Sherman Studios - Early Work

Watching and Waiting

1974
Acrylic mural - 10’x12’
New Rochelle High School

A Rock and an Egg

1975
A Study in Contrasts
Oil on canvas - 23” triangle
I chose two objects that I imagined to be opposites. Besides them being hard & fragile and rough & smooth, the rock was eons old and the egg was new. I later saw the rock as temporary matter and the egg as eternal spirt.

A Variation on the Yin-Yang

1975
Acrylic on panel - 23” x 23”
I painted this piece when I was 19 after visualizing it expanding infinitely. I considered it a symbol of infinite duality.
20 years later, the day after my mom passed away, I had an epiphany that it was an ancestry symbol, with us as the whole, our parents as the two circles within us, their parents within them, and so on.
Some years after that, while showing a version with the circles continuing, a physics teacher told me that it was infinite infinities in one, as the smallest imaginable circles still divide infinitely.
More years passed and a Taoist master told me that the center line was a perfect symbol for the Tao, the ‘Middle Way’ between opposing extremes.

Hilltop

1981
22” x 30” watercolor & friskit
At the Maryland Institute of Art a watercolor teacher introduced me to the watercolor frisket technique. But rather than painting it on with a brush, I chose to draw it on out of a squeeze bottle. This allowed for spontaneous lines with a crisp, clean look. A gallery owner once told me that I had created a computer graphic quality with paint.