Design and Art Australia Online

Harald Morton Sherwin (Harry) was born in 1954 in the small town of Murray Bridge on the River Murray in South Australia.

As a boarder at St.Peter’s College in Adelaide, he attended weekend art lessons hosted on the campus by the art masters Hugo Shaw and David Dridan.

Having spent his childhood in the water of the Murray River, much of his oeuvre is preoccupied with the transparent planes of water and shifting surfaces. In his twenties, he purchased a riverside shack on the Murray River at Swan Reach that he said “started as a sentimental purchase and very quickly became a corner stone of my career, allowing me to paint plein air landscapes.” For a few years after his marriage to Rose, nee Koteschel (1954-2011), he lived in the seaside town of Port Elliot on the Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia and this is where his son Saxon was raised. In 1991, Sherwin moved to the South Australian small inland town of Watervale to live with his partner, Llewena Llewellyn. He used recycled materials to build a studio attached to their cottage. Vineyards surround the cottage and town of Watervale and so the working nature of vineyards, labourers, wine and small towns have all become part of Sherwin’s visual language. He has repeatedly worked the vintage picking season in the vineyards of Wendouree owned by Tony and Lita Brady.

Sherwin cites influences from the French Impressionists and the Post Impressionist and the elegiac tone of the Australian Impressionists. From his early career, Sherwin’s plein air landscapes in watercolour and oil have been at the heart of his practise. His The Ferry at Walker Flat, 1985, oil on canvas, 60cm x 92 cm, formally in the State Bank Collection was co-winner of the Sir Hans Heysen Memorial Prize in the same year and the first of many landscapes to be entirely completed en plein air. The curator Alan Sisley recounted attending the ‘Monet and the Impressionist’ exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2008: “We slowly made our way through the large exhibition commenting on every picture with Harry giving fascinating clues into the techniques of the artist and Cezanne’s eccentric and secretive lifestyle.” After a while it was noticed that Sherwin’s knowledgeable commentary had attracted a trailing audience. This deep understanding of both art history and art techniques underpins Sherwin’s oeuvre.

Sherwin’s figurative painting includes formal portraits such as that of Brother John May, Sevenhill Cellars’ Jesuit Winemaker Emeritus, 2012, oil on canvas, 110cm x 80cm, Sevenhill Cellars. Sherwin represented the elderly winemaker with the carpentry tools of his youth in the uncommission work hanging in the cellar door of the winery in 2017. A small informal portrait of Sherwin’s friend Tom Gleghorn, 2014, oil on board, 36.0 × 26.0cm, private collection depicts the artist in his ninetieth decade informally leaning back in a chair. Gleghorn arrived at Watervale one very hot day “with his minder and missus” to gift paper, paints and canvas that he would no longer use. The company took tea and Gleghorn consented to a photograph in the dining room that Sherwin later used as a reference to realise the portrait.

Figurative painting merges with abstraction in Sherwin’s crowd scenes. In an interview, ABC Adelaide radio host, Peter Goers OAM, discussed Standard (hats), 1984, oil on canvas, 120.0 × 135.0cm, private collection that hung above the fireplace in Goer’s Norwood home. The crowd of hats in a newspaper clipping that informed this particular work reminded Sherwin of “Monet’s waterlillies that sit in the frame edge to edge, almost a colour field abstraction that resolves itself into a narrative, an antidote to the idea of a portrait.” Sherwin’s representations of crowds in news media that depict social events and sporting teams explore a dynamic movement that Alan Sisley likened to the movement of water.

Sherwin explores iconography as still life subjects in painting and collage. Everyday objects such as plastic bags, teapots, apples, glass, water and blue china extrapolate the effects of light, the landscape and social commentary, blurring the line of abstraction and realism. His first and unique watercolour depiction of a plastic bag filled with apples was sold to Eureka Antiques in 1991. Sherwin’s use of iconography is evident in his whimsical mudmaps crafted from sand and mixed media. Although the iconography can only be decoded by local knowledge, the mudmaps universally express the socially connected nature of regional communities. Sherwin regarded his mudmaps “almost like the bush ballads,” where themes of the landscape and the story of a town or a figure all find their way into the same image.

Throughout his career, Sherwin travelled overseas to undertake comparative viewings of the works of well-known artists. In 1983, he painted in Somerset, United Kingdom and in 1987 he painted in Thailand, Greece, Turkey and Egypt. Sherwin won the Thomas Laird Travelling Art Scholarship in 1995 to attend the Edinburgh College of Art summer school. This was followed by a painting trip to Italy. In Ireland, he painted The Cottage, Union Hall, 1995, oil on board, 25.0 × 45.5cm, private collection, in the fauvist style of Albert Marquet and the painting prompted the owners of Union Hall to compile works of the same subject by twenty-four other artists, all of which were published in a compilation entitled The Old Pier, Union Hall. In 2016, Sherwin painted in the United Kingdom, Spain and South America.

Harry Sherwin has held solo exhibitions and group exhibitions around Australia over sixty times throughout his career. In 2012, a survey exhibition was held at the City of Orange Art Gallery, NSW under the directorship of Alan Sisley.

*Jodie Vandepeer interviewed Harry Sherwin in his cottage and studio at Watervale, South Australia on the 22, 24 and 26 February, and the 17 March 2017.

Writers:

Jodie Vandepeer

Date written:

2020

Last updated:

2020