Cheryl Wetsi was born in Sydney, Australia and lived in other parts of the country, NSW, during her childhood and early adulthood. This influenced her love of the wide-open expanses of the Australian landscape and seascapes, and later, her love of Australian native plants. Cheryl became besotted with art when she attended an art exhibition during a primary school excursion, while living in Moree. Her senses were ignited; she went home and declared to her mother she would become an artist one day. Her first career was in Fashion Design; she worked in the clothing industry and later became a Fashion Teacher at NSW TAFE. She met her Ghanaian husband in 1986 while teaching Fashion Technology at TAFE at the university town of Armidale in NSW. She got the calling and became a focused artist around 2005 when she thought she had better start painting before she got any older! Cheryl is self-taught, although she had a solid understanding of design and painting during her time as a fashion designer and years researching and practising in her small studio at home, while making countless mistakes! Cheryl sells her art to small local art galleries, local art exhibitions and private commissions. Cheryl practised as often as she could to improve her art practice and focused on developing her own art style, at the same time teaching for the Department of Education as a Textiles High School teacher. Cheryl is an experimental artist; her art is always evolving, and she enjoys playing with a variety of techniques, tools and mixed – media effects. Her constant experimenting drove her interest from representational art into semi – abstract art. She originally painted with watercolours and oil paints but decided to use acrylic paints as she was able to achieve authenticity, spontaneity, and interesting colour combinations and layering to capture her love of nature and the outdoors. Cheryl’s focus is to create curiosity, expressive forms, and variety within her compositions, while capturing her audience with vibrancy, energy, and light in her paintings.