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, seascapes, and later her affection for 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, and she went home to declare to her mother that she would become an artist one day.

Her first career was in Fashion Design, where she worked in the clothing industry before becoming a Fashion Teacher at NSW TAFE. She met her Ghanaian husband in 1986 while teaching at Fashion Technology at TAFE in the university town of Armidale, New South Wales.

She received the calling and became a focused artist around 2005, when she realised she should start painting before she got any older. Cheryl is self-taught, although she developed a solid understanding of design and painting during her time as a fashion designer and through years of 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, focusing on developing her art style, all the while teaching textiles at a high school as a Department of Education teacher.

Cheryl is an experimental artist; her art is constantly 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. Still, she decided to use acrylic paints because they allowed her to achieve authenticity, spontaneity, and interesting colour combinations and layering, which captured 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.