“Naked women and pictures of Jesus” is how the teenage George Shaw once summed up the contents of the National Gallery. Little did he dream of growing up to become the gallery’s Associate Artist, awarded a two-year residency on site to prepare an exhibition inspired by the collection.

But Shaw was never your average teenager. Born in 1966 on a council estate in Coventry, a city dominated by its new cathedral with a John Piper window and a Graham Sutherland tapestry, he knew early on that he wanted to be an artist. On the desk in his studio in the bowels of the National Gallery is a photo of the crucifix he made for his A-level design and technology project, still kept in the chapel of his former Catholic secondary school, Bishop Ullathorne.

Cast in sleekly angular aluminium, the crucifix shows the modernist influence of Piper and Sutherland, but the teenage Shaw would also take the bus down to London to sketch the old masters in the National Gallery.

In 2011 Shaw was nominated for the Turner Prize for Scenes from the Passion, a series of paintings of the nondescript suburban surroundings of the Tile Hill Estate where he grew up. Describing the nondescript has become an article of artistic faith for Shaw. “If you can’t see the sublime in the everyday,” he tells me when I visit his studio in April, “it’s not worth seeing.”