Steve Shear

Artist Statement

I have been painting and sculpting since 1986. Much of my work (including many of my drawings and sculptures as well as my paintings) can be viewed at my website.

In the past I was represented by the Z-Wolf Gallery in Denver, Colorado and The Boulder Art Gallery in Boulder, Colorado as well as galleries in Tucson, Arizona and Brentwood, California. I spent five years painting under the watchful eyes of Jean Packard, a graduate of the Chicago Art Institute, two summers at the Charles Cecil Art Studio in Florence, Italy, and several years at the Boulder Art Academy in Boulder, Colorado. I also trained in sculpting under Valentin Okorokov, an accomplished Russian trained painter and sculptor. During my two summers with Charles Cecil, I concentrated on the figure and portraiture using the “sight-size” method made popular by John Singer Sargent and before him Titian, Van Dyck and Velazquez. In the Boulder Art Academy, we focused on the art of anatomy and the anatomy of art.

My early paintings (1986 - 2013) can best be described as expressionistic and/or surreal portraiture/figure, often larger than life. Most are from live models and from my sculptures. See for example Lindsay in Reds and Blues and The Music Student at my website. Others come from my imagination as exemplified by The Chess Queen. My objective was to elicit an emotional response through composition, color, shapes, and the application of paint, while at the same time retaining the correct anatomy, either realistically or through purposeful exaggeration. In the latter part of that earlier period, I pushed the envelope by combining abstraction with these real and surreal approaches to the figure in order to create a synergistic result as exemplified by The Sisters of Baghdad. Many of my ideas came from my drawings (virtually thousands of them) which were created out of my head on almost a daily basis. The Cross Dresser is one such painting.

In 2013 I put the paint brushes and sculpting tools aside and began writing fiction, first poetry then novels, screenplays, and stage plays. Six of my novels have been published along with two of my stage plays.

In 2020 I began painting again. This time I turned to color and shapes rather than portraiture and figure. My paint is applied in thick layers exaggerated even more so by multiple layers of glue serving as an underpainting. The glue not only adds thickness to the paint (impasto) but also runs in ways that produce unique shapes which take on lives of their own. Sunflowers and The Vase of Many Colors are examples of this approach. I call this new process using glue as an underpainting my “Gloil” technique and to my knowledge I’m the only painter doing this. It truly produces a beautiful third dimension that paint alone cannot achieve.

Finally, in early 2024 I decided to focus on a particular approach to my Abstract painting using the Gloil technique. I took my inspiration from Jackson Pollock’s drip technique. Rather than dripping paint from a chair, I drip glue over the canvas or board and let it run at will. I might do this one or two or three times often allowing the glue to overlap after each layer has hardened. Once the entire composition has hardened, I spend time observing the end result of this step before deciding which side of the canvas will be the top. I then take a photo of this ‘Glue Underpainting’ and upload it into Photoshop, and then begin playing with colors. As of May of 2026, I have created eight paintings using this approach. They can be seen on my website at: https://steveshear.net/abstraction.

My present approach to Abstract painting relies on the "Gloil" technique I invented. I take my inspiration from Jackson Pollock’s drip technique. Rather than dripping paint standing on a chair like Pollock, I drip glue over the canvas or board on a table and let it run at will. I may do this two or three times sometimes overlapping the layers to produce a thickened impasto look over different sections of the canvas. I then step back and study the glue composition before adding color which will depend on what I see in the composition. Once the colors have been added, I step back again and give it a title. The titles I choose will hint at what it is I see, although not necessarily what others see. For example, my painting STAMPEDE provides a very good hint for this painting. On the other hand, THE ANCIENT MARINER might not be so obvious from its title. While I have painted everything from sunflowers to figures using the Gloil technique, it works especially well when painting abstracts.