‘I Lived Near a Serial Killer’: Stephen Shearer on Turning Teenage Angst and Death Metal into High Art | coloring

STen Shearer is a quiet man. He’s also distant, shy and aloof. It is difficult to schedule an interview. Once you do that, it will be difficult to get him to talk. The Canadian artist probably thinks his work—which spans 40 years and multiple media, including striking paintings of long-haired teens, custom photo collages, and billboard-sized poetry inspired by heavy metal lyrics—speaks for itself. But Shearer’s work does not express reality, at least not clearly; He awkwardly mumbles under his breath like a goth on a family Easter picnic.

“I’ve written down a lot of things I could say, but that’s not my nature,” he says from his white studio in Vancouver, ahead of a show at David Zwirner Gallery in London, his first UK exhibition since 2007. “All the hope or will to be able to kind of communicate goes into the images. And I try to stay out of the way once that happens.”

The boy managed to stay out of the way. Somehow, he’s never allowed any photos of his face to find their way onto the Internet (although you may find some photos that look like him). It’s almost a shock to see that the real Shearer isn’t a gout-stricken billionaire. He’s handsome, lithe, and charismatic, his blond hair slicked back as he ponders his answers, and he slowly shows me around his meticulous workspace that contains huge collections of collages, huge printers, and perfectly hung works-in-progress.

He feels nervous about the interview. “But I know you sympathize with what I do,” he says. Surely he does not often encounter people who are unsympathetic to his work? “I know people love it, but in some ways it’s better to never talk to them. I’ll meet collectors and they’ll say, ‘Oh, you’re the only artist we’ve collected that we’ve never met.’ I just think to myself, OK, I’ve ruined that.”

Despite his embarrassment, Shearer is considered a star in the art world. He caused controversy with his giant photos of sleeping people taken from the Internet, and shocked audiences with his bloody hair. But he is widely respected for the depth and intensity of his paintings, his art-historical mind and his conceptual precision. For all its oversaturated colors and isolated images, and its references to teenage obsession with heavy metal and suburban loneliness, his works look like Edvard Munch on hard weed, or Fauvists drinking cheap cider in the woods behind the school. It’s art history through the lens of teenage boredom and coming-of-age alienation, a stunningly drawn heavy metal malaise.

I ask him if he feels any kinship with the other great Canadian chronicler of suburban youth, Mike Myers, whose 1990s comedy Wayne’s World depicted a very similar kind of teenage ennui. “Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s definitely a suburban experience. I’d say it’s not exactly dark.”

It was dark there from the beginning. Shearer was born in Vancouver, but grew up in Port Coquitlam, an empty suburb on the city’s eastern edge. “There’s nothing amazing about it,” he says, pausing for a long time. Then he adds: “I lived not far from serial killer Robert Pickton.” Pickton killed dozens of women and fed them to his pigs in the 1990s. “I was sensitive when I was a kid. I can tell there are some dark forces around. Sometimes, you’ll find kinda questionable things in bushes and stuff.”

Was it that darkness that attracted him to heavy metal? “Musically, I was open to everything, but I think I was really drawn to it through the iconography and imagery. I wasn’t exposed to art as a young kid, so I was interested in records and posters,” he says.

It was early death and black metal, low-budget, extreme music made by bored teenagers in the suburbs. Their band images were often ridiculously exaggerated – silly kids messing around in the woods, wearing make-up, pretending to be demons and zombies. Shearer takes those reference points and distorts them, anonymizes them, combines them with references to art history, and redraws them again and again.

If you know what you’re looking for, you can untangle the references and spot a teenage Cliff Burton from Metallica, a young “Corpsegrinder” George Fisher from Monstrosity and later Cannibal Corpse, a bloodied Quorthon from Bathory, prog icon Rick Wakeman with the word “hash” bleached in his hair, and the four members of Obituary hanging from the gallows. It elicits an almost Pavlovian reaction in me – Shearer’s endless allusions to German romanticism and extreme metal reflect my own feelings and obsessions.

But I’m not his target audience. “I like to imagine that the ideal viewer is someone 40 years in the future who has no idea who anyone in the photos is,” he says. The vague references help create a sense of almost mystical distance. “I’m making these pictures, sending them out into the world, hoping they can draw people in. I want to make it universal.”

Shearer’s characters were, for the most part, boys on the verge of manhood—long-haired young men caught between childhood and testosterone-fueled adult masculinity. They are androgynous, tense images of lonely children. Ask about the fluid gender of his characters. His mother and uncle, who was transgender, painted, “and I could never recognize what gender was in the art they made. But that’s not a conscious construct, it’s just my sensibility, which is what I’m drawn to.”

Looking at the pictures and then going back to him, suddenly they all look like the same person in different ways. Are they self-portraits? “It’s part anthropological, part autobiographical.” So they are a mixture of cultural fascination and self-reflection? “The fact that I’ve never had anyone pose for pictures when I take them, I think in the history of art you would call them fantasy pictures [a kind of imagined portraiture]. “There is a lineage that connects me to all of them.”

But there is something different about the new works of David Zwirner. The healthy teenagers in the earlier paintings appear to have grown old and withered. The figures are weaker, their hair is grey, their faces are covered in wrinkles, and one figure is surrounded by a pair of crutches. The reckless abandon of youth has been replaced by the fear and discomfort of middle age. “Yes,” he pauses again. “I would say that is the case.” He quickly changes the subject.

Paintings may be his main focus, but they are not the only thing he does. Over the decades he has amassed a vast archive of images from the Internet, compiling them into reference folders and returning to them again and again. It is the source of his “Sleepers” series, photographs of people spread out on sofas and buses, archived by Shearer and blown up to gigantic proportions, transformed into symbols of death.

Then there are his poems, inspired by heavy metal’s bloodiest, most transgressive lyrics, with lines like “foul winds of putrefaction, altar evisceration” and “crucifix sodomy, zealous evisceration”, printed at billboard size for the 2011 Venice Biennale.

Both works have caused controversy and shocked audiences, but they represent a clear extension of Shearer’s approach. This is what Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum, describes as “double cultural archaeology”: Shearer simultaneously excavates the past and preserves the present.

But this is the painting he keeps coming back to. “What I would like to harness is that, within a character in a painting, you can see something that you recognize through your own experience. Then, through it, you can see the lineage of people’s lives, their expressions and fleeting moments in the past. For me, this is the culmination of everything I do.”

In painting alienation, anxiety, and boredom, he seems to be painting not only pictures of himself, but of us as well.