In the interview that follows Steven Shearer told us, “What I like about painting is that it potentially transcends the subject matter of the reference material.” The question to which he was responding was our querying his large collection of Leif Garrett images, and why Garrett? What this interview shows, as have others, is the “thought-full” nature and the thoroughness of the artist’s engagement with his work and working process. Here in particular is where Garrett fits. Shearer’s answer went on to include his own extensive assembly and archiving of images and their ordering in a meticulous taxonomy. His elaboration includes the way Garrett represented the period of the ’90s and the teen media attention paid to beautiful androgynous boy images, to Garrett’s celebrated long hair and to the apparent “lost” personality of the boy star and the sense he had about him of not being entirely “the author of his journey.”
Shearer’s internalized visual memory is capacious, an archive of its own that has absorbed the history of images as far back as images’ own record. His work is a feast for committed art viewers, with whom he shares his own close looking and store. Edvard Munch, Gustav Klimt, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Symbolists, the northern Renaissance painter Hans Memling and his portraits, Neo Rauch, Kai Althoff, the rich fluorescent cloisonné work of Hundertwasser—all northern European, chilly-clime painters using hot colours.