FARM 2025: For decades, Greg Sherwood has gone from the fields to the canvas
BY SHAWN LOUGHLIN
Huron County has a rich artistic history and many of its talented and visionary artists - from the landscapes of Jack McLaren and the portraits of Reuben Sallows to the contemporary art of Ron and Bev Walker, William Creighton, Michele Miller and Elizabeth Van den Broeck to the new generation of Kelly Stevenson, Autumn Ducharme and Abi Bos - have often turned to the land outside their door for inspiration.
However, when one thinks of the art of the Huron County landscape these days, it’s Greg Sherwood who comes to mind. His landscape art has defined the region for over 20 years and, while his clouded skies often dominate the conversation around Sherwood’s art, those skies are almost always suspended above an agricultural setting, most often a farmer’s field, telling the stories of Huron County through the seasons and the planting, growth and harvest cycles to which many have come to set their watches.
Sherwood doesn’t get cute when naming his works of art, often opting instead for direct, to-the-point titles that tell viewers what season he’s depicting through his oil paint and talent.
Currently on his website, Sherwood has a painting featured entitled, “Gravel Road Early Spring” that includes a blue/grey clouded sky above fields with a healthy mix of early growth yellow and green with the rich brown earth of an early agricultural season. Alongside it, almost as a complementary piece, is “Gravel Road Mid Summer” which appears to depict a different gravel road than the first, but is complete with a clearer, blue sky above bright green foliage and brilliant golden fields just starting to grow.
His work then moves into darker, richer tones as the seasons shift to fall, his favourite, and winter, which he doesn’t often paint, though he’s hoping to change that. This brings in the burnt oranges, purples and dark greens we know to look for when the weather begins to cool.
And while Sherwood has painted scenes from vacations he’s taken over the years to, say, Europe, Newfoundland and Arizona, the vast majority of his work depicts scenes from just outside of his door. Now, that means the London area, but, for more than 30 years, until just recently, that meant Huron County.
Born in Vancouver, Sherwood and his family moved relatively frequently in his younger years, as his father was an R.C.M.P. officer whose station would change from time to time. After stops in Toronto and Newfoundland, the family eventually settled in the Ottawa area, in the small town of Russell, to be exact, which has a current population of just under 4,500 people, about a half-hour southeast of Ottawa.
He made his way west as a young man with his eye on an education from the University of Western Ontario in London, which is where he met his wife, Viv. There, Sherwood earned two degrees, first in Science and then in Art.
His artistic journey, however, began earlier. He was always drawing and painting as a child and then took art classes in high school, which is where he really began to learn his trade. At that point, under the instruction of this teacher or at the direction of that class, he experimented with all types of art and many different mediums before really honing in on the more traditional form of oil painting.
Sherwood eventually made his way to teachers’ college, hoping to shape the next generations of young artists and, when Viv landed a job in Wingham, the pair made their way to Huron County for the first time, and as Sherwood took a job teaching at Seaforth District High School, which has since closed.
He taught there for six years, teaching art part-time, before taking a job at F.E. Madill Secondary School in Wingham, where he would stay for the next 22 years until he retired in June of 2015. As he said that, he realized that, later this year, he’ll be marking his 10th anniversary of retirement, remarking that the time has simply flown by.
In an effort to downsize as they entered retirement, the Sherwoods moved out of Huron County for the first time in nearly 30 years when they bought a home in Byron, a small community just southwest of London. However, that spot was never quite right for them, so they moved to their current location, which is a lovely home in the very northeast corner of London which, Sherwood jokes, makes off-the-cuff trips back to Huron County just that much more convenient.
Sherwood began exhibiting and selling his paintings when he was still a university student. Now, most of his work can be found at Marten Arts Gallery in Bayfield. However, those with an interest in Huron County art have no doubt seen his work before. It greets patrons of the Blyth Festival in the form of a mural in Memorial Hall, has hung above the dining room in Cowbell Brewing Co. and his work hangs in the North Huron Township office and in locations throughout the county. He has also been the subject of two solo shows at the Blyth Festival Art Gallery (“A Trick of the Light” in 2015 and “Above my Head and Below my Feet” in 2024) and part of a three-artist show - “The Selective Eye” - in the gallery in 2002.
He says he was just recently reminiscing about the artistic style for which local art lovers have come to know him and he says it can be traced back to a drive to Bayfield. He was heading west to the community and he crested a hill and saw the fields, the sky and the horizon of Lake Huron laid out before him and something just locked into place for him, telling him that this is what he should be painting. That was many years ago, he said, when he was just beginning his teaching career and heading to Bayfield for a new teacher social event and it told him everything he needed to know about the next 30 years of his art career.
As for where Sherwood’s art and the world of agriculture intersect, he says that, until very recently, he had always lived in small towns and was surrounded by the agricultural fields many in Huron County know and love. However, he really sees it more as an aspect of him documenting his life through art, but also the life that exists all around him in the places where he’s lived.
Sherwood, over the years, has worked with notebooks and sketch pads, sometimes even doing some painting out in the very fields he’s painting. However, as technology has advanced, he has taken advantage, first taking pictures with DSLR cameras and now with his phone. He’ll bring those images back to the studio in his London home and, depending on the scene, work from pictures or even project scenes onto the canvas to get a start. He always blocks out the landscape and the clouds with a dark red paint - this is known as imprimatura, which is Italian for “first paint layer” - and continues to work from there, using four varieties of brushes and a number of colours as the painting calls for them.
He is known for creating vibrant small pieces, on canvases or boards that are one foot squared, in addition to bigger pieces that can reach three and four feet wide. And, while he doesn’t have an agricultural background himself, he sees the capturing of the fields and the work being done on them by the farmers, as telling the story of the community, especially when he thinks back to his time in Huron County. For example, as we flipped through smaller versions of his paintings, often done on paper and used to create his larger works on canvas, he will remember where the fields are and why they captured his imagination. Be it an abandoned farmhouse on B Line north of Wingham, a down-sloping view on the road to Mildmay or the gravel roads of North Huron, he remembers being inspired and what compelled him to paint these scenes.
“It’s what the people who live there do,” he said, and it’s important to document that as part of the storytelling of a snapshot in time of a community as it makes it from year to year.
He says that he’s always fascinated when painting a farmer’s field in the juxtaposition between the untouched nature of the scene and the man-altered nature, meaning the sky and the trees combined with the fields being actively worked by farmers, sitting in a state of being planted, grown or harvested, all coming with their own dramatic and beautiful scenes and changing all the time with the seasons.
More information on Sherwood can be found at gregsherwood.ca and his work can be perused at Marten Arts Gallery in Bayfield.