Sharryn Jenkinson

Sharryn Jenkinson is an Australian oil painter based on Victoria’s rugged Surf Coast, where vast skies, shifting weather and elemental drama of the ocean shape her artistic vision.

Known for her immersive and atmospheric skyscapes, Jenkinson creates works that invite viewers into the emotional resonance of nature – moments where light, colour and movement mirror the rhythms of human experience.

Raised on the dry, dusty, Wimmera plains, Jenkinson grew up on a farm not far from the iconic Dimboola, on the banks of the scenic Wimmera river. As a child, she would lie for hours on these plains watching towering cloud formations roll endlessly across the panoramic sky – feeling the anticipation, the electricity of approaching storms.

Those formative experiences continue to echo through her paintings, where immense skies and shifting weather become metaphors for transformation, resilience, and renewal.

Sharryn paints the feeling of being alive in the landscape.

Drawn again and again to wild coastal places, she spends time in the wind, weather and shifting light until the experience becomes something felt rather than simply seen. Back in the studio, these encounters are translated into large oil paintings that carry the movement, atmosphere and emotional energy of the moment.

Jenkinson’s work sits between memory and observation, where sea, sky and land dissolve into gesture, colour and light. Rather than describing a view, the paintings evoke the sensation of standing within it – the wildness, the open vastness, the quiet power of the elements electrifying your inner being.

Jenkinson paints from her Porta Vermelha Studio in Bellbrae, Victoria. Her works are held in private collections across Australia, Europe, Asia and USA, and are exhibited in galleries across Victoria. Her painting: Clouds of Ra, received the Ocean Art award at the Queenscliff Art Prize, recognising her ability to capture the raw beauty and power of the natural world.

A blend of value, hue and confident use of colour temperature, Sharryn’s every sweeping gesture is an instinctive connection to landscape more than scenery.

Viewers often respond deeply to her work, recognising something of their own experience within it.

For Sharryn, painting is a way of sharing that profound and simple truth: that time spent in the natural world reminds us what it means to feel fully alive.