Sherri Lynn Carroll

Sherri Lynn Carroll is a painter of vivid, surreal worlds. Working mainly in acrylic, she fills her canvases with luscious color and movement: octopuses curling through coral, nautilus shells glowing like small suns, jellyfish drifting in a slow dance, sea turtles and dolphins, mermaids and underwater lovers. Alongside the sea she paints joyful guinea pigs in festive garden settings, fire and flow-arts dancers caught mid-spin, and musicians such as Louis Armstrong, always with the same bright, flowing energy that gave her studio its name, Lively Vortex. Originally from San Francisco, Sherri trained early in photorealistic watercolor, which she began in college in 1990, and studied art at College of the Redwoods in Eureka and Mendocino College. That patient, detailed watercolor practice still shows in the precision underneath her most exuberant acrylics. Today she continues to study at Windward Community College on Oahu. For more than twenty years Sherri was a working artist in Mendocino County, licensed as an art business since 2000. She became known for murals in every imaginable place: on homes and businesses, on cars, boats and airplanes, and even on a propane tank painted as a leaping steelhead in Laytonville. She painted a shop mural for Tye Dye Two in Laytonville, a salon mural after Maxfield Parrish in Ukiah, Fred and Ginger panels for the Mendonesia Cafe in Willits, and for fifteen years painted holiday windows. She also painted masks, did henna and painted live at festivals. In the summer of 2020 she brought color back to boarded-up San Francisco, painting octopus and mermaid panels on storefronts on Fulton Street and on Chestnut Street in the Marina. That spring she also hand-painted leather masks made by FROGWORKS. Now based in Kailua on the windward side of Oahu, Sherri paints original acrylics and watercolors, murals, pet portraits and art on clothing, and takes commissions. Her work is also available as giclée prints, and she has begun working digitally in Procreate. Her paintings invite the viewer to slow down and drift for a moment in a brighter, stranger and kinder world, where the ocean sings and even the smallest creatures have a little magic.