8 facts about Ben Shearer

Ben Shearer (born 1941 in Adelaide, South Australia) is an Australian performer who specializes in watercolor painting of the Outback.

When Shearer was six years old, an insult during a game of cricket resulted in blindness of his right eye. He claims this crash as the defense he spent hours painting in scholarly instead of playing sports. Shearer has then said he attributes his creativity and passion of art to his ancestors, John and David Shearer, inventors of the first steam-powered motor car. After success school, Shearer was awarded a Wool Research Fund Scholarship to the Gordon Institute of Technology in Geelong, Victoria and studied textiles. During this time, he lived at the Geelong Grammar School and met his progressive wife. Shearer attended post-graduate assistant professor at the Scottish Woollen Technical College in Galashiels, Scotland, where he studied fabric design and weaving. After graduate school, Shearer moved to Melbourne and worked as a carpet designer for 11 years. While busy in Melbourne, his wife gave birth to their two sons Andrew and Tim.

During the neighboring three decades, Shearer taught himself how to design clothes, weave, make tapestries, draw in pastels, and paint. In 1979, Shearer began his art teaching career at St. Catherine’s College, located upon the campus of the University of Western Australia in Perth. The adjacent year, he began teaching at Scotch College in Melbourne for 14 years. In 1995, he began to focus exclusively on his artwork and now uses his house as a studio. Shearer starts gone pencil drawings on French Arshes paper and next applies the paint. There are usually four to six watercolours bodily worked on at the similar time, so that similar to he works upon one painting, the others can dry.

In addition to his paintings of the Outback, Shearer’s works intensify scenes of Red Cliffs on the Murray River, Katherine Gorge, Boulia, the De Grey River, and Kakadu National Park. His works have been displayed at galleries in Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne, as competently as the Embassy of Australia in Washington, D.C. He resides in Malvern, Victoria behind his wife of 48 years, Caroline.