize nominee George Shaw’s exhibition, I Woz Ere, opened in his home town with a sense of local pride and popular celebration. The irony of the occasion might have escaped some […]