Visual Improvisation and the Polymath’s Eye
Emerging from the cultural ferment of 1960s England and educated in the radical Fine Art department of Leeds Polytechnic during the 1970s, John Sherwood has cultivated a practice that thrives on curiosity, spontaneity, and boundary-breaking. Living and working in Skipton, North Yorkshire, Sherwood is a self-proclaimed polymath whose artistic range spans collage, painting, writing, sound recording, and digital media. His multifaceted output is unified by a signature approach: the ‘Amalgam’—a form that synthesises image, text, and gesture in a layered and exploratory way. These Amalgams resist tidy categorisation, instead revealing themselves as visual arenas where diverse influences, materials, and memories intersect.
Sherwood’s background in Western painting has remained a foundational anchor, but he draws inspiration from sources far beyond the gallery wall. His practice is informed as much by machinery, cave art, and Stone Age flint tools as it is by the pages of glossy magazines or the structure of a wedding cake. His openness to eclectic inputs is not merely aesthetic but ideological; he believes that creativity lies in accepting whatever arises—accident, impulse, or fragment—and allowing it to contribute meaningfully to the work. His studio, affectionately dubbed the “Playroom”, reflects this approach: a compact but densely packed creative space that holds not only traditional art supplies but also crates of unorthodox materials, digital devices, and stacks of reference material collected from music, video, and everyday encounters.
In addition to his expansive artistic output, Sherwood also works through a series of performative alter egos, the most prominent being Eric Bloodorange—an enigmatic, comedic persona whose name emerged from Sherwood’s wordplay on the Viking warrior king, Eric Bloodaxe. Eric Bloodorange writes poetry, paints, and occasionally appears on stage delivering idiosyncratic scripts to live audiences. He is accompanied in this imaginative theatre by a cast of equally distinctive characters, including Dr Strabismoo, Sid Satsuma, and Timmy Tangerine. These invented personalities are not peripheral quirks but integral to Sherwood’s creative ecosystem: they allow him to channel different voices, moods, and forms of expression that might otherwise remain latent. Through them, Sherwood explores absurdity, satire, and surreal humour—reinforcing his commitment to dissolving boundaries between art forms, identities, and states of mind.
By resisting fixed methods and welcoming interdisciplinary flow, Sherwood has built a unique artistic identity that mirrors his philosophy: that art should function as a continuous monologue—or more accurately, a dialogue—between the maker and the ever-shifting visual field. For Sherwood, the act of creation is not about reaching a finalised image, but about navigating a process in which intuition leads, and understanding follows. It is this open-endedness that gives his work its distinctive character: layered, unpredictable, and alive with the rhythms of both thought and play.
