University of California Berkeley - Blue and Gold Yearbook (Berkeley, CA)

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1 The Beauty ot the Organic T vo paintings hang side by side in Katherine Sherwood ' s office in Kroeber Hall. One painting is representative of Sherwood ' s earlier style, and the other has a more recent genesis. The newer painting has an organic quality, a quality of roughness about its texture and brushwork, whose antecedent can be glimpsed in Sherwood ' s earlier work. This painting is spare and flowing, acrylic paints layered over photolithograhs of Sherwood ' s own cerebral angiograms (x-rays of blood vessels within the brain). These recent paintings, flowing with organic curves and textures, sit at the crux of art and science. Sherwood has taken images that were traditionally considered to be outside the realm of art and appropriated them in her work. Now, magnified a thousandfold, these images dare the viewer to regard them as anything but art. When asked how she decided to incorporate these cerebral angiograms into her art, Sherwood said, I first started using these [angiograms] after my 3 Knock Your Block Off (1998), mixed media on canvas, 96 x 72 inches The curvacious forms trapped in blocks at the lower right hand corner are King Solomon ' s Seals. stroke, which was in May of 1997. 1 had a cerebral hemorrhage, and they performed this procedure (on me]. When the procedure was over, I sat up and saw this beautiful image of the inside of my head, and I was moved to say, ' I have to gel those. I want those. ' She adds, with a laugh, All the doctors and nurses looked at me like I was crazy, and I said, ' But I ' m an artist, I have to get these! ' The spirit that moves Sherwood to create is difficult to describe. It comes from a place that ' s very hard to put into words, she says, pointing to intuition rather than a set process. From art history, 1 draw a lot of inspiration, especially all the work that was done around the first millenium, says Sherwood. The cerebral angiograms are another major source of inspiration. Sherwood points to the moment when she first saw her cerebral angiograms as the catalytic event that propelled her back into the studio. That was the first time 1 had even allowed myself to think as an artist, because before I was just so taken with the fact that 1 had to get well. Sherwood ' s stroke changed more than her focus and subject matter; it also transformed her entire painting process. Prior to her stroke, Sherwood was right-handed. After the stroke, Sherwood taught herself to paint with her left hand. Her left hand, says Sherwood, is more free than her right hand. My recent work also tends to be on a larger scale, she comments. Although Sherwood has used brain imagery in the past, her recent work carries a much more personal meaning, where the cerebral angiograms come to symbolize the concept of art making |as| a life-saving device. , Sherwood ' s painting process begins by laying lu-r canvas on a horizontal surface in her home studio. There is a bed in my house that is too high for me now. 1 converti ' il llial from my bed to my siutlio table. I lay the canvas on the bed and work on it while I sii in a chair with wheels. 1 just circle around [the bed] in my chair After the stroke, Sherwood wanted to detoxify the process, so she switched from oil paints to acrylics, and she finishes the paintings with oils. On these canvases, Sherwood juxtaposes photolithographs of her cerebral angiograms with thick, iw ' islin lines of paint and the occasional Kinj; Solomon ' s Seal. The seals are images culleii horn a ini ' dicval in.uHis( ripl cnlillcd ' Ihc I.emegetan. They have the abiliu I ' : ' 1

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ncludes being able to be in a studio with intelligent young bodies ind minds who are willing to experiment with me. My students iren ' t aware that I ' m experimenting, but I try many different approaches to teaching movement, and to getting into whatever a itudent needs to be able to understand liow to perform a particular |:ask. 1 often use IteachingI as an experiment ground. It ' s where I ' ll Tiake a phrase, see if I can turn that into a step. I also like keeping a lulse on what college students are thinking — ' m not that old, but I am quite a bit older than everybody that ' s here — Afhat the mentality is, Afhat do people want iiese days with iiemselves. The more I nteract with students, the nore I realize how mportant dance is to iheir education while Jiey ' re here. Being able to express themselves, to be ahysical. to move to nusic, to train musculariy heir bodies, to take dance seriously as an art form ind as a form of :ommunication, not just a Dastime, is all an mportant part of their education. I like being ible to cultivate what will je tomorrow ' s audience md tomorrow ' s arts matrons. If you ' ve done something, you can jppreciate all the difficulties and intricacies. i you ' ve taken a dance :lass and you know how lard it is to balance on jne leg, when you see somebody balance on poinie and iiold it for 10 seconds without mo ' ing, you think Wow, that ' s amazing. The jiitrained eye would not necessarily see that. The untrained eye ees the high leaps and many, many turns as impressive. The :rained eye sees the in-between steps and understands what that ' s ill about. It looks for a message and something to touch them Features within the dance. If I can impart that idea to just one person out of a class of forty, and they go out into the world and make all their money and become an arts patron, then they will be able to give back in some way. [Teaching is] a physically hard job. When I first started teaching here, I had ten two-hour dance classes a week. Right now I have thiriccn iwo-hour dance classes a week. There ' s a different kind of preparation and a different kind of energy than a lecture class. CH: Do you feel that Berkeley gives adequate support to the arts? SL: I don ' t think that UC Berkeley necessarily, in the eye of the public or the eye of the media, values the arts. 1 think that you and I both know that UC Berkeley is famous for its science, its research, its math, its law, its architecture, and it should be. But, there is another side to Berkeley, and it seems to be downplayed to a certain degree. Nevertheless, the arts are not dead. I think that ' s the important thing, that is to remember that we ' re still here, all these classes are still here, so there is some kind of support. It allows people to be an art major, a dramatic art major, a music major. I wish it were more balanced. The faculty here does a lot of creative activities. A lot of research is creative. Really good research is beyond the box, it ' s thinking outside of the box. In the arts, we think outside of the box every day and all the time. The problem is, it doesn ' t bring in the money, and the money is, in a sense, the bottom line. 1 realize now that in the arts you have to fight and struggle a bit more, because our voice is quiet. ■ Interview conducted by Cynthia Houng I

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ire illness and disease — [help] with the acquisition of wealth — nd give] sophistication and worldly wisdom. These arterial anderings, these glimpses into the rivers and canals that feed a ind, seem vaguely voyeuristic and yet undeniably universal. i came to art relatively late; I was about twenty-four or twenty- e when I began, Sherwood says, commenting that her periences are encouraging towards young aspiring artists who ay not have very much formal training. As an undergraduate, aerwood majored in art histon, ' . Her background, she feels, has ade her more of an artist teacher, leaving its imprint upon her aching methods. Sherwood has been an associate professor in the t Practice Department at UC Berkeley for over a decade, teaching 1 levels of classes, from The Language of Painting, an troductory course, to graduate level curricula. Her enthusiasm for aching shines through In her interactions writh students, where le often takes a very personal, one-on-one approach to istruction. Passing through Kroeber ' s studios on a lazy afternoon, ne can observe Sherwood in earnest discussion, helping her udents develop their technique as well as discover their unique ;nses of aesthetics. ' The most enjoyable aspect |of teaching at Berkeley], she luses, is my interaction with the students. It ' s what keeps me here nd what I truly love. One of the classes that I teach, called The Features Language of Painting, pretty much draws students from every single part of the university. There are always five or six art majors, but 1 love teaching non-artists about art and introducing them to art. 1 think teaching is so important because I ' m giving the students knowledge with which to be art lovers and art majors, equally. 1 always joke that I ' m training stockbrokers to enjoy art. In 1999, the San Francisco Art Institute awarded Sherwood the prestigious Adaline Kent Award for her most recent work. The award is given yearly to a talented, promising, and deserving California artist. The 1999 Adaline Kent Award Committee wrote of her work, In viewing Sherwood ' s paintings, visual traces of the epiphany of human imagination are revealed. The award included a solo exhibition, held at the San Francisco Institute of Art from June 3 through July 3, 1999. On the strengths of this exliibit, Sherwood was chosen to participate in the Whitney Museum ' s Biennial Exhibition in January of 2000, a prestigious exhibit held in New York City that has helped propel several artists ' careers, though for a mature, established artist like Sherwood, inclusion in the Whitney Biennial may simply be considered as an affirmation of her asion as an artist. ■ Cynthia Hoiing Can Make A Woman (1999), mixed media on canvas, 108 x 84 inches Kathehne Sherwood at work