Her Life Caught Up With Her Work

Katherine Sherwood began painting images of the brain seven years before suffering her own “brain event,” a cerebral hemorrhage in 1997 at the age of 44.

She had also spent years exploring the notion of chance, using bingo cards in her work as a metaphor for “that moment that can come into your life and just change you utterly in a second.”

A tenured art professor at UC Berkeley, Sherwood even mentored the department’s disabled students, one of whom, a quadriplegic who had suffered a spinal injury in a diving accident, was her teaching assistant at the time of her stroke.

Sitting in her home studio, which has been outfitted with a large low table and a rolling chair to accommodate the fact that she no longer has use of her right hand and only limited use of her right leg, she marvels at the degree of synchronicity--or meaningful coincidences--in her life. “I was dealing with all these things intellectually,” she says. “When I had the stroke, my life caught up with my art.”

Sherwood, who for decades has worn a clump of amulets around her neck (“they don’t work unless they’re a gift,” she says), was born in New Orleans. She studied art at UC Davis and the San Francisco Art Institute, and made installation art in New York’s East Village in the 1980s. In 1989, she headed back to the West Coast when she landed a teaching job at Berkeley.

During her first years here, Sherwood, now 49, began to create a series of highly researched paintings that combined photolithographs of medical brain scans and satellite photos. She borrowed apocalyptic imagery from medieval illuminated manuscripts and talismanic images of the so-called seals of King Solomon from a 1975 book that cataloged occult practices in the 17th century.

In 1996, Sherwood made tenure. With that and a satisfying body of work finished, the seemingly healthy 44-year-old thought she might relax awhile. But in May 1997, during a graduate critique, she collapsed.

Sherwood spent six weeks in the hospital and months in bed, able to get up only a few hours a day. Her husband, painter Jeff Adams, reorganized their lives and took on sole care of their daughter, Odette, now 9. It would be half a year before Sherwood the painter reasserted herself.

“Seven months after I had the stroke, I had to have a cerebral angiogram,” she says. “I was really afraid because one of the side effects can be that you can have another stroke. Unlike the other tests I’d done, it didn’t show the meat of the brain, it only showed the arterial system. I got up from the test and there were all these monitors with these images on them. I thought to myself, they’re so beautiful. They reminded me of Sung dynasty landscape paintings in China. Right away, I said I need these images.”

The beauty of the images was matched by the beauty of the test results, which showed that she was not in danger of a recurrence. “The confluence of seeing those images and finding out that I was OK was very significant.”

Although she had insisted she would only resume painting when she regained the use of her right hand, she went back into the studio and taught herself to paint with her left hand. Her first task, with the help of assistants and a reorganized studio, was to “very minimally” complete the three canvases she had begun before her illness. When her health insurance ran out, she applied for and received grants, which paid for more therapy and more assistants to help her in the studio.

“The act of painting was the best occupational therapy. I was surprised how much came back in the studio,” Sherwood says. She used the prerogatives of tenure, following her year of sick leave with an early sabbatical. She reasoned that “I couldn’t go back and teach art without being an artist and making art.” During this time, she began a new body of work that is both an evolution of her earlier work and a radical departure.

She eliminated the satellite photos and personalized the neurological imagery, using those angiograms of her brain seen from the inside out. Gone were literal depictions of chance (the bingo cards), and tightly scripted compositions.

“I almost never work symmetrically anymore,” says Sherwood, acknowledging her obvious post-stroke asymmetries.

Working much more freely and abstractly than before the stroke, she has continued to focus on the 17th century talismans, although in a much less literal way. “I use the seals as a map. I get a direction that I want to go in and I just follow what feels good.” Painting the seals over the squiggly lines of the angiograms, the physical and the metaphysical mingle in one visual fabric.

Not surprisingly, the first new work after the stroke focused on “Buer,” a seal said to cure illness and disease. Like the others, it’s a geometric pattern meant to be used with incantations and thought to be the magical source of the biblical King Solomon’s riches and power. She also used a seal called “Sallos,” which “causes love between the sexes,” a tribute to her husband, whom Sherwood credits as much as anything with getting her life back on track. The abstract shapes are set against a yellowish-white background, like medieval parchment, as if “telescoping in to a certain part of a manuscript,” she says.

One major change in Sherwood’s painting is her medium. She gave up working primarily in oils. “I wanted to detoxify my process as much as possible after the stroke, so I went from a completely oil process to a latex and acrylic one. I call it mixed media because I do use oil in the last layers. That really changed my palette a lot.”

She now works with lighter colors that reflect “my exuberance about painting again,” Sherwood says. “Also I tried to use odd combinations of color, placing very ugly colors--beige and liver colors--in the mix. They spiced up the surface in ways I couldn’t achieve in using a pastel palette.”

Speaking to Sherwood about the technical side of her work, you get the strongest sense of the degree to which this stroke survivor is better defined as a painter than a patient. Using her left hand, Sherwood creates the lines of the seal with thick brushes, going over and over the shapes with different colors. As a flourish, she pours on the final passes of color.

“I pour the paint very slowly from a distance of just a few inches,” says Sherwood, making a distinction between her technique and the common references to Jackson Pollock’s. In the process, she discovered that certain colors crack when applied so thickly onto the surface. She puts a lightly pigmented oil medium over the entire painting to accentuate the cracking and to give the painting a patina of age.

Sherwood’s most recent work, which will be on view at the Michael Kohn Gallery from Saturday through June 1, makes use of canvas and stretcher bars inherited from a friend, painter Wendy Sussman, who died last year of melanoma. It was Sherwood’s way of inviting Sussman “into my studio to make the work. That was the form my grief took.”

In the work for the Kohn Gallery show, she has focused on a seal called “Gremory,” because “it’s in the form of a woman. It makes you beloved by women and that’s how Wendy was.” She also used “Balam,” which she says “confers wit, humor and mental ability, because I saw that as Wendy’s wish for all of us.”

In addition to using Sussman’s canvas, Sherwood also has used a bit of Sussman’s palette. “Wendy was very affectionate toward the color blue, a medium royal blue which I didn’t use before.”

In “Sephora,” a title taken from Sussman’s Hebrew name, Sherwood mixes a cool palette of different blues, “which was a very awkward and unknown exercise for me.”

Though Sherwood had a long list of exhibitions that preceded her stroke, the recognition that she has received since--the prestigious Adaline Kent Award exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute and inclusion in the 2000 Whitney Biennial--has been extremely gratifying. “The biennial was a thrill and I was so delighted that it came in my life when it did, a couple of years after the stroke. It was a very affirming situation,” she says.

Press attention came along at the same time, including a long article in the Wall Street Journal that extensively explored the neurobiological side of her art-making. It hypothesized that the hemorrhage in the left side of the brain somehow freed her from the “interpreter,” or the portion of the brain that seeks explanation, releasing a new ease and fluidity into her work.

Although Sherwood appreciates the article, many of her artist friends disagreed with it because the neuroscientific reasoning gave her innate creative process short shrift.

Similarly, she is very sensitive about the wall text at the entry to her Adaline Kent Award exhibition, which framed her work in the context of her stroke, and to critical reactions that did much the same thing.

“They had wall text when you came in and it announced that I’d had a stroke, and I felt that a lot of people just projected their own feelings of sickness and disability onto the paintings,” Sherwood says. “For me, the paintings were completely joyful. They were celebrating the fact that I was alive. The San Francisco Chronicle reviewer didn’t even describe the paintings, just described the stroke and compared me to Willem de Kooning. An 84-year-old that has Alzheimer’s is really different from a 44-year-old stroke patient.”

Susan Schweik, an English professor at UC Berkeley who is developing a disabilities studies program there, says this is not an uncommon way to view the disabled. “There’s no doubt Katherine’s a really useful example in how she’s physically and creatively handled her life. These stories, to the extent they’ve medicalized her, have reduced her to a certain kind of specimen, rather than seeing her as an artist involved in many other things.”

Next fall, Sherwood will teach a course called “Art, Medicine and Disability” for Schweik’s program. “It will try to locate that terrain where all three are functioning,” Sherwood says. For example, she will delve back into the lepers and beggars and cripples that were often the subject of medieval art. “I’m very interested in the work in Italy that was done before and after the Black Plague. It had such a conservatizing effect, they reverted to the art that had been done 500 years before. All of a sudden the figures became much more iconic, like the life was sucked out of them.”

The disability studies program is a good fit at Berkeley, which has been in the forefront of what’s known as the independent living movement in the U.S. “At the same time James Meredith was trying to get into Ole Miss,” referring to one of the legends of the civil rights movement, “Ed Roberts, who used an iron lung, had been accepted at Berkeley. When they found out about his disability, they reneged. He and his mother fought it and the university agreed to admit him and house him in the student hospital.”

Out of that grew a city and a university that have mandated accessible facilities for those with disabilities. Once again, Sherwood marvels at the synchronicity of her situation. Of all the places she has lived--New Orleans, San Francisco and New York City--she says, “can you believe that I became disabled in a place like Berkeley?”

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KATHERINE SHERWOOD, Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles. Dates: Saturday-June 1. Prices: Free. Phone: (323) 658-8088.

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Susan Emerling is an occasional contributor to Calendar.