|
Back
to List of Articles
Brain Work:
A Meditation on the Painting of Katherine Sherwood
by Georgina Kleege
Printed with
permission. Originally published in the 2008 Golgi's Door National Academy
of Sciences Exhibition Catalogue.
A psychiatrist friend
of mine looking at a painting by Katherine Sherwood hanging near my
front door, instantly saw it as an image of the brain, and began naming
its parts. This was no accident; Sherwood’s
work frequently employs images of brains, in particular photo lithographs
of angiograms of her own brain. But many viewers would be more
likely to see this canvas as a thickly–painted abstraction in shades
of orange, brown, yellow and gray-violet. For my friend however,
the recognition was involuntary, even though it was not a part of his
practice to study angiograms. As he described it, he recognized
the forms from images in textbooks he studied in medical school years
ago. To him the forms were barely stylized or abstracted.
Pattern recognition of this kind is a part of human nature, human cognition. Our
brains are wired to observe similarities, register echoes, and construct
analogies. We see things in things. We find faces in rock
outcroppings, in clouds. We look at the stars, connect the dots
and see creatures from our surroundings and characters from our mythology. What
one culture sees as a centaur another sees as a llama—but the impulse
is the same. Sophisticated viewers know not to do this when looking
at a work of abstract art; it is not, after all, an ink blot test designed
to gauge the viewer’s mental state. Still, it is hard to
avoid.
For me, the brains in Sherwood’s paintings are not always so readily
apparent. And even when someone points them out to me, they sometimes
look like something else—an ear, maybe a lung, a…what is
that, a kidney? Forms recur. Patterns repeat. There
are echoes of other organs and vessels here, blood vessels, intestines,
fallopian tubes, branching nerve fibers, which also resemble the roots
of plants, some sort of seaweed. Corals, brain corals, cauliflowers.
For some there is a shock when what seems pure abstraction turns out
to represent or recreate these bodily forms. In this way, Sherwood’s
work draws our attention to the seeming opposition between representation
and abstraction. Is there really such a thing as pure abstraction,
or does the abstract painter draw from natural forms and forces? Is
the viewer meant to read these images, recognizing and drawing parallels
between similar patterns, or simply to revel sensuously in color and
form? Sherwood paints the inside of bodies, not the outside. She
lures us in to find the connections between the inside and outside world. She
reminds us that painting has always been about bodies, and not just the
exterior surfaces of nudes, displaying themselves in all manner of attitude
and activity. Consider Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson
of Professor Nicolaes Tulp (1632), where the anatomist displays
the tendon of the corpse’s dissected arm, simultaneously holding
up his own arm to show the action that particular tendon controls.
Sherwood uses angiograms of her own brain and engravings of brains and
other parts of the nervous system from early anatomy and medical texts
such as Andreas Vesalius’s On the Structure of the Human Body (1543). Juxtaposed
with these different types of medical imaging are patterns drawn from
Solomon’s Seals, a system of calligraphic symbols from the Middle
Ages, associated with magic and healing. The seals typically involve
a pattern of branching lines capped by triangles contained within a circular
border. They look like aerial views of mazes, or perhaps stylized
renderings of brains. The seals were part of rituals conjuring
spirits of all sorts—some good, some evil, some both at once. The
spirits appeared in different forms, as birds and animals, as fantastic
creatures with multiple heads, carrying serpents or swords, riding on
horses, on lions, on camels, on bears. If the conjurer knew the
right words, they would then appear in human form. They had the
power to grant health, wealth, and knowledge of philosophy, astronomy,
astrology, rhetoric, geometry, geology, botany, alchemy and all the other
arts. The conjurer was supposed to make the pattern associated
with a particular spirit and wear it as an amulet on his breast. The
seals were to be made of the metal appropriate to the particular spirit
and used at the correct hour of the day, the correct day of the week,
in the correct phase of the moon. The spirits were meant to read
these symbols and know they were being summoned.
The seals are a form of secret writing, legible only to those with the
special knowledge. Does this mean that a scholar, familiar with
the seals, would be able to pick them out of one of Sherwood’s
paintings and name the relevant spirit? Would the spirit itself
see the seal and know it was being summoned? Probably not; these
spirits were fickle and fussy. The conjuring ritual was very precise. Fail
in one of the details and the spirits would not come.
Sherwood’s process also follows a precise sequence. She layers
the blank canvases with coat after coat of acrylic gesso, to erase the
texture of the cloth itself and create a monochrome creamy ground on
which to pile up the image. She affixes photo lithographs of her angiograms
and etchings of brains and other parts of the nervous system from Vesalius’s
text. Sherwood layers these patterns with patterns from the seals. The
patterns overlap and occlude each other. To make
the rectilinear forms—the branches and triangles of the seals,
for instance—she marks the line with tape and strokes on the pigment
with a brush. For the curves, she pours the paints from plastic
containers. The poured paint begins with a thick line and then
ends with a thin trickle. The paint is so thick that it often cracks
as it dries. Sometimes sections of paint even peel off. Sherwood
lifts the peeling forms—like peeling skin, like peeling a scab?—and
reattaches them, sometimes turning them upside down. The peeling
paint leaves its trace behind, like a scar. The painted surfaces
have a living, fleshly quality. For the final step, she mixes an
olive green oil paint with wax and turpentine and brushes it all over
the canvases, then wipes it off. Traces of the pigment remain behind,
highlighting the cracks and crevices, and even discovering divots and
dimples in the ground. The cracks, though formed at random, seem
symmetrically spaced—yet another network of branching lines.
Once, Sherwood worked to avoid this sort of craquelage and other
flaws in the painted surface. Now she works to encourage it. She
cannot know in advance how it will turn out, but she invites these alterations,
these accidents. She does not work from a plan or sketch, but allows
the painting’s composition to emerge of its own volition. All
this takes patience; each new layer of paint needs to dry before new
paint can be applied. Sherwood’s process might seem to have
something in common with the action painting techniques of such artists
as Jackson Pollock. But her actions are slower, gentler, more deliberate,
more reverent. And there is an element of faith, of mystery, of
magic. All these practices are not governed by the so-called logical
left brain. They embrace the idea of the happy accident, the fortuitous
mishap.
At what point do I talk about Katherine Sherwood’s disability? She
had a stroke ten years ago, affecting the left side of her brain, leaving
her paralyzed on her right side. After the stroke she had to learn
to walk, talk and paint all over again. She now lays her canvases
flat on a work table and paints with her left hand. She circles
the canvases seated on an old, wheeled office chair. In press accounts
of her work, Sherwood’s stroke is often represented as a fortuitous
mishap. With the censoring functions of her left-brain switched
off, her painting became more fluid, her process more purely intuitive. In
this interpretation of Sherwood’s stroke there seems to be a longing
for some sort of divine intervention granting compensatory powers for
lost mobility. But Sherwood insists that her work has really not changed
that much. She points to earlier work that deals with the
same forms and ideas. For her, adapting to her disability, learning
to paint with her new impairments, was less a matter of heroics than
one of practical problem-solving. She acknowledges that necessary
changes in her process have altered the way she thinks about the work. She
is now a one-handed painter, working on an horizontal rather than vertical
surface. But she seems more inclined to think that after years
of dealing with the same ideas and images, she finally came into her
own and created the painting that had somehow been in her mind all along.
The desire to understand Sherwood’s stroke as benefiting her work
reflects the culture’s master narrative about disability. In
this narrative, the stricken individual overcomes her disability through
heroic perseverance. The story is supposed to inspire first pity
then awe, and to offer reassurance that when disability strikes, we can
all triumph in the same way. Sherwood’s story seems
to offer an extra spin on this formula in that her overcoming involved
changes in her brain function over which she had no control, allowing
her not merely to regain but to surpass her previous powers. In
other words, it is as if she overcame without even trying. Sherwood’s
story also seems to confirm cultural notions about how artists function. Artistic
activity is supposed to be governed by the putative creative right brain. The
artist is supposed to be emotional, intuitive, noncerebral, perhaps even
a little crazy.
It can be said that all painting has an element of the self portrait. Even
when the painting does not depict the artist at her easel, brush poised,
eyes alert, the painter shows us what she sees and how she sees it. We
glimpse the world through another pair of eyes. Katherine Sherwood
shows us the inside of her skull, since we understand that art takes
place first in the artist’s brain. But to what extent do
we even need to know Sherwood’s life story to appreciate her work? Does
it help to appreciate the work of Vincent Van Gogh to learn that he may
have had temporal lobe epilepsy, bipolar disorder and an ophthalmologic
condition caused by drinking absinthe or using lead-based paints?
And yet, Sherwood’s stroke is there on the canvas, apparent in
the angiogram, the visible record of that cerebral event. Katherine
Sherwood’s work however, is not about overcoming that event; it
does not seek to inspire pity or awe. Rather it makes use of that
biographical fact, incorporating it into her work, making it a part of
the system of symbols and visual elements that she deploys.
There is also an act of reclamation here. Sherwood reclaims her
angiogram as an image of her brain, made by her brain rather than her
hand. To her doctors, it is a tool to gauge her recovery. To
her it is a pattern of marks as uniquely her own as any she might make
with a paintbrush. In the same way she elevates the etchings she
borrows from Vesalius’s text to the status of works of art. Originally
commissioned to illustrate the anatomist’s words, she bestows on
the unknown artist posthumous recognition for his work. And on
top and around these images, the Solomon seals summon spirits who can
grant different kinds of knowledge, different facets of brain function. Katherine
Sherwood draws our attention to the seeming oppositions between medicine
and magic, science and art, intellect and intuition, the literal and
the figurative, left brain right brain. She reminds us that these
distinctions are never as clear-cut as they seem, and that what now seems
cutting-edge science may one day be dismissed as so much superstition.
In her studio, Katherine
Sherwood invites me to touch her paintings. The
surfaces are so thickly painted that they are almost sculptural, almost bas
reliefs, almost as if forms have been pressed into wet paint to
leave these traces behind. They invite the touch, but it feels
a bit transgressive. Art viewers are not supposed to touch paintings,
but I must confess that it’s something I’ve done all my life. Both
my parents were visual artists. I spent a lot of my childhood in
artists’ studios, and yes, I touched the paintings. In fact,
my fingerprints are all over paintings that now hang in museums around
the world. But touching Sherwood’s painting also feels transgressive,
because we do not usually get to touch these parts of the body, except
in the dissection lab or operating room. I feel myself transported
back in time, doing dissections in high school biology class—the
wonder holding back the disgust, as we folded back the layers, feeling
the strange and yet familiar textures—the astonishing uncoiling
length of intestine, the strength of arteries, the spongy lightness of
brains. The remembered stench of formaldehyde is replaced by the,
to me, more pleasing scent of oil paint and turpentine. I am brought
back to the present with the realization that I am, in fact, touching
paint and not what it represents. I feel compelled to wonder: which
part of my brain should I use to understand this work—the logical,
symbol-deciphering left brain, the free-associative sensuous right brain,
my memory , my imagination, my vision or my touch?
Part of the affinity I feel for Sherwood’s work is that I can draw
a parallel between her practice as a painter and my own practice as a
writer. To write this essay I assemble words, form phrases, compose
sentences. I free-associate, allowing a word or phrase to summon
memory, to lead me astray. I follow strands of thought until they
peter out, trail off in a trickle. When I reach the end of a strand,
I move on. Tomorrow I will come back and add or delete. What
I delete will leave a trace behind. The trace will govern what
new words I add. I will observe patterns that I was not conscious
of while writing yesterday. I will move and rearrange, juxtapose
and overlap patterns, draw connections, connect the dots. This
layering and rearranging is not governed by the logical left brain. Often
I do what I do simply because it feels right. Over time, after
days and perhaps weeks of working in this way, the seams between the
additions are smoothed out; the illusion of a logical train of thought
begins to emerge.
This is not the only way I know how to write, but it somehow seems appropriate
to Sherwood’s work. I am not an art historian or critic. It’s
hard to know where to start. Should I try to create an image of
the painting in the reader’s mind’s eye, or to enhance the
experience of viewers who have already seen it for themselves? Should
I narrate Sherwood’s painting process or her thought process with
the clusters of interlocking ideas that make up her imagery? In
what ways does her biography figure in all this and in what ways is it
irrelevant? I pose these questions. I circle back to new
starting points. My process is slow, accretive, drawing attention
to its false leads and fortuitous mishaps.
At what point do I talk about my own disability? I am legally blind. I
have a significant vision impairment which compromises my ability to
perceive Sherwood’s work visually. I know the work through
touch and, drawing on my friendship with the artist, through what Katherine
has said about it. I can talk about Katherine’s process,
how the work was made. I can talk about the ideas that went into
its making. I can talk about the feel of the paint, or I should
say, the different feels of the paint, since the smooth texture of the
creamy ground is radically different from the thick sections of poured
paint with its ridges and cracks. I can talk about the colors,
because I still perceive color accurately. But can I really claim
to know these paintings? This raises a complex philosophical debate
about the role of vision in epistemology. Can I claim to have first-hand
knowledge of this work, or is what I know merely hearsay—what I
have heard Katherine and others say about it? I could ask the same
question about any viewer—to what extent is understanding of this
or any work dependent on knowing the different ideas and elements behind
it? Why else do art museums publish catalogues and post biographical
and critical wall texts?
I could leave the biographical fact of my disability out of this meditation
and remain the disembodied consciousness of this essay. But Katherine
inspires me to incorporate my visual impairment into the body of my text,
to draw attention to it, to make use of it as an element in the work. My
tactual explorations of Sherwood’s paintings give me, if not special
knowledge, then at least a particular perspective. 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
Back
to Top |
|
