Artist Liam Everett

Everett draws his creative energy from bodily movements to transform traditional painting materials and everyday substances into texturally rich gestural paintings. His use of salt, alcohol and other agents strip and smudge thick layers of paint while leaving behind unsettling traces from previous states.

He has shown in galleries and museums worldwide, such as Paris’ kamel mennour Gallery; Office Baroque of Brussels; and U.C. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives in California.

Early Life and Education

Everett uses painting as his primary medium for exploring open-ended questions of gesture, materiality, obstruction and environment. His studio is where the artist gathers makeshift tools and debris in order to establish an inventory of what exists nearby and establishes working reservoirs to store whatever resources may be present at hand.

He applies this strategy to his canvas work by employing furniture and loose materials that both limit his movement while guiding it. According to him, this practice separates him from the outcome of his decisions while simultaneously enabling his art piece to assert itself more freely.

Everett’s abstract mixed-media paintings utilise everyday substances such as salt, alcohol, steel wool and power sander to build and erase layers of pigment using caustic erosion techniques reminiscent of crude alchemy. His paintings create and remove paint layers quickly with this approach highlighting their temporary nature and emphasizing his work’s relationship to crude alchemy.

Professional Career

Everett’s approach to abstraction, inspired by dance and theatre, results in paintings that both block and direct their own material presence. He employs props such as furniture and loose materials as tools to simultaneously block and direct his approach to painting, acting like sculptural staging elements that activate motion inherent to his works. Furthermore, Everett utilizes caustic everyday substances such as salt or alcohol stains or discolorations of linen surfaces as catalysts to induce instability within compositional structures of paintwork compositions.

Everett’s process entails both experimentation and rehearsal in his studio environment, where it serves both investigation and playfulness. By continually drawing from interactions with material to feed back into his process and see where they reveal themselves unexpectedly; his six monochrome pieces created during his stay at Kasmin combined traditional intaglio techniques with primordial materiality that evoked natural phenomena and chance.

Achievement and Honors

Everett’s physical and martial approach to abstraction results in paintings that oscillate between their indexical and autonomous tendencies. Drawing inspiration from dance and theater, his gestural smudges, lines, and creases convey human body presence in his studio. By using everyday substances such as salt, lemon juice, or alcohol for layer removal he emphasizes painting’s earthy qualities while emphasizing its connections to alchemy.

Everett employs furniture and loose materials as obstacles that obstruct yet direct his approach to mark making in his studio, serving as an arena to test open-ended questions regarding gesture, material obstruction and environment. A 2017 SECA Art Award recipient, Everett has shown internationally at Kasmin Gallery New York; Altman Siegel Gallery San Francisco; Office Baroque Brussels and On Stellar Rays Athens among many others.

Personal Life

Everett creates texture-rich gestural paintings using traditional painting materials and everyday substances like salt, lemon juice and alcohol. His hand-oriented works foreground the connection between painting and alchemy while emphasizing his hand’s presence within them.

Born in 1973 and currently based out of Sebastopol in Northern California, this artist uses found objects as props in his studio environment to both direct and deviate his approach to painting.

His work has been shown at Altman Siegel Gallery in San Francisco, Kasmin Gallery in Milan and Office Baroque in Paris among others. Additionally, he has won multiple awards and fellowships such as SFMOMA SECA Art Award (2017) and Richard Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship (2013).

Net Worth

Everett’s paintings reveal their production process, the result of deliberate and repetitive actions designed to generate movement and materials. He surveys his studio and immediate surroundings for tools or debris that could serve as props in creating mass and layers on linen surfaces, then applies these objects directly on them as props in shaping mass or layering up layers.

Everett’s work can be found in numerous international public collections, including those at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Brooklyn Museum; and Kistefos Museum, Jevnaker, Norway. He is represented by Altman Siegel in San Francisco.