I lived near a serial killer’: Steven Shearer on turning teen angst and death metal into high art
Eddy Frankel | The Guardian | 29th May 2026
Living in Vancouver and predisposed not to talk to the press, Shearer has built a reputation without attracting much notice. He is now “a star”, due particularly to his colourful, intense “lonesome” portraits of long-haired youths. He draws on media images that are then mashed up with allusions to German Romanticism. Are they “part-autobiographical” asks the writer. Says Shearer, “I guess you’d call them a kind of imagined portraiture”.