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This series of essays on emerging Canadian artists is sponsored by THE FRASER ELLIOTT FOUNDATION in memory of BETTY ANN ELLIOTT
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I am in Steven Shearer's studio, it's almost midnight and we've dropped by to have a beer and see his latest work. His first completely hand-rendered paintings since art school, they are fluorescent, apocalyptic visions of heavy metal concerts. If they were less expertly executed they could pass for the tribal, folk-art expressions of a suburban fan. Our attention is diverted from the art by the arrival of three young artists who have arrived to jam in the adjacent studio. We join the weekend rockers as they plug in their amplifiers and tune their instruments. Shearer picks up a guitar and starts to play a solo from Led Zeppelin's "Heartbreaker" with remarkable facility. The other artists soon beg us to leave, as Shearer's virtuosity is an inhibition to the enjoyment of their nocturnal hobby. As we depart, I ask Shearer why he quit the guitar when he had innate talent and years of training behind him. Musical ability has always seemed magical to me, so it puzzles me that anyone would discount it, especially after they had mastered the craft. Shearer explains that having spent his adolescence practicing the technique of heavy metal in his parents' suburban basement, he came to disdain both the musical genre and the notion of rock stardom. Shearer also loved to draw and so, faced with his parents' ultimatum to go to school or get a job, he enrolled in art school, at Emily Carr in Vancouver.
After school, Shearer made a reputation for himself with paintings combining text and geometry in a questioning of notions of expressivity. Since 1996, when he returned to figurative art, he has produced several distinct bodies of work that focus on youth and those forces that aim to affect or control it. These forces are driven by different motives. While profit is the indisputable goal of the entertainment industry, other forces are more ideologically driven. Modernism has its own youth program, rooted in the Enlightenment's elevation of children and childhood. For modernism, all creativity is identified with childhood, and the nurturing of childhood creativity is seen...