David M. Roth reviews Joan Brown and Katherine Sherwood at Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco through November 15, 2014.

Roth writes that "the two painters share important links to SF’s history of mediating between the competing impulses of abstraction and representation… But the link that binds them most closely is their intensely personal focus… Brown created her own mythology, painting herself amidst things she loved: dogs, cats, fish, friends and household furnishings and, toward the end of her life, symbols of Eastern spiritual practices. Sherwood… continues to explore the effects of a medical crisis that left her partially disabled but emboldened. For the past decade she’s made a fast-evolving series of abstract works that probe the mysteries of the brain by combining ancient symbology with clotted, cracked, carefully controlled paint pours that suggest the physical reality of a brain hemorrhage."