Katherine Sherwood

Katherine Sherwood began painting images of the brain seven years before suffering her own "brain event," a cerebral hemorrhage in 1997 at the age of 44. She had also spent years exploring the notion of chance, using bingo cards in her work as a metaphor for "that moment that can come into your life and just change you utterly in a second."

Katherine Sherwood began painting images of the brain seven years before suffering her own "brain event," a cerebral hemorrhage in 1997 at the age of 44. She had also spent years exploring the notion of chance, using bingo cards in her work as a metaphor for "that moment that can come into your life and just change you utterly in a second."

Katherine Sherwood (Michael Kohn Gallery, 8071 Beverly Blvd., L.A., [323] 658-8088). Abstract paintings by Sherwood, including "Big Gremory" (2001), above. Ends June 1.

Artist Katherine Sherwood was just 44 when a hemorrhage in her brain's left hemisphere paralyzed the right side of her body — forever changing her artwork. Before the stroke in 1997, her mixed-media paintings featured strange and cryptic images: medieval seals, transvestites, bingo cards. Reviewers called her work cerebral and deliberate. Creativity, says the UC Berkeley professor, was an intellectual and often angst-filled struggle. After the stroke, she could no longer paint on canvases mounted vertically, so she laid them flat, moving around them in a chair with wheels.

In what had to be one of the most poignant moments to grace a public tribute, Donny Yorde, a 60-year-old man with Down's syndrome, took the spotlight before hundreds of people to thank his mother for not institutionalizing him. Instead, Norma Yorde went on to establish the Good Shepherd Lutheran Home of the West, which has built a network of 100 homes for people with developmental disabilities.