‘I used to live next to a killer’: Steven Shearer on turning youth and death metal into high art | Drawing

Sten Shearer is a quiet man. He is also needy, shy and withdrawn. He is difficult to press down in conversation. And when you do, it becomes difficult for him to talk to her. Perhaps the Canadian artist thinks that his work – which has spanned 40 years and many publications, including amazing paintings of young people with long hair, legal portraits, and great poems inspired by heavy metal music – speaks for itself. But Shearer’s work doesn’t really speak, not clearly; it hums awkwardly in his hands like a noise at a family Easter party.

“I wrote a lot of things to say,” he says from his white studio in Vancouver, ahead of his exhibition at the David Zwirner Gallery in London, his first exhibition in the UK since 2007, “but it’s not my style. All the hope or desire to communicate goes into the pictures.

And the child managed to stay away. In other words, he didn’t allow pictures of his face to find their way to the Internet (although you can find some that appear to be him). It’s really surprising to see the real Shearer isn’t just an ordinary billionaire. She is beautiful, fit and hip, her blond hair swept back as she ponders her answers and slowly shows me around her art studio with its large collages, large prints and fine hanging works in progress.

He is afraid of interviews, “but I know you are listening to what I do”, he says. Is it true that he often does not meet people who do not listen to his work? “I know people like it, but it’s better in some ways if I don’t talk to them at all.” When I meet collectors they tell me: ‘Oh, you’re the only artist we’ve collected that we’ve never met. I keep thinking to myself, I’ve ruined that.”

Despite his difficulty, Shearer is a star in the art world. He has caused controversy with his large pictures of sleeping people taken on the Internet, shocking audiences and his vulgar poetry. But he is widely respected for the depth and rigor of his paintings, his historical skill and intellectual maturity. With all its bright colors and lonely scenes, about young heavy metal fans and loneliness, his work looks like Edvard Munch with a strong weed, or those who like to drink cheap cider in the woods at school. It’s a classic about the ennui of youth and the absence of adulthood, a wonderfully painted swoon of heavy metal.

I ask if he feels any kinship with another great Canadian chronicler of rural youth, Mike Myers, whose 90s drama Wayne’s World captured a similar type of adolescent. I mean, it’s a rural experience, of course.

Darkness has been there since the beginning. Shearer was born in Vancouver, but grew up in Port Coquitlam, a wasteland east of the city. “Nothing too interesting,” he says, pausing for a long moment. Then he adds: “I used to live next door to Robert Pickton, a murderer.” Pickton killed many women and fed them to his pigs in the 1990s. “I was a kid, I was depressed. I knew there were some dark forces. Sometimes you find suspicious things in the bushes and things.”

Was it that darkness that made him fall in love with heavy metal? He said: “In music, I was open to everything, but I think that this made me more interested because of the images and pictures.”

Early death and black metal was cheap, extreme music made by bored youth in the suburbs. Their group photos were often full of weirdness – silly kids walking through the woods in make-up, pretending to be demons and zombies. Shearer takes those facts and twists them, hides them, combines them with themes from history, and re-examines them again and again.

If you know what you’re looking for, you can open the document and see a young Cliff Burton from Metallica, George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher from Monstrosity and later Cannibal Corpse, a bloody Quorthon from Bathory, prog icon Rick Wakeman with the word “hash” hanging on his head. It triggers an almost Pavlovian response in me – Shearer’s endless references to German Romanticism and extreme metal reflect my desires and interests.

But I am not his audience. “I like to think that the ideal viewer is someone 40 years from the future who doesn’t know who’s in the picture,” he says. Unidentified references help create a sense of distance from the near. “I’m making these pictures, sending them around the world, hoping that they will draw people into these pictures.

Shearer’s figures, in particular, have always been young men on the brink of maturity – long-haired teenagers caught between childhood and the machismo of testosterone-fuelled adults. They are androgynous, difficult images of lonely children. I ask her about the fluid gender of her figures. Her mother and uncle, who were transgender, painted, “and I can’t imagine what the genders were in the paintings that they made. But it’s not the conscious construction, it’s my intelligence, that I’m attracted to.”

Looking at the pictures and back to him, suddenly they all look like the same person in different guises. Is it just pictures? “It’s part anthropological, part-autobiographical.” So they are a mixture of social interest and self-esteem? “Since no one takes these pictures of me when I make them, I think that in the history of art you call them the most beautiful pictures (a type of imagination).

Something is different about David Zwirner’s new works, however. The healthy young people of the old photos seem to have aged and withered. The figures are frail, their hair is turning gray, their faces are wrinkled, and they have sticks on their sides. The reckless abandon of youth has been replaced by the fear and discomfort of middle age. “Yes,” he stands up again. “I would say so.” And he quickly changes the subject.

Art may be his main focus, but it’s not what he does. Over the years he has collected many images from the Internet which he compiles into descriptive volumes and repeats them over and over again. It’s the source of his Sleepers series, photographs of people being pulled from seats and buses, kept by Shearer and shot on a wide scale, transformed into symbols of death.

Then there are his poems, inspired by the most dangerous, most destructive words of heavy metal, with lines such as “dirty winds of decay, the explosion of the altar” and “crossed by the cross, high-elevated bowels”, printed to the size of posters at the 2011 Venice Biennale.

Both organizations have caused controversy and shocked audiences, but they are a clear extension of Shearer’s approach. This is what Nicholas Cullinan, director of the British Museum, described as “the archeology of two cultures”: Shearer is mining the past and preserving the past at the same time.

But it’s an image he keeps coming back to. “What I want to use is that, within a painting, you can see something that you recognize from your own experience.” And then inside, you can see a line of people’s lives and their descriptions and their brief moments in the past.

By painting isolation, anger and boredom, it seems that he is not only painting pictures of himself, but of us as well.