Sari Shryack Is Not Sorry — and That's the Whole Point

Shryack was born in 1991 in Springfield, Missouri, and her path into painting ran through a classroom, not a happy accident. She attended Drury University, where she studied under painting professor Todd Lowery and graduated with a Fine Arts degree in 2014. That formal training is the quiet backbone beneath the candy-bright surfaces: the work looks playful, even irreverent, but it's built on real craft — drawing, color theory, and the representational control that lets a painted neon sign or a glossy plastic toy read as both true and heightened at once.

Today Shryack paints in Austin, Texas, where she lives with her husband and two young children, and where the Not Sorry Art studio has become a recognizable presence. The name does a lot of work. It's a posture as much as a brand — permission to make art that is large, bright, feminine, and proud of all three. Asked on her own site for the favorite part of being an artist, she keeps it simple: "Making something new everyday." It's a small line, but it reads like a mission statement for a painter who treats prolific output and joyful color as features, not flaws.

Shryack describes her practice as examining "the intersection of class and gender through bold compositions of color and light which reframe the high and low culture divide." In plainer terms: she takes the imagery a fine-art tradition would dismiss as kitsch — fairground food, carnival prizes, the glossy ephemera of American leisure — and paints it with full attention and full saturation, asking why some objects get to be "art" and others don't.

Her ongoing Carnival Series is the clearest distillation of that idea, with works like County Fair Corndogs, Playboy Stuffies, and Through The Midway. Across her catalog the through-line is light pushed to its limit — color and illumination dialed up until an ordinary scene turns electric. The pieces range widely in price and scale, from accessible originals to major statement works, and her shop spans roughly $250 to $10,000 depending on size and medium.

What sets Shryack apart from a lot of working painters is that she teaches the whole thing. In 2020 she launched Not Sorry Art School, an online painting curriculum she describes as covering "everything from color theory to representational realism," so students "learn to paint in a way that looks realistic, colorful, and painterly." It has grown into a library of 16-plus self-paced video courses for every level, from complete beginners to working artists, with community support and lifetime access.

The school's ambition goes past technique. Its stated goal is to help students "learn not just how to paint but how to sustain a fulfilling artistic practice" — a nod to the professional, make-a-living reality that most art instruction skips. It's a fitting extension of the Not Sorry ethos: the bright, unapologetic work, and the open invitation to go make your own.

The paintings reward seeing in person and at scale, but it's easy to start online. Her studio site, sari.studio, is the home base for her portfolio, originals, and prints — you can buy directly through the shop. To learn the method yourself, her online painting curriculum lives at notsorryart.com. And the day-to-day — studio process, new work, the carnival in progress — runs on Instagram as @not_sorry_art. Beyond Austin, she is the 2026 Artist-in-Residence at Sundance Square in Fort Worth, working toward a solo exhibition.

About this spotlight: an independent, unpaid feature, written because we admire the work — drawn entirely from Sari Shryack's own public pages. All artwork and images are the artist's; see the work in full via the links above. Sources: sari.studio/about, sari.studio, and notsorryart.com.