Sheila Mary Denning was born in West Sussex to an English mother and Irish GP father.

He helped her find work and she was able to continue her studies part time until the outbreak of World War II.

Appalled by the bombing of Dresden, she applied for exemption from military service as a conscientious objector and left the army in spring 1945.

[1][2] Denning found the rigorous realist techniques taught at Camberwell under the influence of Coldstream of limited value and gained more from the tuition of Bloch, a German Jewish refugee who had travelled throughout Europe meeting and working with a wide range of artists.

Denning taught painting for many years at adult education institutes in West Sussex, at Brighton Technical College and occasionally at Heatherleys School of Art, as well as running private courses in portraiture and landscape from her home in Chichester.