Slipknot's Shawn Crahan will be creating art outside of music next year
Just two months after releasing their number one album We Are Not Your Kind, Slipknot’s mastermind Shawn ‘Clown’ Crahan is already plotting his next move.
Never one to sit still, Shawn perpetually has his gloved fingers in a lot of pies, and next year we might see another artistic creation from the baseball bat swinging menace.
“I’d love to make more books, have some gallery shows, and stuff like that,” Clown recently told GQ. “I love making our music, but now that the album’s out and it went No. 1, I need to take some time for myself and go do some other shit. Above all else, I really want to push myself to make some fascinating art this year.
"Sometimes I don’t even like to admit that I’m 'an artist,' because then maybe I become a cliché, and then my hunger for it leaves. It’s taken me 20 years to convince people of what the word 'art' truly means. I use the word very loosely, since to me it represents everything."
READ THIS: Jim Root's track by track guide to We Are Not Your Kind
In the time between the two latest Slipknot albums (2014’s .5: The Gray Chapter and 2019’s We Are Not Your Kind), Clown directed the feature-length movie Officer Downe and Slipknot’s 2017 live DVD Day Of The Gusano. But, as he told GQ, movies are just one of his artistic interests.
"I tell people that I have 'artistic schizophrenia.' I used to ask my mom all the time what was wrong with me. She told me that I was a renaissance man, and that I was gonna do a little bit of everything. I do three things religiously every day: I either work with music, work with photographs, or with film. And then on top of all of that I draw, I paint, I collage, I write, I direct, I produce. I harness this core of myself that I expand out to all of that, so it’s all consistent."
"I’ve really honed in on the art of living," he continued. "Every morning I wake up, I walk outside, I look around and go: what the fuck is really going on? That’s my inspiration every day. I’m recognizing that we’re constantly living and working in other people’s art, even stuff like street curbs. That’s decades of learning and creating just to make that. My whole thing is to teach myself to appreciate anything and everything around me, and to recognize the artistic ability behind those creations. It makes my life so much more fun."
Slipknot embark on a tour of the UK and Ireland in January 2020. Get your tickets here.
Slipknot UK/Ireland tour 2020
January
14 Dublin, 3Arena
16 Manchester, Arena
17 Newcastle, Utilita Arena
18 Glasgow, The SSE Hydro
20 Sheffield, FlyDSA Arena
21 Nottingham, Motorpoint Arena
22 Cardiff, Motorpoint Arena
24 Birmingham, Arena
25 London, O2 Arena
