<<But if I meet them I try to remember ONE good thing about them- so I don't hate them >>
If you're unable to find one good thing about them, I suppose you can always try keeping the hate at bay by feeling sorry for them. If this "thought" process comes from something in their childhood that caused them to see the world as devoid of safety, that's pretty ironic. Scared nutters using a defense mechanism that scares everyone else.
Karen
P.S. You might find this WSJ article interesting. It's about a right handed painter who had a stroke that paralyzed her right side.
May 12, 2000
Tragedy Turns a Right-Handed Artist
Into a Lefty -- and a Star in Art World
By PETER WALDMAN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
BERKELEY, Calif. -- At first, a splitting headache, then
vertigo, then collapse. By the time paramedics wheeled
Katherine Sherwood into the emergency room at Alta
Bates Hospital here, the right side of her body was
completely paralyzed, and she couldn't speak.
Ms. Sherwood, a seemingly healthy 44-year-old, had
suffered a massive stroke. Doctors doubted that the
painter and University of California art professor would
walk again, let alone paint -- if she survived at all.
That was three years ago. Today, at
47, Ms. Sherwood's artistic career is
thriving as never before. Still
paralyzed on her right side, she has
taught herself to paint left-handed. The
result, to her own amazement, has
been a flurry of work that has turned
the obscure painter into one of the art
world's rising stars. Her canvases are
selling briskly for the first time in her
25 years as an artist. What's more, Ms.
Sherwood says paintings now flow from her brush
without the creative angst she experienced as a
right-handed artist.
"Her work has been radically transformed," says Larry
Rinder, curator of contemporary American art at New
York's Whitney Museum of American Art, which
features two of Ms. Sherwood's large abstract paintings
in its current Biennial Exhibition, a prestigious
showcase for new art. "It is very rare for me to see work
that is that instantaneously impressive, that fresh and
powerful," Mr. Rinder says.
The artist's newfound success raises an intriguing
question: Could the stroke, by injuring part of Ms.
Sherwood's brain, have enhanced her powers of
creativity? The answer, say brain researchers, is quite
possibly yes.
Paul Corballis, a neuroscientist at Dartmouth College, in
Hanover, N.H., offers a startling hypothesis, yet one
grounded in the latest research on the human mind: that
Ms. Sherwood's stroke, by damaging or disconnecting
the part of her brain responsible for logical reasoning,
may have freed up the rest of her mind to think more
creatively, unencumbered by normal neurological
constraints.
"The thinking now is that all our great human intelligence
comes with a hidden cost in other arenas," says Dr.
Corballis.
This theory can't be tested inside Ms. Sherwood's head,
of course, and other factors could account for her
success. But Ms. Sherwood agrees that the stroke
drastically altered the way she thinks and paints.
"Sometimes I look at my work now and ask, 'Did I paint
that?' " she says. "There's a sense of disconnect that was
never there before. It's almost as if the ideas just pass
through me, instead of originating in my head."
An art-history
major in
college, Ms.
Sherwood
didn't start
painting until
the end of her
undergraduate
years. Highly
cerebral in her
approach, she
incorporated a
range of
esoteric images -- transvestites, medieval seals, spy
photos, bingo cards -- into high-concept pieces with
themes such as sexual identity, militarism and luck. Her
1995 self-portrait, "Old Enemies," depicts a
snowman-shaped figure with scraps of bingo cards for
legs and photographs of hydrogen bombs exploding in
her womb -- "suggesting procreation and nuclear
apocalypse are equally matters of chance," according to
the catalog for the exhibit that earned Ms. Sherwood
tenure at Berkeley in 1996.
An 'Unburdened' Feeling
Today, she couldn't create such images even if she
wanted to -- which she says she does not. Her fine-motor
control of her left arm is minimal, allowing her to paint
in only the broadest strokes. Yet, Ms. Sherwood says,
her left hand enjoys an ease and grace with the brush that
her right hand never had. ("Unburdened," is how she
describes it.) It also has a mind of its own. Now, when
she sits down to paint -- in a rolling chair that lets her
scoot around a canvas laid flat on a table -- she often
marvels at what comes out.
"Somehow my left hand doesn't reflect the struggle --
emotionally or on the canvas -- that was always there" in
the past, she says.
The upshot is a style critics and curators describe as
"raw," "intuitive," and "of pure intent." The Whitney's
Mr. Rinder, comparing two works, from before and after
her stroke, says the earlier painting looks "studied ...
relying on conventional symmetries." Circles on the
pre-stroke canvas "look like they were drawn to be
irregular," he says; circles on the post-stroke painting
"just are irregular."
"There is something more visceral, less intellectual,
about these [recent] pictures," says David Ross, who, as
former head of the Whitney and now director of the San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, has known Ms.
Sherwood since the 1970s. "Her painting now is much
better, much more interesting, than before. That's quite
miraculous, but it's true."
Last year, Ms. Sherwood won the Adeline Kent Award,
given annually by the San Francisco Art Institute to a top
California artist. Then her work, including the 1999
painting "Facility of Speech," was selected for the
Whitney's Biennial, and she became a finalist for a major
S.F. MOMA award. Meanwhile, collectors have
snapped up most of her works from the past two years;
sales were sporadic at best before the stroke. Now, her
large paintings sell for $10,000 and up.
"The paintings are breathtaking," says Laurence
Mathews, an executive with an art-auction Web site in
San Francisco who has five of Ms. Sherwood's recent
canvases in his personal collection. Mr. Mathews,
without knowing her story, fell in love with Ms.
Sherwood's work at a gallery exhibit last year, he says.
He doesn't care for her earlier paintings. "She gained
some sort of power, some clarity, from the stroke," he
says.
History is replete with examples of other artists who
overcame disabilities and went on to greater success.
Portrait painter Chuck Close, for example, has done his
most highly acclaimed work since being rendered a
near-total quadriplegic by a spinal blood clot in 1988.
He paints with his teeth and a makeshift Velcro hand.
In Oliver Sacks's 1995 book, "An Anthropologist on
Mars," the neurologist writes about a 65-year-old artist
who goes completely colorblind as the result of a head
injury. Morose from his loss of color, the artist, whom
Dr. Sacks identifies only as Jonathan I., becomes
nocturnal and paints terrifying pictures of dark, raging
faces and dismembered body parts. But after two years
or so, as his memory of color fades, he comes to feel
"privileged" to see "a world of pure form, uncluttered by
color." He undergoes a creative renewal, and his
paintings are lauded by admirers who assume his
"black-and-white period" is just another artistic phase.
In Ms. Sherwood's case, it took months after the stroke
before she even considered painting again. Her speech
recovered much more quickly, at first with a new accent
that some friends attributed to her New Orleans
upbringing. But her frozen right side defied all treatment
-- from conventional electromagnetic therapy to
alternative forms such as acupuncture and Reiki
massage. As weeks turned to months, doctors warned her
that the paralysis might be permanent.
"I figured her art career was over," recalls her
neurologist, Randall Starkey.
A Fit of Depression
She grew depressed, as is common among stroke
victims. Determined to paint again right-handed, she
rebuffed friends and colleagues who pleaded with her to
give her left hand a try. She learned to walk again,
dragging her right leg behind her, but her days of
rambling along San Francisco Bay with her husband and
five-year-old daughter were over. She couldn't slice a
bagel or tie her daughter's shoes.
"In two minutes," she says, "I went from being a healthy
44-year-old woman to the equivalent of an 80-year-old
invalid."
Her epiphany came in a most unlikely place: on an X-ray
table in her radiologist's office. Six months after the
stroke, Ms. Sherwood was having a carotid angiogram to
check for any further bleeding inside her brain. Heavily
sedated, she glimpsed the image of her brain's blood
vessels on a computer screen. It reminded her of a
favorite painting, a 1,000-year-old Chinese landscape.
She demanded a copy of the angiogram. "The technician
thought I was crazy," Ms. Sherwood says.
Within a few days she and an assistant were back in her
studio, cutting and pasting photolithographs of bright red
ganglia onto elaborately enameled canvases. Her left
hand took control from there, scrawling wide, loopy
lines of paint over and around the angiogram, in designs
that vaguely evoked her favorite calligraphic seals from
medieval texts. Reborn a lefty, Ms. Sherwood began the
most productive period of her life.
Staying Out of the Way
"All of a sudden, it flowed," says her husband, Jeff
Adams, also an artist. "Suddenly she's got me shuffling
canvases, racing back and forth to the paint store for
more colors." The flow didn't stop. Before the stroke,
when her work would occasionally stall, Ms. Sherwood
conferred with her husband in her studio. Now it never
stalls, he says. In fact, Mr. Adams has had more trouble
getting back to work since the stroke than his wife has.
"I try to stay out of her way," he says. "I don't want to
spoil what's going on in there."
A year after the stroke, when Ms. Sherwood exhibited
some of her new paintings for the first time, a San
Francisco gallery owner asked how it felt to be a better
painter left-handed than right-handed. "I was horrified,"
she says. "But I have to acknowledge it's true."
How could this be? For decades, neuroscientists have
known the brain's left and right sides house different
mental functions. Notably, the left hemisphere, which
controls the body's right side, is dominant in language
and complex thought, while the right side, which controls
the body's left side, handles advanced perceptual tasks.
But that doesn't mean scientists are "left-brained" and
artists are "right-brained." In a normal person, the two
sides of the brain are intricately linked, assuring a
seamless presence of all types of skills.
Still, it is possible, neuroscientists say, that, given the
location of Ms. Sherwood's stroke, in the so-called
internal capsule of her left hemisphere, the hemorrhage
remapped circuitry inside her head in a way that
strengthened her more-artistic right side. Specifically,
they say, the stroke could have at least partially disabled
the specialized system in the left hemisphere that
researchers have dubbed the "interpreter." This system
constantly seeks explanations for why events occur;
seeks order and reason, even when there isn't any.
Research has shown it can overwhelm other mental
processes, so weakening it could improve one's art,
experts say.
In a 1998 experiment conducted by Dartmouth brain
researcher George Wolford, participants were asked to
guess if a light was going to appear at the top or bottom
of a computer screen. The experiment was rigged so the
light would flash at the top 80% of the time but in a
random sequence. The human subjects invariably tried to
find a pattern, and thus never guessed correctly more
than 68% of the time. By contrast, rats, which don't have
an "interpreter" bullying their thoughts, learned to select
the top bar every time, scoring 80%.
The 'Thin Moment'
The experiment was applied to split-brain patients --
people who have had the links between their left and
right hemispheres surgically severed to treat epilepsy --
and the right hemisphere responded much like the rats
did. The right brain "does not try to interpret its
experience and find deeper meaning," concludes
Dartmouth neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga. "It
continues to live in the thin moment of the present."
That "thin moment," or what athletes call "the zone," is
the envy of chess masters and pro golfers, says
Dartmouth's Dr. Corballis. Many of them report
performing at their best on "autopilot," he says, when
they are oblivious to what they are doing.
So does Ms. Sherwood. Left-brained or right, she
worries now about losing the magic touch as suddenly as
she found it. In recent months she has been regaining her
mental facility for analyzing and discussing paintings in
academic terms, which she lost completely after the
stroke. She even gave some thought to teaching a
graduate-level seminar next fall, something she hasn't
done for three years. But she changed her mind.
"I suddenly realized I'd have the same mental burdens I
had before the stroke," she says. "My career's at a totally
different level now, and I just feel obligated toward
that." |
