To kick off 2023, we spoke to Steven Beercock, a self-taught artist based in Sicily. He filled us in on his creative process, journey as an artist, and what has kept him committed to painting over the years. Painting has been a way for him to let his heart speak, whereas he would have otherwise remained emotionally mute. Check out the interview below!
Where are you from and where do you currently reside?
I was born in 1960, in York and brought up in Boston Spa a small town in West Yorkshire, England between York, Leeds, and Harrogate, but I have lived half of my life with my Italian wife and two sons here in Enna, a slightly bigger town on a mountain, in the center of Sicily, for the past 32 years.
What drew you to working with oil paint, and how did it feel when you did it for the first time?
We had just bought our own home and had three floors of bare walls. I don’t like prints, but we had no money available at the time to buy originals, so I casually said, “I’ll make them” – much to the initial amusement of my wife. I chose oils, as opposed to acrylics or watercolors, because for a short time in my adolescence, I had used oil pastels to make portraits, had enjoyed how well they had blended, and assumed oil paints would do so too. I have to say that I am 100% self-taught. At the tender age of 54, it was strange and a little scary at first to begin painting quite large and ambitious compositions without any guide other than the odd YouTube “How to” video. However, I have reinvented myself many times in my life, so I was used to strangeness and am rarely scared by the fear of getting things wrong. My mantra is “I love making things; especially mistakes.” Oils were the perfect choice in the end as they are far more forgiving than many other media and give you time to rethink things.
I often introduce more actors into my “stories,” (as I call my pieces), while I am painting them, and therefore need to adjust, move or remove items. That approach would be very messy with acrylic and nigh-on impossible with watercolors, I imagine. I am criminally anarchic in my approach(es), which would probably have most pro artists pulling their hair out. I care not a jot. Fun is fundamental for me, functional, indeed. Oils are serious fun.
How would you describe your style?
After eight years of painting every day for hours, I have only very recently managed to corner some kind of definition and the nearest I can get would be “a somesensical colorist-surrealist.” Even that is still a temporary description as I am still discovering my influences, tendencies, and obsessions and, anyhow, care very little for statements about style.
I see myself as a colorist first and foremost as color is nearly always my first consideration. Deciding on my palette is like working out what mood I am in and because most of my paintings are either surreal or abstract, I feel totally free to choose whatever combination I think fits. Freedom is my number one obsession and always will be. I lay out my tubes and have a long chat with them until we come to an agreement. As you can see, I have definitely spent too much time on my own :). Occasionally I will be moved enough to do a realist painting: water is often a great inspiration as I grew up and lived a near feral existence, at times, down by the beautiful river Wharfe.
The canvas in front of me is *my* world; my flat Earth, and mine alone. And I am alone with my ignorance and hunger to attempt a little magic. No one is obliged to like what I do, not even me, but do it I must. Indeed, I have produced around 350 medium to large paintings in the last 8 years since this voyage began without really knowing exactly what I am doing. That’s where “somesensical” comes in. I allow myself to only half understand what I have done or am doing: to extract, at least, some sense out of it. Sometimes I find none at all. Other times it can appear months later. Who cares in the end? No one is going to die.
Seriously speaking, though, I do respect my dreams, my subconscious, and my apparent spontaneity. Excuse the oxymoron, but it’s a kind of organized spontaneity; after I have laid out and organized my colors, I let the show begin and trust most of what presents itself. My faith in such, on first appearance “nonsense”, is perhaps rooted in the belief that it is the result of the primitive and the child in me slowly waking (and in turn waking me) up. This gradual return to, or yearning for, the past produces a myriad of images and scenes which make me jump out of bed at any hour and get them onto my whiteboard or directly onto canvas before they vanish into the foggy light of daily practical thoughts.
Two of my series are titled “Il lungo dormiveglia,” (the long slumber) and “somesensical” which both in their own apparent madness try to capture the acceptance and even the joy of chaos that, perhaps only the primitive and child in us can truly appreciate.
What has kept you engaged and committed to your craft over the years?
All the feelings and ideas I had built up over the first 54 years of my life previous to learning this language. Without my brushes and oils, I would have remained emotionally mute. Now my heart can finally speak. I will die with a brush in my hand.
How have you grown as an artist in the past five years and what are the major contributing factors to your growth?
The first thing I must underline is my growth is highly irregular and in no way linear. Scarcely logical. Probably, the greatest improvement, thanks to painting, is that through the careful, if at times quite idiosyncratic and childlike, choice of palette my emotions have become – for this uptight Englishman – noticeably more accessible and definitely easier to express. My powers of observation and ‘dream capture’ skills have also been enhanced. This has given me greater confidence in my choices of the subjects I describe or the story I want to tell – no matter how weird or, at times, disturbing they might be.
What materials do you most commonly use?
Oil 85% of the time. Acrylic 14% or less (most often with spontaneous abstract expressionst pieces) and oil pastels (for reasons of nostalgia as I had used them in my youth) 1%.
For me, buying a canvas is always a statement of serious intent. I like that “healthy pressure.”
Can you describe some of your favorite pieces you’ve worked on?
This is the hardest question of all to answer, indeed, if you ask me again tomorrow, the answer will most probably be different. I’ll give it a go all the same. I’m going to pick one from each of my series just to give a clue of where I have been, where I am, and where I appear to be going. I apologize for any lack of clarity but, as I implied earlier, sense, logic, and clarity are not necessarily my main intentions. Here goes: I’ll start with Realism just to assure you that I still have some grip on reality 🙂
I. “The river Anapo”, oil on panel 200x200cm, 2017 An example of my occasional ventures into realism, where I often pay homage to a natural location I admire to the point of worshipping. This time here in magnificent Sicily. I have to be super inspired by the impeccable beauty of a subject to be able to paint it without ”twistin’ it a bit.” Perhaps, I just suffer from chronic boredom. Whatever, this scene was and is heaven to all of my senses.
II. “My cathedral” oil on canvas 120x80x1cm, 2015. The title was carefully chosen, despite my passionate atheism, to show my adoration of the childhood haunt most dear to me.
III. “Slight breeze” oil on canvas, 60x60x4cm, 2016, from my “Flight of fancy” series. I wanted to capture an essence of childhood wonder and expectations of the early sixties. A common scene where reality and fantasy comfortably coinhabited. This was the inevitable scene I imagined in the skies that I scanned for, daily, through the washing on the line with great excitement as a young, 4-year-old defender of “my family and other animals” armed to the teeth with elderberry branch ray gun/mudslinger. They didn’t stand a chance.
IV. “Stomp-in Movie” oil on canvas 60x60cm, 2020. This is 47/55 from my “Tall story” series which has been the most popular of all my series. The protagonist is a headless giant who wanders the planet performing bizarre acts of kindness to animals in general and dinosaurs in this particular example. The first one in the series was inspired by a dream I had, four years ago, of flying through the village of my childhood and coming across this giant with hundreds of swifts coming out from where his head should have been. I painted the scene the next day and have continued painting others. He visits me less frequently today while I’m daydreaming. It’s hard work being a giant, less alone a headless one.
V. “Trapped” acrylic on canvas, 120x80cm is from my “Il lungo dormiveglia (the long slumber)” series where I exploit many of the strange hallucinatory “visions” I experience often during the hypnagogic and hypnopompic sleep/waking phases. I make them actors in scenes I construct while painting often, unsurprisingly, giving a sense of chaos and unease. On social media, I continually get comments and questions as to which drugs I use. “None. Art is my only drug.” Not many seem to believe me and little do I care. As a child, my six siblings and I would play the “What can you make of this?” game where the kid to your left would do a one-line squiggle on a piece of paper and hand it to you to see what you could make of it by adding a few of your own. I often think back to this when I am composing a painting freely. It tends to confirm my suspicion we have truly “thinking hands.” As odd as the final result may appear, I feel confident the majority of my developed squiggles represent authentic feelings and thoughts in some way or other, whether I consciously understand them or not.
VI. “22” oil on canvas 100x100x4cm, 2021. This painting is another one from my “Il lungo dormiveglia (the long slumber)” series and was a joy to paint. Amid all the chaos, everything, at least in my eyes, seemed to flow. Soon after, I did another which was quite different but had that same feeling of flow to it, but like this, without intentionally meaning anything in particular: painting for the love of painting. Why not.
Do you have any advice for up-and-coming watercolor artists? Are there any tips or techniques you can offer?
None, sorry. I do have great admiration for those who are skilled in such an unforgiving medium, though. I, personally, would be a disaster, I think.
What are your website and social media links?
