Katherine Sherwood

PBS NewsHour

“Art Exhibit For Dear Life Shows New Perspectives on Disability and Medicine in the US”

Aired October 18, 2024

Correspondent Jeffery Brown, of PBS NewsHour’s “Canvas: Arts and Culture” series, interviewed Katherine Sherwood about her paintings in For Dear Life at MCASD at La Jolla, as well as Jill Dawsey, curator of the show, and artist and filmmaker Alison O’Daniel.

Garden of the Yelling Clinic

by Katherine Sherwood, 2022

From Katherine Sherwood: In The Garden of the Yelling Clinic (catalog), George Adams, Walter Maciel, and Anglim Trimble Galleries

“I am speaking back to, critiquing, and intervening in the art histories that have ignored and devalued these female painters’ work. In the Brain Flowers, I am interested in amplifying their histories. I am connecting with the women painters rather than challenging their representations. These paintings also represent a neuroplastic process of connecting with myself; in painting every day with my non-dominant hand, I am physically growing nerve connections in my brain and body. I am learning to be a more exact and expressive painter.”

In Good Company: Katherine Sherwood and the Women Artists Who Inspire Her

by Virginia Treanor, 2022

From Katherine Sherwood: In The Garden of the Yelling Clinic (catalog), George Adams, Walter Maciel, and Anglim Trimble Galleries

“All of the artists Sherwood emulates in her latest series of Brain Flowers operated, like her, in the conjoined realms of art and science. Also, like Sherwood, they all constantly made aesthetic choices that added nuance and meaning to their work. Sherwood stated in an article she wrote in 2012 that she, ‘...became fascinated by the traditional role of the artist to pictorially represent what the anatomist discovers. In today’s medical imaging technology, the role of the artist is eliminated.’...

“The amazement at newly discovered wonders of God’s creations radiates out from these works, as a fusion of the scientific and the spiritual all too often neglected in our own time. How fitting that a woman artist has brought the nuance of interpretation and personalization back into the consideration of scientific imagery as her precursors did before her.”

Brains, Flowers, and Female Martyrs: Continuity in Katherine Sherwood's Practice

by Farley Gwazda, 2022

From Katherine Sherwood: In The Garden of the Yelling Clinic (catalog), George Adams, Walter Maciel, and Anglim Trimble Galleries

“For those who are more familiar with Sherwood’s post-stroke paintings, the work in this catalogue may come as a surprise. The representational figurative painting, explicitly feminist and disability rights activist ethos, floral imagery, appropriation of historical works, and brushwork that shows her hand might all appear new. However, all of these elements are present even in Sherwood’s earliest works of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Tracing the development of these themes affirms the continuity of Sherwood’s practice and enriches our understanding of her current work.”

Out of the Blue: Art, Disability and Yelling

by Katherine Sherwood, 2019

Chapter published in: Contemporary Art and Disability Studies, 1st Edition, 2019. Routledge ISBN 9780429260902

“Most of the press I received about my post-cerebral hemorrhage artwork was based in the popular media versus art journals. I made an excellent “overcoming narrative” as it is known in our field of disability studies. The media’s interest with disability is limited to disabled people beating the obstacles, thus appearing “normal.” The superficial narrative is widespread and pernicious. Other articles proposed that my new success came from changes in my brain, particularly in the disruption of “the interpreter.” My artist friends vehemently disagreed with this assessment, preferring to believe it had something to do with the 20 years of painting I had done before my cerebral hemorrhage and my ample time to paint while I was recovering. I leave it to mystery, a category that drives my doctors crazy.”

After Brain Damage, the Creative Juices Flow for Some

by Emily Sohn, 2014

Los Angeles Times, March 15, 2014

“‘The paint I was now using started to crack — and before the stroke, I would’ve been horrified,” she says. “But after the stroke, I thought it looked interesting and, I believed, was part of the metaphorical language of the painting. Also, I really saw the paintings confirming my ability to live.’

“For Sherwood, the brain damage and resulting shift in her art led to awards, museum shows and a whole new level of critical acclaim. For scientists, experiences like hers are helping shine light on the workings of the brain.”

How a Cerebral Hemorrhage Altered My Art

by Katherine Sherwood, 2012

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, April 2012, Volume 6, Article 55

“How a Cerebral Hemorrhage Altered My Art” examines how a massive stroke affected my art practice. The paralysis that ensued forced me to switch hands and become a left-handed painter. It was postulated by several neuroscientists that the “interpreter” in my brain was severely damaged during my cerebral vascular accident. This has had a profoundly liberating effect on my work. Whereas my pre-stroke period had the tendency to be over-intellectualized and forced, my post-stroke art is less self-conscious, more urgent and expressive. The primary subject matter of both periods is the brain. In my practice as an artist, my stroke is a challenge and an opportunity rather than a loss.

Apoplexy and Personhood in Katherine Sherwood’s Paintings

by Anjan Chatterjee, 2008

Essay from “Golgi’s Door” catalog, National Academy of Sciences, Washington D.C., 2008

I became interested in Katherine Sherwood after having read about her in the popular press. I am a neurologist keenly interested in the biologic underpinnings of art and creativity. For me, artists like Sherwood who have the resilience to continue to produce a body of work after brain damage are of great interest. One can ask, as I do, what might have happened in Sherwood’s brain as it changed following her stroke that “accounts” for her current artistic style. In interpreting her art, one brings to bear ideas of how her damaged hemisphere might have reorganized and how her undamaged hemisphere might now be playing a dominant role in her artistic vision. As a scientist, I hope that study of Sherwood and other artists with brain damage will offer new insights into the nature of creativity and will ground aesthetic theory in the neurosciences.

Brain Work: A Meditation on the Painting of Katherine Sherwood

by Georgina Kleege, 2007

Essay from “Golgi’s Door” catalog, National Academy of Sciences, Washington D.C., 2008

“I do not subscribe to a belief in compensatory powers—the notion that blind people enjoy enhanced hearing and touch. And touching Sherwood’s painting is not like reading a Braille text. It creates no image in my mind’s eye—if my mind even has an eye. But it allows me to report that the paint is not just what it depicts; it is a textural, even sculptural element. It is also a tactile record of the process of its application, tangible marks left by the hand and the brain that made it.

“Katherine Sherwood’s work invites us to think about thinking, to meditate on the brain, its form, its contents and the many ways artists, scientists and magicians have sought to map and harness its powers. It is intensely cerebral work, on both the figurative and literal levels. It makes us mindful of the brain as the site of ideas, imagination, memory and dreams. But it is also a fleshly thing, made of tissue, fueled by blood, heir to mishap, and yet capable of renewal and change.”

Art and Healing: A Conversation with Katherine Sherwood

with Richard Whittaker, 2002

An Interview from “The Conversations: Interviews with 16 Contemporary Artists”

“I’m preparing to teach a class in the fall called ‘Art, Medicine and Disability.’ I’m trying to locate that specific territory where those three concepts are best described by visual art. I’m trying to look at how visual artists have responded to illness and disability. There’s a whole range of things I’m trying to work out in looking at art from different cultures that specifically have to do with healing. For instance I’m looking at the 16th century Blue Beryl Treatise in the Tibetan art tradition. This explains every bit of their system, all the herbs, the different kinds of states that each part of the body can be in—it’s just fascinating. I’m also trying to look through the lens of disability at a few modern art historical subjects. For instance, Toulouse Lautrec as a disabled artist. Also at how Monet, Manet and Matisse grew old. For instance, looking at the work Monet did at the end of his life when he was almost blind. I love those paintings. I think they’re the best of the whole body of his work.”

The Body of Paint

by John Yau, 2001

From exhibition catalog, Katherine Sherwood at Gallery Paule Anglim, 2001.

“While it seems safe to suggest that Sherwood's paintings are about her body, I think that such a reading is reductive and overlooks the larger, more pressing issues her work addresses. By juxtaposing abstract emblems derived from a seventeenth-century book on sorcery with photolithographs of the blood vessels found in the brain, the artist brings us face to face with an ongoing crisis in America and elsewhere: What is a body and who presides over it? At the same time, and in contrast to art that is explicitly political or social, Sherwood challenges many presumptions associated with Abstract Expressionism, particularly regarding the obsolescence of the gestural and the death of painting.”

Tragedy Turns a Right-Handed Artist Into a Lefty – and a Star

by Peter Waldman

The Wall Street Journal, VOL. CXLII NO.94, May 12, 2000

Ms. Sherwood, 47, Paralyzed In Part, Wins Acclaim For Her 'Intuitive' Works Asking 'Did I Paint That?'

“Her epiphany came in a most unlikely place: on an X-ray table in her radiologist's office. Six months after the stroke, Ms. Sherwood was having a carotid angiogram to check for any further bleeding inside her brain. Heavily sedated, she glimpsed the image of her brain's blood vessels on a computer screen. It reminded her of a favorite painting, a 1,000-year-old Chinese landscape. She demanded a copy of the angiogram. "The technician thought I was crazy," Ms. Sherwood says. Within a few days, she and an assistant were back in her studio, cutting and pasting photolithographs of bright red ganglia onto elaborately enameled canvases. Her left hand took control from there, scrawling wide, loopy lines of paint over and around the angiogram, in designs that vaguely evoked her favorite calligraphic seals from medieval texts. Reborn a lefty, Ms. Sherwood began the most productive period of her life.”

Gesturing From Within

by Juan Rodriguez, 1999

Essay from Adaline Kent Award catalog, San Francisco Art institute, 1999

“Our sense of being in the world, like breathing, effortlessly flows in and out of our bodies. It is the nature of art, in particular the art of painting, to present the viewer with what is both seen and unseen. The act of painting, and its parallel the act of viewing, penetrates our dualistic ideas of existence: what is inside or outside, what is fluid or solid, what is visible or invisible. Sherwood's paintings, as well as having clear and distinct subject matter, contain this penetrating quality that gives them an elusive sense of being, an ambiguity that can be understood by the oppositional forces embodied in her work. Sherwood builds her paintings horizontally—the multiple applications of paint for the ground, the addition of photolithographs, and finally the abstractions and gestural marks complete the painting. By this method of working, gravity is nullified, or at least neutralized. Lines and gestures are controlled to allow the viewer to visually travel through the intricate, painterly webs that cover the images of satellite photos or blood vessels.”