Harrald Morton Sherwin (Harry) was born in 1954 at Murray Bridge when it was a small town on the River Murray in South Australia. Sherwin is the youngest of four surviving children and his artistic practise was encouraged by both his parents. His father, Vernon Henry Sherwin, was an Oxford educated Church of England minister, a member of the New Guinea Rifle Brigade. He was also a fellow of the Royal Society of Anthropologists and his wet-plate photography documented the customs and dress of Indigenous people of northern Australia and Papua New Guinea. Vernon died suddenly when Harry was in his final year of school and his enduring interest in reading is reflected in Harry Sherwin’s work, particularly the inclusion of the social commentary in newsprint re-represented in his still lives. Sherwin’s mother, Mary Rose Morton, was encouraged to write to missionaries as a student of the Creveen Girls’ School in North Adelaide and this instigated a pen friendship with Vernon Sherwin. Paintings acquired by Mary’s father were displayed in the Sherwin family home including works by Horace Trenerry, Septimus Power as well as a Hans Heysen landscape in oil never publicly displayed. Mary normalised art practise; she regularly rode her bicycle to sites on the Murray River to draw en plein air and this had a profound and enduring influence on her son.
Sherwin boarded at St.Peter’s College in Adelaide from the age of 11 and he attended weekend art lessons hosted on the campus by the art masters Hugo Shaw and David Dridan. He also developed a portfolio of drawings from his contributions to large-scale decorations created for school dances. In his final year, Sherwin took his portfolio to a contact in the South Australian Department of Education and the meeting resulted in his enrolment in fine art at the Torrens College of Advanced Education. He graduated in 1975 with an Advanced Diploma of Teaching, returning that year to finish, ironically, the painting component of the course because he had directed his energy into polishing his dissertation on Marcel Duchamp: ‘The impact of indifference’. Sherwin’s first placement as an art teacher was at Campbelltown High School. At the end of the year, Hugo Shaw rode his bicycle to Sherwin’s address in Prospect. He encouraged the young teacher to apply for the soon-to-be vacated position of art teacher at St.Peter’s College Junior School, a position that Sherwin held for five years. In 1980, Sherwin resigned from his alma mater to take up part-time employment at Pulteney Grammar School with the intention of availing himself of more time to concentrate on his own art practise. After 1991, he taught in the Mid North of South Australia.
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. Whilst still 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.
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 watercolours of the Royal Canal in Islington, United Kingdom and he visited the Prado in Spain for the purposes of studying Diego Velasquez. In the same year, he created pen and ink drawings, gouache and collage works during his travels in South America.
Sherwin cites influences from the French Impressionists and the Post Impressionists, particularly Cezanne’s still lives. The elegiac tone of the Australian Impressionists as colourists is prominent in his plein air work but so too is his admiration for the atmosphere created in paintings by Lloyd Rees and J.M.W.Turner. 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. He renders numerous visual quotations of works by Édouard Manet, and others, in his still lives and collages.
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.
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 hangs 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.
Sherwin’s first exhibition was held in 1980 at the Cutcliffe Gallery in Manly. It was professionally successful but a financial flop. On the morning of the official opening, a co-exhibitor became drunk on whisky and abused in-coming patrons from the top of the gallery entrance stairs. Nevertheless, Sherwin continued to show in 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 in 2012 under the directorship of Alan Sisley.
Bibliography
Are We There Yet? Harry Sherwin: A Survey Exhibition 1980 – 2012, Orange Regional Gallery, Orange, 2012.
Australian War Memorial URL. This website provides an image and caption of Capt. Padre Vernon Henry Sherwin in the New Guinea Volunteer Rifle brigade c. 1940. https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/P06223.001 accessed 23 February 2017.
Finucane, Paul and Aileen. The Old Pier, Union Hall, Red Barn Publishing, Skeagh, 2013.
Sevenhill Winery URL. This website includes information on the portrait of Brother John May. https://www.sevenhill.com.au/system/newsletters/assets/000/000/005/original/SHC12067_Tiber_November_2011_web.pdf.
Interview
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:
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- Date written:
- 2020
- Last updated:
- 2020
