Design and Art Australia Online

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. The award was announced via telegram and a photo was taken of Harry Sherwin flanked by the since disgraced Managing Director of the State Bank, Tim Marcus Clarke, and the German Consul-General.

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 recurrently employs iconography as still life subjects. Iconography such as plastic bags, teapots, apples, glass, water and blue china extrapolate the effects of light, the landscape and social commentary. He admires Giorgio Morandi for “slowing down the eye” and he regards still life and interiors as “paintings, not just subjects. They blur 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. Other repeated iconography such as green Coca Cola bottles, ceramic jugs, fruit, vegetables and matchboxes is also deployed in Sherwin’s collage. He holds Henri Matisse in high regard and his interest in collage is “real and enduring”; he considers himself to be predominantly a realist painter although the term takes no account of his “deep regard for abstraction and collage”. Sherwin’s use of iconography is perhaps most uniquely evident in his whimsical mudmaps crafted from sand and mixed media. The mudmaps playfully depict the cartography and people of specific small towns and although the iconography can only be decoded by local knowledge, they universally express the socially connected nature of regional communities. He regards 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 made connections with a number of painting contemporaries also represented by Terry Cutcliffe including: Charles Cooper, Georgina Bracken, Fred Frizelle and the academic Alan Sisley. The first exhibition became a conduit to commercially successful solo exhibitions at the Painters Gallery, Darlinghurst in 1982, 1984 and 1986. This was followed by solo exhibitions at the Access Gallery, Balmain in 1989 and 1992. Sherwin continued to show in solo exhibitions in South Australia another twenty-one times before a survey exhibition was held at the City of Orange Art Gallery, NSW in 2012 under the directorship of Alan Sisley. In 2016, the artist had another solo exhibition at the Barossa Regional Art Gallery. Together with the many group exhibitions, Sherwin has exhibited over sixty times throughout his career.

Most notably, Harry Sherwin won The Nora Heysen Centenary Art Prize for Still Life in 2011 with his large oil painting Yellow Table, 2011, oil on canvas, 110cm x 140cm, private collection. He was the recipient of the Balaklava Art Prize in 1996 and 2011. Sherwin won the Victor Harbor Rotary Watercolour Award in 2009 and the Burra Regional Art Gallery Portrait Prize in 2014 for his self-portrait. He was awarded the Clare Valley Rotary Art Show Open Prize and numerous other categories from 2000 through to 2016. Sherwin attained the Port Pirie Prize in 2016.

Harry Sherwin has been represented in numerous collections including: the New South Wales Government; State Bank of South Australia; Co-operative Building Society, SA; City of Hamilton Art Gallery, VIC; City of Orange Art Gallery, NSW as well as in private collections in the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Germany and throughout Australia.

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.

City of Adelaide URL. This website provides historical information on the Cremeen Girls’ School
http://www.cityofadelaide.com.au/assets/documents/MAP-TRAIL-historical-walking-hercules-heaven.pdf accessed 27 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. accessed 26 February 2017.

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:

Date written:

2020

Last updated:

2020