Sheri Raschke (Ramsey) was born in Omaha, Nebraska. As a student there, she exhibited artwork from a school project in the Joslyn Art Museum — and realized art would be her life's profession.
When she was 13, her family moved to South Bend, Indiana. In 1971, Ramsey graduated from Indiana University, earning a B.S degree in Art Education with a focus on drawing and painting. Ramsey taught art at Center Grove High School in Indiana for two years. She then stopped teaching to paint full time at her Ramsey Art Studio in 1973 and began working in pastel as well as oil. Her chosen subjects were figure, portrait, still life and nonrepresentational painting.
In 1974, Sheri and her husband Don moved to Springfield, Illinois where they now live. In the mid 80s Ramsey started painting landscapes. She loved painting "en plein-air" (for lack of an easel, she painted in her car with doors and windows open) and painted abstracted landscapes in her studio from those outside studies. After learning to use a camera, she painted landscapes from photographs she had taken.
Now she paints using a combination of "en plein-air" and her photographs. Most paintings are of Springfield city parks and the surrounding countryside, including family land in Sangamon County. She has painted throughout Illinois, and in Indiana, Michigan, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, California, Canada, Italy, France, Norway, Africa and Israel.
Ramsey has studied in Albert Handell's workshops — two workshops in Woodstock, New York where she studied figures and portraits and one in Springfield where she studied landscape painting. She has also taken workshops from Richard McKinley, Desmond O'Hagen, Bob Rohm, Elizabeth Mowry, Leslie Rich and Colleen Howe.
Ramsey teaches at the Springfield Art Association. She paints full time from her home studio. She is a member of the Pastel Society of America, the Illinois Prairie Pastel Society and Gateway Pastel Society. She has also conducted pastel workshops at Domaine du Haut Baran, Puy l'Eveque, France.
She and her husband are the parents of two children, both now married with families of their own.
About the artist