In a famous speech about a pageant of his
own creation, Shakespeare’s magician Prospero
states that “… these actors are all spirits and
are melted into air, into thin air …,” concluding with
the famous line “… we are such stuff as dreams are made of
and our little life is rounded with a sleep …”

The Wait by Steve Sherrell

These words might serve as a touchstone for artist Steve Sherrell’s work, as the sense of transformation, the shifting games of perspective and the reordering of the stretch and flow of space and time is very central to his thinking as an artist.  Thoughts and concepts can seem like objects and environments in a Sherrell work — and vice versa.  Yet for all his visual slight of hand, there is a grand romantic at the heart of it all: Sherrell's artistic creations drip with color, beauty and subtle craftsmanship.

His work is varied in theme and outlook.  On different occasions it may be based on a figure, on a landscape, a seascape, on city environments or architecture.  At other times it might even be based on a literary work, with a series of prints forming a narrative sequence, or employing book-like formats and texts.  Occasionally his paintings and prints seem to be pages out of books, complete with marginal glosses around the edges.  These images in the margins create new combinations of symbols and contexts, as if doors suddenly opened within the fields of his paintings and allowed you to view other people, places and times.

The figures and objects in Sherrell's paintings, like Prospero’s actors, flow in and out of the scene and become part of the air — the air becomes the actors in kind.  In his work the person, object, or environment often seems touched by some element which gives it extra qualities, transforming it into something new and different.  It may only be the strange light, colorful and fairy-like, that transforms his landscapes into worlds touched with magic (as in works like “Reflected Moon” or “The Plums are Small”).  Or it may be some telling detail which is the transforming element, such as in Sherrell's portrait of the French Romantic poet Rimbaud: In Sherrell's "Rimbaud," the eyes have two pupils to reflect the romantic artist’s dualistic nature — half ordinary man, half visionary spirit.

In various guises, the theme of transformation is present in every Sherrell painting.  Yet it is not just tricks of context and style Sherrell employs, for, like any good dramatist, he aims at stirring emotions in his work.  He speaks of wanting his work to “… draw the viewer into some sense of the joy, sadness and beauty of life.”

Muse of Abstraction by Steve Sherrell

Some of Sherrell’s work seems to invoke the world of string theory in contemporary physics, with its shifting membranes of reality that bump and touch to create new units of space/time.  One such example is his large “Return of the Queen” painting, in which we see a queen-like figure wrapped in what might be a strangely shaped kimono, only its lines reflect what appears to be ripples in space.  A small burning red rose speaks of passions of the heart. Her love seems to have transformed her into some kind of strangely beautiful ripple in the currents of space and time, riding the tides of the universe’s eternal forces with her emotions.

Another work that seems to inhabit a different kind of reality is “The Diver.”  In it, the artist (with only his head visible in a bubble-like porthole), is wrapped in an automaton-like suit and wanders through a realm of Kandinsky-ish abstractions as a diver might wander in an undersea world.  It might well be a metaphor for the way an artist, on occasion, feels he lives in an environment entirely made of art.

Sometimes Sherrell’s work turns to the world of architecture and/or the world of the machine.  A good example of this is the work “Dancing on the Curve,” in which a Tuscan-looking tower seems surrounded by a dancing space, while on the edges of the image, like glosses in a medieval text, a panoply of symbols and objects make up the raw materials of ideas used to create the tower.  During the Renaissance, town towers were often symbols of a city’s enlightenment and progress.  In Sherrell’s painting, the tower and the human thoughts which may have inspired it, as well as the space which in inhabits, are fused into a new super image, perhaps symbolic of the complexities of man’s progress in establishing and understanding his role in the universe.

The painting “Propped” is a characteristic example of Sherrell's works based on machines.  In it, an anthropomorphic machine creature, complete with a broken window pane brain and bearing a vague resemblance to a Marcel Duchamp Dada sculpture, stands immobile. On one hand it seems to be a marvelous being, but on the other appears to have to rely on a mechanical cane to stand erect.  Its environment is barren, wrapped in a aura of stillness, and some of its limbs seem to be rusting away.  It is as if the figure in Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” fell, broke a leg and is now immobilized.

Dancing on the Curve by Steve Sherrell

Sherrell’s computer-based artwork and his painterly work seem to feed off one another: The computer work frequently reflects a passion for complex textures and nuances of surface, while the painting often reflects the strange perspectives, distortions, montage elements and brilliant color schemes of computer art.

Many of Sherrell’s landscapes share a kinship with early romantic art, such as those of David Caspar Friedrich or J.M.W. Turner.  These are Sherrell's visions of the individual (usually a very tiny figure) confronting dazzling evocations of nature.  Sherrell professes a deep attachment to the poems of Keats and Shelley with their confrontations between the lonely self and the vastness of the universe.  But the landscapes are even more otherworldly and dreamlike than those of the early romanticists — more like scenic designs for romantic operas than places which bear a definite reality.  The painting, “The Wait” is a good example of this genre.

In more recent works such as "The Plums Are Small," Sherrell has sought to refine and simplify his paintings so the content has an almost calligraphic quality, more like hieroglyphics of things than the things themselves.  But even here, the hieroglyphics seem animated by intelligence and fly about their painterly environments like beings busy overturning rocks and trees in search of deeper meanings.

Despite all this complexity of vision, Sherrell's work is always visually beautiful and tickles the eye as well as the mind.  He is master of the purely plastic elements of painting: dream-like color, three-dimensional brushwork, asymmetrical compositions, elaborate decorative pattern work.  Yet his content, the things he chooses to paint, revels in a sense of emotionally meaningful connections.

The core of Sherrell's work is about man’s relationship with “the sublime,” and his paintings and prints seem an invitation to a voyage to visit worlds full of things beautiful and fascinating.  His is a grand vision, modern yet profoundly romantic.

Click the below buttons to view galleries of Steve Sherrell's artwork.

— Robert Kameczura