In 1997, American artist Katherine Sherwood was 44 when she suffered a major stroke. She writes about her experience and how it changed her work in a fascinating article just out, How a Cerebral Hemorrhage Altered My Art
All of the images below are examples of her work, taken from the paper.
Sherwood writes that she had long been interested in the brain. She incorporated neuroscience themes into her work even before the stroke. Here's a 1990 piece:
Then, out of the blue, her life was changed:
The next May I experienced a cerebral hemorrhage affecting the parietal lobe of the dominant hemisphere [i.e. the left side of the brain, which controls the right side of the body]. I lost my ability to walk, talk, read, and think as my right side became paralyzed within the course of 2 min. It happened during a graduate student’s critique... I do not ...
