Cheryl’s Bio
Professionally trained Artist and Art Teacher Cheryl Willcox is an Australian Impressionistic landscape oil painter, born and raised in NSW, Australia. Cheryl loves to explore, sketch, and paint her local community, drawing inspiration from the landscapes around her.
"I draw inspiration from my immediate surroundings on the Central Coast of NSW, where the convergence of National Parks, inland waterways, and the ocean provides endless creative exploration. Living in a community where the ocean plays a central role in the landscape, I find inspiration along its beaches, cliffs, and lagoons."
Her artistic process begins with observing and investigating the natural environment, usually by walking and watching. Sketching, photographing, and plein air painting serve as the initial steps, allowing her to capture the essence of the landscapes before returning to her studio. She is most excited by the vibrant colors created by the ever-changing interplay of light, influenced by weather, season, and time of day.
Always creating and painting, Cheryl studied Art at Newcastle College of Advanced Education, graduating with a Bachelor of Education in Art. In 1982, she began her career as a high school Visual Art Teacher, later becoming Head of the Visual Arts Department.
A stint in China in 2000 gave Cheryl the space and time to reflect and become familiar with art from another culture—seeing how it is interwoven through all aspects of life and society. On returning to Australia, with a reawakened love of its natural beauty—rugged, picturesque, clean, and eternal—Cheryl decided, “This has to be painted! And cannot be taken for granted again!”
Reengaging with the art world and her own creative drives, Cheryl enrolled in Watts Atelier Art School in California, USA, where she studied techniques that leverage both the old and modern Masters.
A dedicated studio and workshop space was recently created when she and her husband renovated the bottom floor of their home—marking the beginning of her career as an exhibiting artist and art mentor.
Exhibitions:
2019 – Mother Nature Exhibition, Weswal Gallery, Tamworth
2020 – ISO Exhibition, Gosford Regional Gallery
2022 – Finding Your Calm, Gosford Community Gallery
2023 – Above and Below, Gosford Community Gallery
2024 – Lily Pond Flow, Gosford Community Gallery
2024 – Finalist, Hunters Hill Art Prize
2024 – Finding My Calm, cs Studio, Newcastle
2025 - Finalist in Central Coast Artist Of the Year
2025 - Art in Bloom. Coming soon. 23rd August. to 8th September
Cheryl’s new book for art lovers and learners is available on Amazon.
From Pencil to Pond: My Creative Journey
You don’t wake up one day and become an artist. It’s more like a slow unfolding—a long, looping path made of small moments, reinventions, and returns.
I began as many do: with a pencil in hand and a deep love of drawing. I studied art at Newcastle in the early 1980s, and while I dreamed of painting full-time, life offered me a different beginning. I became an art teacher—guiding others to find their creative voice, all while quietly waiting for permission to explore my own.
Years later, a return to formal study at Watts Atelier in California reignited my passion. Watts was rigorous, exacting, and entirely focused on the fundamentals—drawing, observation, discipline. It wasn’t always easy. There were no soft landings: you passed or you failed. But that environment reminded me of something essential—that drawing is not just a skill, but a way of seeing. A way of being present.
I learned to paint with my whole body. To move from the shoulder, not the wrist. To trust the energy that begins in the bones and travels through the brush. That movement—that rhythm—is what I now bring to every canvas.
My work is grounded in realism, but I let the painting lead me somewhere looser, more abstract. Accidents are welcomed. Edges are softened. Layers build slowly, like sediment in a stream. And always, there is light. Always, there is water.
The lily pond has become my muse and my metaphor. It holds stories—Narcissus, the Lady of the Lake, Monet’s Giverny—and yet, it remains personal. A pond is a place to reflect, to pause, to see what lies beneath the surface. That’s what I want from a painting. Not just to be looked at, but to be felt. To be entered like a memory or a dream.
This is where I’ve arrived. From pencil to pond. And I’m still journeying—brush in hand, heart wide open.
EARLY LIFE
I didn’t know it at the time, but hanging on the walls of my Infants School were famous Artworks by Degas (Tumbling Ballerinas), Franz Marc (Red Horses) and Paul Klee (Slaying the Seals).
I remember being totally captivated by the images, the colour and the feelings I got from looking at what I would later discover were just prints. But it didn’t matter – my love of Art was born.
That initial feeling has never left me and it’s why Art continues to be my reason for being – through teaching, painting and experiencing it first-hand.
After years teaching high school Visual Arts, I left to concentrate on my own Art-making, studying classical drawing and oil painting at Watts Atelier and then being coached by Stefan Baumann of The Grand View TV Show.
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