The Easel

2nd June 2026

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”.

26th May 2026

Mum isn’t the only word at Tate’s magnificent Whistler show

Mark Hudson | MSN | 20th May 2026

Whistler is rarely seen as a star of 19th century art. Living in Europe during the Japonisme craze, he absorbed it unfussy aesthetic, producing landscapes with features that are suggested rather than fully detailed. The famous portrait of his mother is likewise a study in restraint and proof that art could be both “abstract and accurate”.  But Whistler was an “egomaniac” and his own worst enemy, distracting us from the fact that he made “extraordinary and genuinely revolutionary paintings”.

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