"Venn Diagram," a show of illustrations by Whitney Sherman, is currently on view in the Pinkard Gallery of the Maryland Institute College of Art's (MICA) Bunting Center. This dynamic exhibit draws on more than 28 years of professional illustration work by Sherman, the chair of MICA's Illustration Department.
Sherman, who has a longstanding history with the school, received her degree in photography from MICA, and the earliest work in the show is a commissioned photo series of a couple's wedding from this period. The dynamic black and white photos are notable for their cohesive aesthetic, utilizing space and light to encapsulate the day's dramatic emotion.
This is all we see of her photography, for as Sherman explains, early on in her career she began to work primarily in commercial graphic design. The first thing to keep in mind about commercial art is that it's necessarily a collaboration between the artist and whoever commissions the art. However, Sherman says that her creative freedom is not really compromised by this relationship because she is comfortable with her established artistic method: companies (or newspapers or magazines or book publishers) hire her because they knew that they wanted their illustration to be a Whitney Sherman.
And for good reason, since her works are crisp in line and layout, unafraid of metaphor, and formally consistent. However, this does not always lead to a harmonious business relationship -- every illustrator, Sherman notes, has had designs rejected by clients who just didn't understand the art. So how to explain her commercial success? "I deliver good ideas," she states succinctly.
Her wealth of clever ideas is well llustrated in the show's very title. "Venn Diagram" is so-called because Sherman's illustrations deftly capture her art's ability to interact with the audience and the artistic and emotional overlapping inherent in what she calls universal themes.
Her works hold commercial appeal because of these universal themes, rarely approached literally, which she says"keep the doors and windows open" for her clients and audience.
These themes, such as personal psychological tension and emotional interactions, are coherent, sustainable, and consistent. Their consistency lies both with Sherman's own life experience, constantly informing her art, as well as the text or manuscript, if there is one, on which the illustration is based .
Black and white works to go with newspaper editorials comprise an excellent segment of the show; a particularly arresting image is Sherman's rendition of post-partum depression, which depicts a woman rocking her infant to sleep. For Sherman, depression is marked by "finding yourself thinking in a way that's not your own."
Illustrators with a distinctive style often become pigeonholed. Sherman luckily escaped that fate, although confesses that after being commissioned to illustrate the covers of about ten murder mysteries, she felt somewhat frustrated. Her style proved adaptable, however, and her work has appeared in children's books, corporate publications, and even as CD cover art.
Over the years, her work has moved towards abstraction, going from regular pastels to collaged elements and computer-generated images. One reason for this shift was a matter of health: working in pastels meant breathing in huge quantities of pastel dust every day. Although originally wary of digital art, Sherman found that she could make it work for her in ways that standard techniques couldn't.
Fragmented, flat-colored pictures gave way to screen printing and silk screening, techniques seen in the works of artists such as Andy Warhol, who used formulaic, repetitive silk screens to create such great pieces as Last Supper, available for view at the BMA.
Sherman found that by slightly offsetting the screening, she could make images that seem to quiver slightly within their own lines, which enhances the illustration's sense of motion. To modernize her original methodology of representing universal themes, she began co-opting recognizable elements from everyday life, such as a green snail's shell, shown as an artist's cap in a self-portrait, or a rubber band, representing her "elastic and infinite" relationship with her daughter. However, she does intimate some frustration with digital art, and has returned to earlier techniques as of late.
My favorite work in the exhibit is a recent work, a portrait of Benjamin Franklin composed of black, red, and white pastel on cardboard, representing him as a turkey with glasses. The virtuosity of line in this work is so complete, so exact in its rhythm that I had to smile with satisfaction.
Check out these evocative illustrations in the Pinkard Gallery at 1401 W. Mt. Royal Ave. until Sunday, Feb. 15.
