Philip Lawrence Sherrod was born in 1935. He received a BA in Painting in 1959 from the Oklahoma State University and attended the Art Students League in the early 1960s. He is the recipient of several awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 1982 and a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 1989. His works are in the public collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., the Museum of the City of New York, the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, among others.
Philip Sherrod is known for his expressive paintings of street and city scenes. He paints the city as one experiences it: with great, excitable energy that seems to vibrate from within the painting. Streets, buildings and signs feature heavily in Sherrod’s paintings, underscoring tenets of American city culture such as coffee shops, subway stations, Broadway marquees and even the circus. Sherrod’s cacophonous arrangements transport the viewer to some another world. His pulsating style has been linked to Van Gogh and Chaim Soutine, artists who developed the personalized, expressive brushstroke. Above all, Sherrod’s unedited outpourings of his psyche give the viewer direct access to the artist’s mind.