Sharyne Jewell (nee Doughty) is a Sydney based artist with a BFA from RMIT where she majored in Painting and Film Making (animation). She has a background in dance and currently works as a fitness instructor.

Her paintings fall into two distinct categories: her relationship with the external world, and that of people in her world and own self-reflection. The former category’s works are an attempt to find harmony between nature and humanity’s impact upon it and a search to find beauty where nature abuts uncomfortably against the industrialised city. Sharyne paints highly textured canvas then embroiders found or vintage objects on to them. She likes the idea of transforming the everyday in to something beautiful and new … alchemy!

Her second theme is an examination of the fleeting quality of beauty and sensuality. Since her days at RMIT, she has created a series of personal portraits of herself, friends, lovers and family. These sometimes confronting images show her conflicted relationship with her own body in the years spanning early adulthood to her 40s. Alongside these images are representations of people from the innocent naive relationship children have with their bodies to images of the peak of adult sensuality and the inevitable changes wrought by age and experience.

Dancing professionally at 12, she now looks at her oldest daughter and wonders how she would feel to see her in such work in a couple of years. And of what she would think if she became a mother who allowed a child such a precarious existence… And here is the basis of another tension which has underpinned her work from the start: Her appreciation of the inherent sensuality in children running headlong against maternal protection and a deep suspicion of commercialising factors which underpin the sexualization of childhood.

The body reappears in current works as she uses her art to investigate different aspects of her personality. She is driven and confident, and equally alarmed by the unpredictability of life as she moves through her forties. One moment she is sensual and confident, and the next moment feeling that she can never attain the Western ideal of beauty.

Sharyne runs a punishing schedule as a fitness instructor. Almost a full circle from her gruelling early dance years… And always, always documenting and externalising the journey with self portraiture woven into and painted over

These current works employ digital imagery. Sharyne photographs her canvases and drawings then merges them with self portraits and photographs of friends to immortalize a uniquely mortal happening. This process creates a sense which is ethereal and yet familiar at the same time.

Sharyne has been inspired by David Hockney’s choice to have the prints for his photocollages developed at everyday photo-labs, leaving so much to chance.
Her earlier engagement with photography utilised Polaroid technology which she used to document the art that she and colleagues were making, manipulating the colours by distressing the prints as they self-developed. This created an on-the-fly, art form based on being in the creative moment with colleagues. The resulting ephemeral unpredictable images inspire her again as she continues her use of photography with new technology.  She enjoys these similar random possibilities as well as the constant evolution presented by digital photography, often relying on images taken by friends on their mobile phones. The raw, candid quality of cameras in phones is reminiscent of the reduced palate and compressed planes of the Polaroid.

She is fascinated by the trend in “do it yourself” art. In an attempt to reclaim this art for the artist, she has some of her digital montages photo-lab printed on to canvas. She gives the printers no instructions, allowing them to print the image any way they deem appropriate. This again echoes back to the unexpected outcomes which earlier photographic techniques produced: by not knowing in advance what the next stage of a work was going to be like, the development towards the final iteration was unpredictable and liable to take her off on unexpected tangents. She then makes the choice whether to add to or rework the canvas.

Sharyne has won a number of art awards including the People’s Choice Award for the Kings Cross Art Guild Images Of The Cross Art Prize (2004) and the People’s Choice Award for the Amnesty International Freedom Award (2002 and 2005). She was a finalist in Cromwell’s Art Prize (2006). Her works are in private collections in the UK, Europe, USA and across Australia.