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Sheree Ross
AUSTRALIA
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"Likeness is easy, but spirit is the thing worth chasing."
Sheree Ross is a Brisbane-based Australian artist whose lifelong devotion to drawing and painting has grown into a distinctive body of work shaped by intuition, emotion, and a profound bond with her subjects. Portraiture sits at the heart of her practice, though she also ventures into wildlife, birds, and the quiet mysteries of the underwater world. Across all of these subjects, her aim reaches beyond physical likeness toward something harder to capture: the essence, the spirit, and the singular individuality of whatever, or whoever, sits before her.
Coral Kaleidos | Acrylic
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40 x 30
The painting symbolises the connection of life and the fragile beauty of our oceans. It is a visual reminder of the vital importance of marine conservation, showcasing a pristine, harmonious world that we must actively protect from environmental degradation.
Art announced itself early in her life and never left. As a child she would lose whole afternoons to drawing and colouring, captivated by the people and animals around her and by the silent stories they seemed to carry. Throughout her school years, art remained the subject in which she most naturally excelled. During this same period she fell in love with classic cinema, absorbing hours of vintage black-and-white and colour films, and the decorative elegance of the Art Nouveau and Art Deco movements settled quietly into her imagination, later surfacing as subtle undercurrents within her visual style.
Regal Lineage | Acrylic
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32 x 24
This painting celebrates the enduring power, resilience, and connection of sisterhood and cultural heritage. By blending the figures seamlessly into the rich, dusty background, the piece symbolises a deep, timeless connection to the land and ancestors, serving as a powerful testament to the beauty and dignified strength of Black womanhood.
"At sixteen my mother's face became my first true teacher."
A defining choice shaped everything that followed: she declined formal art training altogether. Rather than absorb the conventions of a classroom, she chose to trust her own instincts and build a personal visual language from the ground up, letting intuition rather than technique steer each decision. At sixteen she completed her first portrait, a tender depiction of her mother, Fay, and that single deeply personal work lit a fascination with portraiture that has never dimmed, along with the enduring challenge of pressing character and humanity into paint.
Sweet Freedom | Acrylic
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40 x 30
I was invited to be one of a group of artists to create paintings for a children's charity called Freedom Art for Children At Risk. This was to raise awareness and money from the sale of paintings to go towards funding the rescue of children all over the world in dangerous and poor situations. This painting is a representation of multi-cultural children who are happy and healthy when rescued. The sugarcane and the butterflies represent the sweet taste of freedom.
Curiosity pulled her outward at eighteen. Wanting to know the world beyond the familiar edges of home, she spent several years travelling, and throughout those journeys she kept sketching and observing. She was quietly sharpening her artistic eye all the while, gathering impressions from the faces, landscapes, and cultures she moved through, storing away a reservoir of inspiration that would feed her work for decades to come.
My dear Aunty Norma was an antique doll collector and I wanted to paint something for her secretly so one day I asked her 'If you could have any antique doll in the world, what would it be?' She answered without hesitation 'A Jumeau Doll, but they are way to expensive for me to have'. I smiled and went home and researched them and found they were indeed too expensive, so I painted 3 for her instead and surprised her with it a week later.
Jumeau Dolls | Acrylic
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24 x 16
"I never trained formally because I wanted my instinct to lead, letting each portrait grow on its own terms rather than following somebody else's rules."
"When I stand before a subject, whether a person, a bird, or something drifting through the underwater world, I am not chasing an exact likeness alone, I am listening for the essence, the individuality, the small flicker of spirit that makes them wholly themselves, and I keep painting until that presence rises off the surface and can be felt by anyone who pauses long enough to truly look."
A Father Remembered | Acrylic
NFS
24 x 16
My dear father Frank (who has passed now) was a true one of a kind larrikin with a heart of gold and the hardest worker you could ever want on your team. He was born poor but worked his way to a better life with many hair raising adventures. I wanted to capture in a painting this spirit of his, with his direct gaze and kind face by choosing an intricately woven hammock to represent his many colourful escapades.
Marriage brought a new chapter. After meeting and marrying her husband, Darren, she settled into family life and returned to the easel with sharpened focus and intent. Portraiture became her central pursuit, and commissions began arriving as her reputation spread by word of mouth. Her paintings drew warm and genuine attention, and a steadily growing stream of sales and commissioned work followed, affirming that her instinctive approach resonated deeply with the people who encountered it.
The Blanket | Acrylic
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40 x 30
When I was painting for the Children's charity I came across this image online of a tragic and gentle little boy who broke my heart. I had to paint him as he affected me so deeply . His eyes and body reflect the hopelessness of his situation and the thick, velvet blanket seems to be his only refuge. This can remind us that material things may give us comfort but the soul may still be starving.
The year 2010 marked a turning point when she joined the Royal Queensland Art Society. Submitting two paintings to the Society's annual exhibition for the very first time, she received the Encouragement Award, a recognition that gave her both confidence and momentum. That early validation opened further doors, among them the 2013 Freedom Art for Children at Risk Charity Exhibition, where she presented a collection dwelling on the resilience of vulnerable children across the world, giving her work a purpose that reached beyond the canvas.
This painting shows how sea animals and the reef need each other to live. The title frames the sea turtle and colourful fish as caretakers of their bright underwater home. It reminds us that these reefs are beautiful but fragile, and we must protect them.
Guardians Of The Coral | Acrylic
NFS
40 x 30
Recognition continued to build in the years that followed. In 2014 she entered the Portraits in Time competition and earned an Honourable Mention Award, cementing her standing as a portraitist able to unite technical assurance with real emotional depth. Through these productive years she kept balancing commissioned commitments against personal projects, patiently assembling a portfolio that mirrored her abiding love of people, animals, and the natural world in all its endless variety.
"Illness stole my years, yet never once my inner vision."
Then life intervened in ways she had not foreseen. For many years she lived with a chronic illness that sharply curtailed how much she could create, and between the demands of a family business and the weight of her health, her painting grew intermittent and uncertain. Yet her bond with art refused to break. Creativity persisted as a quiet, unbroken thread running beneath everything, waiting with genuine patience for the moment it might one day return in full force.
Graceful Strength | Acrylic
NFS
40 x 30
This painting came about when I was trying to think of what to paint for my brother Mark's 50th birthday. As I enjoy painting animals I asked him if he was an animal what would he be? He answered as he always wanted to be a pilot he would like to be an eagle, soaring through the sky. I decided to make the eagle coming in to land to represent that there are times to soar in life and times to land and reflect.
Perseverance eventually rewarded her. After years of research and determined effort, she found ways to manage her health and slowly reclaimed her wellbeing, and as her strength returned and family obligations eased, she discovered she was free once more to pour real time and energy into her painting. Stepping back into the studio with renewed enthusiasm and clarity, she began producing work at a level she had not reached in many years, as though a long-held breath had finally been released after a lengthy silence.
When I was working in my family business a staff member commissioned me to do a special painting for her. I said 'sure, what were you thinking of?' to which she smiled and replied ' Can you paint a New Zealand Maori Warrior's face with a waterfall coming out of his mouth surrounded by a forest?'
This is the result. She was happy.
Warrior | Acrylic
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24 x 16
Eager to learn whether an audience still awaited her, she entered several online competitions, and the response delighted her, with back-to-back successes bringing both Gold and Silver awards in quick succession and leading directly to this solo exhibition. Her approach today remains as personal and intuitive as ever, each canvas allowed to evolve organically in answer to the emotion and unmistakable character before her. She holds firmly to a belief that art should be far more than decoration, that it should ask people to pause, observe, and feel something true, offering paintings that keep revealing fresh layers of meaning and become lasting companions to those who live alongside them.
Bean | Acrylic
NFS
40 x 30
I couldn't finish this exhibition without a pet portrait. My neighbours own a beautiful dalmatian dog called 'Bean' (because he is full of beans). He is very striking and I wanted to paint him as a gift for Christmas for them. When I took the painting over and leaned it against the wall he came around the corner and stopped dead in his tracks thinking it was another dog. Then he started barking very loudly and angrily at it for about 5 minutes until he realised it wasn't a real dog.
"Even a bird's glance holds a whole life worth painting."
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