Artist Katherine Sherwood was just 44 when a hemorrhage in her brain's left hemisphere paralyzed the right side of her body — forever changing her artwork.
Before the stroke in 1997, her mixed-media paintings featured strange and cryptic images: medieval seals, transvestites, bingo cards. Reviewers called her work cerebral and deliberate. Creativity, says the UC Berkeley professor, was an intellectual and often angst-filled struggle.
After the stroke, she could no longer paint on canvases mounted vertically, so she laid them flat, moving around them in a chair with wheels. She learned how to work with her left hand; it had less fine motor control but was more free and natural in its movements. She began to use different, less toxic types of paint, which led to new kinds of visual effects.
And she began to more deeply explore the beauty of blood vessels in the brain after seeing some of her own brain scans.
Critics called the new work intuitive and raw, more vibrant, abstract, expressive.
Her attitudes too had changed: "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.