Tragedy Turns a Right-Handed Artist
Michael Dediu
Page One Feature
Tragedy Turns a Right-Handed Artist
Into a Lefty -- and a Star in Art World
By PETER WALDMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
BERKELEY, Calif. -- At first, a splitting headache, then vertigo, then
collapse.
By the time paramedics wheeled Katherine Sherwood into the emergency
room
at Alta Bates Hospital here, the right side of her body was completely
paralyzed, and she couldn't speak.
Ms. Sherwood, a seemingly healthy 44-year-old, had suffered a massive
stroke. Doctors doubted that the painter and University of California
art
professor would walk again, let alone paint -- if she survived at all.
That was three years ago. Today, at 47, Ms.
Sherwood's artistic career is thriving as never
before.
Still paralyzed on her right side, she has taught
herself to
paint left-handed. The result, to her own amazement,
has been a flurry of work that has turned the obscure
painter into one of the art world's rising stars. Her
canvases are selling briskly for the first time in her
25
years as an artist. What's more, Ms. Sherwood says
paintings now flow from her brush without the creative
angst she experienced as a right-handed artist.
"Her work has been radically transformed," says Larry
Rinder, curator of contemporary American art at New
York's Whitney Museum of American Art, which features two of Ms.
Sherwood's large abstract paintings in its current Biennial Exhibition,
a
prestigious showcase for new art. "It is very rare for me to see work
that is that
instantaneously impressive, that fresh and powerful," Mr. Rinder says.
The artist's newfound success raises an intriguing question: Could the
stroke, by
injuring part of Ms. Sherwood's brain, have enhanced her powers of
creativity?
The answer, say brain researchers, is quite possibly yes.
Paul Corballis, a neuroscientist at Dartmouth College, in Hanover, N.H.,
offers
a startling hypothesis, yet one grounded in the latest research on the
human
mind: that Ms. Sherwood's stroke, by damaging or disconnecting the part
of
her brain responsible for logical reasoning, may have freed up the rest
of her
mind to think more creatively, unencumbered by normal neurological
constraints.
"The thinking now is that all our great human intelligence comes with a
hidden
cost in other arenas," says Dr. Corballis.
This theory can't be tested inside Ms. Sherwood's head, of course, and
other
factors could account for her success. But Ms. Sherwood agrees that the
stroke drastically altered the way she thinks and paints.
"Sometimes I look at my work now and ask, 'Did I paint that?' " she
says.
"There's a sense of disconnect that was never there before. It's almost
as if the
ideas just pass through me, instead of originating in my head."
An art-history major in
college, Ms. Sherwood
didn't start painting until
the end of her
undergraduate years.
Highly cerebral in her
approach, she
incorporated a range of
esoteric images --
transvestites, medieval
seals, spy photos, bingo
cards -- into
high-concept pieces with
themes such as sexual
identity, militarism and
luck. Her 1995
self-portrait, "Old
Enemies," depicts a snowman-shaped figure with scraps of bingo cards for
legs
and photographs of hydrogen bombs exploding in her womb -- "suggesting
procreation and nuclear apocalypse are equally matters of chance,"
according
to the catalog for the exhibit that earned Ms. Sherwood tenure at
Berkeley in
1996.
An 'Unburdened' Feeling
Today, she couldn't create such images even if she wanted to -- which
she says
she does not. Her fine-motor control of her left arm is minimal,
allowing her to
paint in only the broadest strokes. Yet, Ms. Sherwood says, her left
hand
enjoys an ease and grace with the brush that her right hand never had.
("Unburdened," is how she describes it.) It also has a mind of its own.
Now,
when she sits down to paint -- in a rolling chair that lets her scoot
around a
canvas laid flat on a table -- she often marvels at what comes out.
"Somehow my left hand doesn't reflect the struggle -- emotionally or on
the
canvas -- that was always there" in the past, she says.
The upshot is a style critics and curators describe as "raw,"
"intuitive," and "of
pure intent." The Whitney's Mr. Rinder, comparing two works, from before
and
after her stroke, says the earlier painting looks "studied ... relying
on
conventional symmetries." Circles on the pre-stroke canvas "look like
they
were drawn to be irregular," he says; circles on the post-stroke
painting "just
are irregular."
"There is something more visceral, less intellectual, about these
[recent]
pictures," says David Ross, who, as former head of the Whitney and now
director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has known Ms.
Sherwood since the 1970s. "Her painting now is much better, much more
interesting, than before. That's quite miraculous, but it's true."
Last year, Ms. Sherwood won the Adeline Kent Award, given annually by
the
San Francisco Art Institute to a top California artist. Then her work,
including
the 1999 painting "Facility of Speech," was selected for the Whitney's
Biennial,
and she became a finalist for a major S.F. MOMA award. Meanwhile,
collectors have snapped up most of her works from the past two years;
sales
were sporadic at best before the stroke. Now, her large paintings sell
for
$10,000 and up.
"The paintings are breathtaking," says Laurence Mathews, an executive
with an
art-auction Web site in San Francisco who has five of Ms. Sherwood's
recent
canvases in his personal collection. Mr. Mathews, without knowing her
story,
fell in love with Ms. Sherwood's work at a gallery exhibit last year, he
says. He
doesn't care for her earlier paintings. "She gained some sort of power,
some
clarity, from the stroke," he says.
History is replete with examples of other artists who overcame
disabilities and
went on to greater success. Portrait painter Chuck Close, for example,
has
done his most highly acclaimed work since being rendered a near-total
quadriplegic by a spinal blood clot in 1988. He paints with his teeth
and a
makeshift Velcro hand.
In Oliver Sacks's 1995 book, "An Anthropologist on Mars," the
neurologist
writes about a 65-year-old artist who goes completely colorblind as the
result
of a head injury. Morose from his loss of color, the artist, whom Dr.
Sacks
identifies only as Jonathan I., becomes nocturnal and paints terrifying
pictures of
dark, raging faces and dismembered body parts. But after two years or
so, as
his memory of color fades, he comes to feel "privileged" to see "a world
of pure
form, uncluttered by color." He undergoes a creative renewal, and his
paintings
are lauded by admirers who assume his "black-and-white period" is just
another artistic phase.
In Ms. Sherwood's case, it took months after the stroke before she even
considered painting again. Her speech recovered much more quickly, at
first
with a new accent that some friends attributed to her New Orleans
upbringing.
But her frozen right side defied all treatment -- from conventional
electromagnetic therapy to alternative forms such as acupuncture and
Reiki
massage. As weeks turned to months, doctors warned her that the
paralysis
might be permanent.
"I figured her art career was over," recalls her neurologist, Randall
Starkey.
A Fit of Depression
She grew depressed, as is common among stroke victims. Determined to
paint
again right-handed, she rebuffed friends and colleagues who pleaded with
her
to give her left hand a try. She learned to walk again, dragging her
right leg
behind her, but her days of rambling along San Francisco Bay with her
husband
and five-year-old daughter were over. She couldn't slice a bagel or tie
her
daughter's shoes.
"In two minutes," she says, "I went from being a healthy 44-year-old
woman to
the equivalent of an 80-year-old invalid."
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.
Staying Out of the Way
"All of a sudden, it flowed," says her husband, Jeff Adams, also an
artist.
"Suddenly she's got me shuffling canvases, racing back and forth to the
paint
store for more colors." The flow didn't stop. Before the stroke, when
her work
would occasionally stall, Ms. Sherwood conferred with her husband in her
studio. Now it never stalls, he says. In fact, Mr. Adams has had more
trouble
getting back to work since the stroke than his wife has.
"I try to stay out of her way," he says. "I don't want to spoil what's
going on in
there."
A year after the stroke, when Ms. Sherwood exhibited some of her new
paintings for the first time, a San Francisco gallery owner asked how it
felt to be
a better painter left-handed than right-handed. "I was horrified," she
says. "But I
have to acknowledge it's true."
How could this be? For decades, neuroscientists have known the brain's
left
and right sides house different mental functions. Notably, the left
hemisphere,
which controls the body's right side, is dominant in language and
complex
thought, while the right side, which controls the body's left side,
handles
advanced perceptual tasks. But that doesn't mean scientists are
"left-brained"
and artists are "right-brained." In a normal person, the two sides of
the brain are
intricately linked, assuring a seamless presence of all types of skills.
Still, it is possible, neuroscientists say, that, given the location of
Ms.
Sherwood's stroke, in the so-called internal capsule of her left
hemisphere, the
hemorrhage remapped circuitry inside her head in a way that strengthened
her
more-artistic right side. Specifically, they say, the stroke could have
at least
partially disabled the specialized system in the left hemisphere that
researchers
have dubbed the "interpreter." This system constantly seeks explanations
for
why events occur; seeks order and reason, even when there isn't any.
Research
has shown it can overwhelm other mental processes, so weakening it could
improve one's art, experts say.
In a 1998 experiment conducted by Dartmouth brain researcher George
Wolford, participants were asked to guess if a light was going to appear
at the
top or bottom of a computer screen. The experiment was rigged so the
light
would flash at the top 80% of the time but in a random sequence. The
human
subjects invariably tried to find a pattern, and thus never guessed
correctly
more than 68% of the time. By contrast, rats, which don't have an
"interpreter"
bullying their thoughts, learned to select the top bar every time,
scoring 80%.
The 'Thin Moment'
The experiment was applied to split-brain patients -- people who have
had the
links between their left and right hemispheres surgically severed to
treat epilepsy
-- and the right hemisphere responded much like the rats did. The right
brain
"does not try to interpret its experience and find deeper meaning,"
concludes
Dartmouth neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga. "It continues to live in the
thin
moment of the present."
That "thin moment," or what athletes call "the zone," is the envy of
chess
masters and pro golfers, says Dartmouth's Dr. Corballis. Many of them
report
performing at their best on "autopilot," he says, when they are
oblivious to what
they are doing.
So does Ms. Sherwood. Left-brained or right, she worries now about
losing
the magic touch as suddenly as she found it. In recent months she has
been
regaining her mental facility for analyzing and discussing paintings in
academic
terms, which she lost completely after the stroke. She even gave some
thought
to teaching a graduate-level seminar next fall, something she hasn't
done for
three years. But she changed her mind.
"I suddenly realized I'd have the same mental burdens I had before the
stroke,"
she says. "My career's at a totally different level now, and I just feel
obligated
toward that."