Ian Everard

 Two Time Art Party Participant

Sexanddrugsandrockandroll

Artist’s Website

www.ianeverard.weebly.com

Artist’s Statement

I am a painter and inter-media installation artist. I collect objects, thinking they might be subjects. These are often found books, photographs, record covers, newspapers and ephemera. I copy exactly what I see, usually in watercolor, and then juxtapose the subject with its painted copy, producing a sort of visual rhetoric. In so doing, I am bringing up questions such as—Why this object? What does it really represent? What is implied by its re-presentation? Is exact representation even possible? Of course it is not possible, but much can be revealed in the attempt. Painting, for me, is an associative state. I often include spoken word and hand drawn video sequences in order to describe the associations that are prompted by the subject. The videos are presented with painting, drawing, tracing and frottage, in settings where I am an implied, or sometimes actual, presence, often with work in progress. The reconstructions are set in and refer to my studio, studio practice and the imaginative space of the studio. The contents of these installations include some of things I have found, accumulated, acquired, inherited and stored over the years. They amount to a disorganized archive, representing other times and places. I am interested in the associative states of mind these objects, pictures and copies evoke, such as displacement and haunting, daydreaming and remembering. For me, the studio is a means of transport…like a sort of time machine…

About the Artist

Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll! Got your attention? So, this is the story. Sometime in the 1950’s, Ian Everard was born in St. Ives, Cornwall, in the U.K. Now he lives in Santa Cruz, where he’s been since the start of the 80’s. Sometime in the late 60’s, he began doing the art school dance, somewhere near London. The art school dance is a two-step—at the end of the day, put down your paint brush and dance! Later, in the 70’s, he continued the dance somewhere in the Midlands of England. He vaguely remembers seeing Ian Dury at art school, every now and then. This was when Dury was a visual artist, before he was famous as the singer of the anthem that seemed to sum it all up—the ever hummable and slightly ironic, Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll! Like a tabloid headline—Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll! That 45 was released in ‛77. One of his friends got a copy, so Everard rushed out to get one for himself. It had a picture sleeve with a black and white picture of Ian Dury—fashionably wasted but sated. He played it over and over. It’s a catchy tune. He has cherished it ever since.

Now he has made Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll the subject of a series of paintings. Picture him making the picture, singing along with the song, remembering the scene…