88 Friary Road

I caught Shaun during his painting day, en plein air, so to speak, on a rooftop in Rome. Through a strange coincidence I had watched La Grande Bellezza (a movie by Paolo Sorrentino) earlier that day and so while I was walking in a small Suffolk town I felt the blue of the sky was not of England but of Italy, and the seagulls, well, they were just seagulls.

Shaun’s work is based on the feeling of impermanence, on transition from one moment to the next. The jewel-like emerald green; of the hills around, the specific light and landscape around Rome, where he is based, is what inspires him to work. He paints in situ, in the landscape. “When you look outside, you have so much variety… The woods here are different [to England], there is a different wilderness to them.”



“When I lived in Peckham I thought that was it, I would never leave the city. But it fed into my work only until a certain point; I was always inspired only by fleeting moments, by glimpses of colour. And then a moment came when it felt like I needed a bigger horizon; as an artist, but also to be able to have the the space to be able to invite and work with other people.” What Shaun wanted, was to find a space that he felt was home; and would feed into his practice in a way London, despite arguably being the epicentre of the art-world, didn't anymore.



We talked about the importance of finding your place in the world, somewhere that is home, and escaping the narrative, that we as artists can sometimes fall into, that by living within the parameters of the metropolis, our careers will more likely take off. “I see London now as a resource; somewhere to go back to, but not somewhere where I necessarily want to create my work.”



London as a resource, but as a platform too; Shaun returned to Peckham this October, bringing together a group exhibition, “Existential Licence”, a quiet space with room to breathe on a residential street, as an alternative to the hustle and bustle of Frieze Art Fair across town.



“There is something different when you paint on a circle. it’s more dynamic. With a square I found I was automatically dividing them into four quarters, four camps, so to speak… With a round painting you can’t do that, it has a movement that I like.” Shaun’s oval paintings are very tactile, a memory of a dream in full colour; the scene we arrive at seems to be coming from within. And yet the colours are not in a haze, in the same way the shapes or the scene is. The subject matter is hinted at, not arriving at a definite statement but remains abstracted; alluding to many possibilities.



In the big oval painting in the show I am reminded of Monet’s waterlilies; the colours, but also the way there is a clear sense of depth and spatial relations, and what to me appears like lotus flowers floating on the surface, each looking towards one another; as in a figural painting where we’d follow the looks of the figures within.





Text © Martina Šišková
Photographs © Jon C Archdeacon