In Conversation - Jack Shearing
Words: Elliott Marsh
The Lido Stores meets Lido Open 2024 winner Jack Shearing, whose solo exhibition The Sunset Speaks Loudly of Days runs from 5-28 June.
Shearing entered a small, beautifully realised depiction of an eerie, atmospherically charged urban scene into the Lido Open 2024. His entry – titled Night Walk and one of more than 1,200 submissions received in The Lido Stores’ fourth annual open call – was shortlisted by guest judge Vincent Hawkins and gallery owner-curator Kristen Healy and exhibited alongside 74 other artists in September 2024.
“The Lido Stores shows a lot of artists I’ve been aware of and follow on social media,” Shearing says, “and it was probably through seeing their promotion of shows that I became aware of the gallery. When I saw Vincent was judging, I thought it’d be a great one to enter because we share some sensibilities in our work. There were lots of personal connections with artists in the 2024 Open – old friends from residencies, that sort of thing, and one of my tutors was in the show. The art world is quite small, and you don’t have to look far to find connections!”
Guest judge Hawkins, now based locally and in residence at Tracey Emin’s Margate-based TKE Studios, was drawn to the immediacy of Shearing’s work. “A few sweeps of the brush and it was completed, unhesitatingly”, he told The Lido Stores. “It’s drawing with paint.”
“That painting was very direct, and a composition I’d thought about before”, Shearing continues. The winning piece depicts an alleyway he walks regularly on the way to and from his home in East London. Its loose abstraction – the immediacy of soft, rapid strokes giving way to the uneasy lure of the underpainted golden-yellow hues – evokes hazy memories of the juxtaposition between urban sprawl and the creep of nature, of mottled artificial light flitting through branches and leaves.
“It was this liminal space that had this very specific atmosphere, sitting between urban and natural,” he says, “with gardens encroaching onto the space and the street light filtering through the trees. This small fragment of the city feels untouched and left to nature – you could see the backs of people’s houses and gardens, at night these glowing windows like small beacons of light. There was a presence you only tend to find in the space between private and public. You can access the city in a different way at night – it’s closer to you and has a charged atmosphere, and I was trying to capture that in the painting.
“I remember walking to the studio one evening and deciding to try painting it in one go. I prepared the linen with a brighter colour and then worked dark pigment on top. I like the atmosphere that's created from artificial street lighting , and layering of dark paint on the bright grounds creates that dappled effect of artificial light filtering through the trees. I had been working on a much larger and considered work at the time, and I wanted that painting to be direct, quite loose and abstract, and not to question the outcome too much.”
Shearing, 27, has been a practicing painter since his teens. An earlier interest in the rigidity of form stemmed from an early interest in design. That, he explains, ultimately yielded to his burgeoning interest in painting that crystallised during a 12-month break from education devoted to exploring paint in the studio. “That was an active choice,” he says, “rather than pursued through studies. Making bad paintings and just having to work through it! Painting is something I’ve always been interested in, but I probably got serious about it around the time of my Art Foundation course. I did my BA at Central St Martins [2018-2021], which was about unpacking and testing. Once you graduate, you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to get a studio and make that work.”
More recently, Shearing undertook the Drawing Year at the Royal Drawing School, completing the course in 2024. “I’ve always thought the Drawing Year would be an interesting, challenging thing to do”, he muses. “Observation has always been an important part of my practice, and the course encouraged me to draw directly from life. The course gave me a lot of momentum. It tells you that the way to get through the slump is just looking at things, not overthinking and just making. The subject isn’t so important; what you bring to it is. I was aligned with that thinking, but I learned I’m not a drawer, and that’s fine. I feel like I draw with paint.”
Shearing now operates from a shared studio space in London. “As it’s a shared space, I often listen to music on headphones. Online radio is good, as you can just zone out of it. It’s not something you’re consciously choosing to listen to. Podcasts are good for the same reason. If you’re listening to something interesting, that’s keeping elements of your brain working but it almost allows you to be freer with what you’re doing as you’re mentally in between spaces. Working in silence can be too intense, unless, I find, I’ve had a certain idea and I need complete focus and to use that intensity to execute it.
“I go through different phases of the practice feeling quite neglected, like I’ve not got enough time. That said, I’ve realised it’s not productive to be there all the time.” He now tends to fit shorter sessions, typically four hours or so in length, around his part-time job. “If I can’t be there every day, it won’t necessarily be a bad thing – I’m always thinking about the work. I might only spend four hours in the studio, but because I work quickly, those constraints can be good. You can get a lot done in those four hours. At the time I painted my Lido Open entry, I was going to the studio quite a lot after my day job, normally arriving around 9pm. It was quite nice – there was no expectation of doing something significant, but actually, I would find that without the pressure, I’d start working and just go on until midnight. That momentum can be really good.
“Sometimes I need to put a lot out there and see what comes back. Maybe plan an idea and make three paintings that muse on a specific subject, then maybe one of those is worked on and the others become something else. I’m definitely someone who can’t just be focused on one thing. Stopping and walking away is almost the most important thing for me. You can over-finish something; what’s interesting is when something’s been left in the process, versus when something has been consciously finished. It looks right, but the choice to stop feels conscious. That goes back to working fewer hours in the studio. I used to work eight-hour days in the studio, and I’d often take photographs of the work in progress then look back and think, oh, that was the moment it was finished, and I’ve taken it too far!
“I think sometimes you’re aware when work isn’t at the right point to be shared. It might not be your best work, or it could be better. For a long time, it felt like my work was mostly being seen by peers and other artists, and was mostly a private practice. The Lido Open painting was part of that moment, very much about figuring out my work. There is an element of you that’s doing it in an attempt at communication, to try and share something. That comes later – when you’re in the studio, it should be about the act of making. Not overthinking, considering what the viewer is going to think.
“I think you can see that in other people’s work – whether it was made to be shown or just made to be made. There’s a real magic in the work that is so engaged in that process, and it becomes unexpected. The best works put the viewer in the position of the maker. That comes when the maker’s lost in it themselves.”
Shearing joins Lido Open alumni Lee Johnson, Sukey Sleeper and Olivia O’Dwyer in staging a solo exhibition at The Lido Stores. Though he’s exhibited in group shows for several years and recently took on a curatorial role for the first time (Recurrence, ASC Gallery), his presentation at The Lido Stores in June 2025 will be his first solo exhibition. Titled The Sunset Speaks Loudly of Days, Shearing’s presentation showcases a new body of work realised over the last 12 months. The paintings, all executed in oils on canvas or linen, embody the transience of the gloaming hours and the fleeting interplay between light and surface. His practice is grounded in observation – the capturing of familiar elements at specific moments in time, musing on how the rendering of light and shadow distorts our perception.
In seeking subject matter, he takes photographs on his phone – a memory bank that serves as a notebook of conceptual ideas. As his practice has evolved, he’s found himself leaning more into abstraction as a means of transforming the ordinary and overlooked into something visually and conceptually resonant. The Lido Open painting was, he says, an early example of what he describes as “finding his voice”.
“I’ve been looking at my photos very small lately, almost on the camera roll, and seeing the distilled vagueness of it, and painting from that tiny image. My previous paintings had been more figurative. A tutor had said to me, there are rapid brush marks that suggest a more abstract language, and you’re marrying the two. I’ve come to accept my own handwriting, as it were. I’m influenced by Alex Katz, who makes smaller paintings that are almost like drawings. That immediacy of image is important to me. I’m not someone who works slowly – the mark is done quickly, and it’s not too thought out. My smaller works embrace that directly. With the larger works, those moments just become more accumulated over time.”
In Shearing’s latest works, he’s taken the economy of touch even further, stripping back the subject and inviting the viewer to cast their own perceptions onto the loosely drawn compositions. “I end up questioning, what is the subject? It’s more the form of the brush marks, the language, the light and the colour, as opposed to the physical subject. It’s about finding empty subjects that allow you to be open, in a more emotive space rather than a formal, conceptual place. You’re feeling the subject. The painting is a representation, an illusion, it’s not the thing that it represents. I’m not trying to make the subject an exact figurative representation; I want to make it more ephemeral. The subject is never firmly represented, it's always a bit nebulous. I’m interested in opening to the viewers’ perception and subjectivity.
“I really think about the surface when considering a new composition – what you start with is very important. Some of the surfaces are prepared with rabbit skin glue which you can put pigment in and get very pure colour. One thing I’ve done is an under drawing in pigment with rabbit skin glue. The pigment really glows through thinned veils of oil paint. I use watercolour and ink for studies, but oil is my preferred medium. It might not be the right thing in the long term, but there’s so much you can do with it, it’s never left my practice. It’s becoming more about the shadow and the light. One of the paintings for my solo is of a plant on a window ledge, sat behind a curtain, with the light streaming in. You’re not seeing the plant – you’re seeing the light hitting the fabric. I see that almost as what painting is. The impression of light hitting a surface. I want the space to be a bit more destabilised, where you’re in the moment rather than looking at the moment. It’s more exciting territory for me than the more structural, architectural forms I was painting before.”
The Sunset Speaks Loudly of Days opens at The Lido Stores on 5 June 2025, with an opening drinks reception featuring an introduction by Vincent Hawkins on Saturday, 7 June, 7-9pm. Fronted by owner-curator Kristen Healy, a painter who held studios in the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands before establishing The Lido Stores in late 2020, the private views have become a hub for the south-east artistic community – a regular meeting place for a talented cadre of artists that actively encourages the sharing of ideas. “The Lido Stores is so clearly an artist-run space”, says Shearing. “It feels like it’s for artists, and it’s accessible, versus being more of a gatekeeper. It feels like a place artists can come and have conversations and show their work. It makes so much sense, but it’s quite a rare thing.
“I’m from Brighton originally, and compared to Brighton, Margate feels like it has more of an emerging art scene. There are so many galleries and spaces for artists. Margate has a different resonance to London, where there’s so much going on and a solo exhibition would be such a tiny thing. It’s a great place to have a first show – you know there’ll be a conversation around it, and that’s what you really want as an artist.”
The Sunset Speaks Loudly of Days Jack Shearing – Lido Open 2024 Winner 5-28 June 2025 Opening reception (feat. introduction by Vincent Hawkins): Saturday, 7 June, 7-9pm
The Lido Stores, 2 Ethelbert Terrace, Cliftonville, Margate, CT9 1RX
Opening hours: Thursday-Saturday, 11am-4pm, or by appointment