Sherry Kendrick’s award-winning Chinese brush art can be viewed hanging on walls, but it also appears on biceps, lower backs and surfboards.
Kendrick, a Chinese brush painter for nearly 30 years, owns Sherry’s Brush, a studio and Chinese art supply shop, 3827 Mission Blvd. Her brushwork of traditional Chinese subjects such as bamboo and pine trees appears in hundreds of paintings and on handmade greeting cards. And her characters, the symbols for the Chinese language, have found new life as tattoos.
Working with many of the artists from the Mission Beach and Pacific Beach tattoo parlors, Kendrick also fields requests for her renderings of Chinese characters from as far away as New Mexico and Pittsburgh. When the client is local, Kendrick meets with them to discuss exactly what they want, because the Chinese characters have such precise meanings.
“If they say they want ‘peace,’ I ask them if they want peace and harmony, peace and solitude, peace and quiet, piece of cake,” Kendrick said. Once they’ve decided, Kendrick sends the client away for 40 minutes and closes her door so that she can focus on the character. She writes it with a brush on rice paper over and over. When the client returns, she lets them choose the variation they want.
“It’s like handwriting,” she said. “You can write ‘long life’ for 20 different people, and they can all be different. The emotion is different each time.”
The client then takes the rice paper back to the tattoo parlor for the tattoo artist. “They tattoo exactly the way I paint,” Kendrick said. “You can see the brush edges.”
Morris Carlson, manager of Chronic Tattoo, 1253 Garnet Ave., Pacific Beach, said the artists in his shop have worked with Kendrick since they were in their first location on Mission Boulevard more than five years ago. Carlson said that many of his customers come in knowing what they want, but if they don’t have accurate reference for the Chinese characters, he sends them to Kendrick.
“The artists here know the quality of her work,” Carlson said. “We’re proud to do business with her.”
Permanent ink done by the local parlors, and temporary tattoos she paints herself outside of her shop during the summer, are just a few examples of Kendrick’s varied work. She has also provided Chinese characters that personalize surfboards with “joy and happiness” or “no trespassing.”
Chinese brush painting first interested Kendrick nearly 30 years ago. Her son Gus, now the base player in the band Thicker Than Thieves, was only two years old at that time, and Kendrick said she was looking for some adult conversation. Seeking a place she could walk or bike to, she chose the Santa Clara Recreation Center in Mission Beach for a class on Chinese brush painting with Kitty Tao.
“I told her I wanted to learn like a Chinese, and she laughed at me,” Kendrick said.
In 1990, an art patron sponsored Kendrick to study for eight weeks in Hangzhou, China, a city famous for its culture, West Lake and natural beauty.
“It validated everything I was doing,” she said. “They called me ‘Satisfied Soul’ because I didn’t want to go shopping,” she said.
Kendrick still assists Tao at classes, but focuses more on her own students at her Mission Beach studio and her painting workshops at the Quail Botanical Gardens in Encinitas. Her work has earned numerous awards at the San Diego County Fair, and many of the paintings and ribbons hang in her studio, along with piles of finished work, books, an intricately carved brush holder and other sources of inspiration.
Now Kendrick’s focus is on finding dedicated students for individual lessons. Kendrick said she begins teaching with the basics ” grinding ink, holding the brush, using the arm from the shoulder rather than the wrist ” before ever starting to paint.
“These rules and tools have been the same for thousands of years, and they work,” she said. “I tell my students to leave their brains in the car, and bring their hearts and minds inside. They make the best decisions for you.”
But the teacher is still a student herself. Kendrick said the biggest lesson she has learned from Chinese painting is patience. “No matter what you want the brush to do, it seems to want to do its own thing. The pressure on the tip of the brush changes everything.”
Kendrick lives in Mission Beach with her husband Michael, who works for the San Diego Unified School District, and her cat Sumi, meaning “black ink.”
For more information, call (858) 488-0917.