Scherman was the youngest of the 48 artists, which included Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Peter Blake and Henry Moore.

In 1987, he was one of 48 Canadian artists commissioned by the Cineplex Odeon Corporation for works to be installed in cinema complexes in Canada and the United States.

These visual investigations are drawn from the mythologies of antiquity, the narratives and characters of the Shakespearean tragedies, Hamlet and Macbeth, and historical events that have formed and shaped the world today.

Scherman, however, does not rely on illustrating dramatic moments, a characteristic of history painting, but employs a range of subject matter—portraits, animals, flowers and food—as stand-ins and visual metaphor, and imagining what is not written.

[31] As with his mythology and literature sources, Scherman created a meta-text through images in order to present a visual language beyond dramatic moments.

[33][34] The architects and minor figures of the First French Empire, Napoleonic France and the Third Reich were intertwined in a narrative of tyranny, ambitions and inflicted suffering.

Critic Jacques Henric underscored the complexities of About 1789 and Chasing Napoleon: “The French Revolution is not only the preparation, the dress rehearsal and the quintessence of what would constitute the horrible grandeur and the superb infamy of the centuries that followed [but also the] perfectly monstrous utopia that the 20th century would attempt to bring about: to make a new mankind.” [35] Scherman expressed the horror of the Third Reich in a painting with a horse subject for Oradour.

[36] A horse is depicted grazing in a meadow but the title refers to the massacre of French civilians by the German Waffen-SS in 1944, but as Scherman has noted, the painting’s significance is absent if the massacre is not known by a viewer; “the panting’s meaning is that it’s just a horse painting [and that] happens with all art all the time.” [37] The Chasing Napoleon exhibition [34] was organized by Curatorial Assistance Travelling Exhibitions [38] and toured to public galleries in the United States and Canada in 2001-2002.

[51] The subjects for Difficult Women [21] came from diverse walks of life, historical to contemporary, including activists, philosophers, political figures, athletes and celebrities.