A LITTLE ARTWORK

By Ed Sherwood

Since my highest calling in life has been to write or more specifically to document and share through the medium of writing, certain things I have experienced, known and learned in this lifetime, it’s easy for me to forget that I once use to spend a lot of time drawing, illustrating and sometimes painting, what I saw or imagined.

For many years I considered drawing, illustrating and painting a form of ‘training’ for the countless hours I would one day spend sitting attempting to write. The following images, with more to add, are a minute sample of the hundreds of drawings and illustrations I did more than ten, twenty and thirty years ago.

All were done ‘free hand’ without using tracing paper, light boxes, photocopying machines and/or ‘grids’, so when I did copy something (i.e.: a photo in a book), if the ‘original’ was very small, as it usually was, and I wanted to produce a larger illustration any enlargement would have to be an eye-hand-brain co-ordination thing. For a more capable illustrator, and I have seen the work of many more capable than I, including illustrators capable of producing an image (i.e.: a portrait) in less time, it would be a ‘no-brainer’. For me, it was a matter of observation and a lot of practice, patience and perhaps most of all persistence, since the exercise of producing an accurate ‘impression’ of what I saw, felt and/or imagined, was often physically and mentally exhausting. With this being the case, with some exceptions, ‘the joy’ of drawing, illustrating and/or painting, like writing for me, was more in completing something, in having created it, rather than in the process or ‘journey’ of getting there.

In contrast, the joy of ceramic art and design, which I studied full-time at Derby University from 1990-1992, was both in the process and in completing something. This is because I derive more enjoyment from making things. Working in three dimensions and especially with clay, it’s easy to feel directly connected to the earth, and the Earth. It’s also very alchemical and elemental working with base materials, physical elements, chemical reactions and heat, and a lot more sensual. The creativity and skill of designing and making something from a ball of clay spinning on a wheel, and/or by other means, that is both artistic and functional (i.e.: useful), has always appealed to me, and the two years I dedicated to experiencing this remains with me, as does the two (full-time) years I spent at The Institute of Art and Design, in Gt. Yarmouth, nine years earlier, learning graphic design.

Barry Hughes, the college Dean, who was a mentor and friend to me, asked me when I attended the college entry interview “What is graphic design?” I paused for a moment and replied, “Communication. Graphic design is about finding an effective way to communicate something through the media of visual art and design.”

As the expression goes, ‘a picture can say a thousands words’ and it can be a photograph, an illustration, a painting, a sign and symbol. Similarly, a thousand words or less or more, or one, can ‘paint a picture’, and both can effectively communicate something about something else, including the communicator. With this in mind I share a little artwork, from years gone by.

Man’s Best Friend:

When I left my parents house in 1981, at aged sixteen, to begin a two year full time course in Graphic Art & Design at the prestigious Gt. Yarmouth College of Art & Design, I left behind a very much loved family dog called ‘Harry’, who I had experienced a special relationship with. I had rescued him as a pup, by another name, from a cruel and abusive town slum alcoholic ‘owner’, who beat him repeatedly, before I could give him another life in the countryside where Harry changed from a dog afraid of any human contact to man’s best friend. When the circumstances of moving far away from my parent’s house to attend art college did not allow me to take Harry with me, I carried him in my heart and put that love into one of my first pieces of ‘commissioned’ artwork (Fig.1).