PHILIP LAWRENCE SHERROD, NA 
______NEW YORK ON CANVAS!
Philip Lawrence Sherrod has been painting raw, earthy expressionist pictures for more than two decades. Now that expressionism is back in vogue, one would expect his work to be hailed by critics as a typical manifestation of the new spirit, but that hasn’t happened. It may be that his work is too authentically
expressionist and that the new fashion in expressionism calls for a self-conciousness and hip reference to sources that Sherrod’s painting doesn’t contain. It isn’t that his work is without sources:
Delacroix, Van Gogh, Ensor, Soutine come immediately to mind. And it isn’t that he is naive; like most artists he takes what is useful to him from imagery around him. But his paintings are direct
expressions of what is going on inside his mind. They are uncalculated, unedited, and some- times almost unbearably vulgar outpourings of his psyche, diametrically opposed to the contrived emotionalism of the more sophisticated” neo-expressionists.”
Sherrod’s paintings/- often embarrass us, for they allow us to peer more deeply into the churning mind of the artist than is comfortable. There are feelings and yearnings revealed that we would, perhaps, rather not know about. But isn’t that what authentic expressionism is really about? Expressionism is not a
particular style or manner of painting, but a spontaneous outpouring of the ideas, images, and emotions at the core of the artist’s life. That is what Philip Sherrod is giving us; whether we like it or not, whether the critics recognize him or not. It is the only way he can paint.
Excerpt from Foreword/-Sherrod Catalog- (61 Painting Exhibition)
Thomas W. Leavitt, Director,
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1985
Thomas W. Leavitt, Director,
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1985
It is difficult to express the astonishment and awe one feels when
walking into the small area that constitutes Philip L. Sherrod’s studio. There are canvases piled on and leaning against everything stationary--the perfect image of the artist’s studio. That is the microenviroment of Philip Sherrod. His raw palette and heavy brushstroke capture his passionate approach to his subject matter, whether in form of cityscapes, nudes, portraits, or self-portraits.
The images pulse with a life force too strong to ignore, demanding a response from the viewer. In an artistic age dominated by ab- stract expressionism, in which content has been reduced to the dialectic tension between color and form, the powerful, descriptive
literalness of Sherrod’s images might be rejected as trite and out of date. Without a doubt, he maintains the significance of the sub-
ject matter throughout his work. Despite his rapture with the physical properities of paint on canvas, he refuses to allow color to upsurp the image. To understand the strength of Sherrod’s work and his significant contribution, one must penetrate the miasimic
contortion of color and see his subject matter, because each is equally integral to the whole. Whether labeled an absurdist, or colorist, or even a pornographic painter, Sherrod illustrates with his subject matter an individual approach to the world. “Sherrod is an artist of extreme individual eruption. He is both a supreme enviro- mentalist and a visulizer of the human condition. “1 It is an in-
stinctive, personal response that sees optimism and meaning in life, as well as the “ugliness, stalemate, horror and repression”2 of it. He utilizes images based on a universal visual and emotional experience. Often depicting the less-than-ideal facet of the experience, the primal energy of Sherrod’s canvases confronts the viewer with an intense visual challenge.
Excerpt from introduction/-Sherrod Catalog-(61 Painting Exhibition) Cynthia Wayne, Curator Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 1985
-Prix de Romas’s-..(Roma*Construziones)-1985/-1986
Evincing a junk sensibilty to painterly three-dimensional works fashioned from urban detritus, Philip Lawrence Sherrod asserts
how things are--while in same instant, the present tense of this
assertion slips, by way of the redolence of his found object appropriations, and oscillates into the past. A woman’s boot, a wheel from a shopping cart, a mangled toy helicopter, a cross- section of a beer can are among the myriad, trash out of which,
Sherrod’s work is composed. The objects themselves lose their identity, or more exactly, lose the literalness of their identity, as they function within Sherrod’s collages. In fact, these things almost seem to dematerialize before the viewer’s eyes--an effect which
itself bears out the effectiveness of the artwork. Sherrod has taught at the Art Students League for many years and founded The
Street Painters in 1977. He said that he “took his work to the street to get free of the studio dilemma that most artists end up with.”
It might also be said, conversely, that Sherrod takes the street to his work--raising it up into his art in a swirl of particulars of which
are gleaned with an alert eye, a quick wit, and a markedly laissez- faire hand. In seemly inadvertent ways his pieces are stamped with historical relevance. Arcane connections are made. Primitive and technological meld without contradiction: the lunar and the numerical, the prehuman and the post apocalyptic. It is archaeology in reverse, an unearthing of the present.
As do Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines’ of the 1950’s,
Sherrod’s work deals with the aesthetic problem that originally occured with the appearance of Duchamp’s Readymades early in the last century. Which is, to what degree does the realness--the “readymadeness’”-- of an object, such as a bicycle wheel or a plastic dinosaur, infringe upon and undermine its contextual de-
signation within a work of art? For Rauschenberg the answer was
fairly easy; “I think a painting is more like the real world if it is made out of the real world”. One would imagine that Sherrod shares this opinion, and its tempting to think of him as an urban realist in a frenzy of Neo-Dadist inspiration.
Oil paint, in any event, is his dominant medium, and representation
his dominant mode. Whether it is a thick textured cityscape or cloud formation or the wilderness of a human face, these small urgently rendered rectangles mediate and control, by brute poetic will, the energy of his found objects--which, though potent, are adjunct to the project of his painted images. This said however,
it must be stressed that the two work to--gether--cooperating to open a world of manifold visual layers; and one that manages never to feel offhanded, satirial, or clich’e.
Mark Dorrrity
New Art International Annual -2008
Philip Lawrence Sherrod is an artist who honors the nexuses and junctures where human life swells. His personal landscape and
great subject are the streets of New York. And accordingly, one
observes a panicked momentum to his work. It is almost as if his mission were beyond his--or for that matter anyone’s--power to properly accomplish, These paintings have a hasty, delirious , quasi-journalist quality, But at the same time , they strive to surpass the immediacy of their content, and to mirror with a jarring glance the city they celebrate.
Sherrod’s technique is impressionist, and his style is solidly his own. Nonetheless, as much as these paintings are products of an individual talent, one feels at the same time they are natural in-
evitable extrusions of the action they depict, by-products of urban frenzy. As colorful enviromental residue, they persist on the borderline between the organic and the inorganic, between purity
and pollution. His Marlborough Man is as human, perhaps, as Degas‘ absinthe drinker. Though the froth of pigment from which contemporary society is derived is garish. The yellow of Courbet’s parrot may seem the yellow of French’s mustard; the blue of Monet’s lily pond may look Windex.
Commentary (Free Lance Writer) -J. Sedley
New Art INternational Annual -2009
philip lawrence sherrod, NA
Born in 1935, painter Phillip Lawrence Sherrod earned a BS and BA from Oklahoma State University and studied at the Art Students League. ...
www.nationalacademy.org [Found on Google]
http://www.wix.com/
PHILIP LAWRENCE SHERROD'S WEBOOK.COM BLOGS
Mike Fernandez. Photography. New York City. 646 509 5990
Bowery Poetry Club, New York, NY http://bowerypoetry.com/#January_01 ... dozens of other poets and performers for this 18th annual New Year's Day marathon ...-2011.
PHILIP LAWRENCE SHERROD, POET READ POEM- ..3MINUTES, “-DRILLING*INTO/..-(JAW*BONE!)?..-LIKE*OFF*SHORE/-?..-(BLOOD*FLOWING/-?..-INTO*THE*/-..*WORDED*THROAT(!))”?
DAVID HOWARD KEITH HARING, NAM JUNE PAIK, CHRISTO, ART ... ALL "ART SEEN" TELEVISION SERIES PROGRAMS ARE 28 MINUTES IN LENGTH ...
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