About the artist

Heidi Lustig is an Australian artist known also by her Instagram handle Violet Portrayal who creates ethereal and surreal portraits. Her graphite and oil paintings explore themes such as surrender, sacrifice, fertility, female rage, loss, rituals and womanhood.

Heidi graduated from a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Fashion Design in 2009 followed by a decade in the Melbourne fashion industry. A car crash in 2018 and the birth of her first child during the pandemic led her to leave the fast-paced fashion industry altogether.

In 2022 after experiencing the first of 4 miscarriages she turned to art to process the challenges she was facing with secondary infertility and ectopic pregnancies. Every piece she created helped her to come to terms with the unpredictable nature of fertility. The gaze of some of her subjects at first glance may seem quite neutral but upon closer inspection are infused with a quiet rage. Others have a surrendering or more of a naive innocence to them.

While Heidi works with a range of media her primary method of working is on wood panels. She sketches the face directly to the panel, with little room for erasing or error. The face is then sealed into the wood with clear layers before she oil paints around this. The result is skin that has a wood grain texture shining through. A ghostly appearance which contrasts with the vibrancy of the oils.

The presence of birds in Heid’s art come from the childhood holidays spent on her grandparents’ remote Australian outback farm. Hearing the willy wagtails chattering, the magpies singing and seeing the tiny fairy wrens flitting about. The birds in her work are often mischievous and wield some power than the subject. Other times they act as a chaperone or witness to whatever the subject is feeling.

While each painting comes from Heidi’s own experiences and inner world, she feels a piece is truly powerful when the viewer can see their own story in the work.

Her work made its official gallery debut in 2023 with Nanny Goat Gallery, an independent gallery with a focus on imaginative realism, surreal figurative and narrative art located in Petaluma, in the North Bay region outside of San Francisco, California.

Heidi took a brief pause at the beginning of 2026 to have the 2nd child she so longed for and who fuelled her fine art career in the beginning. She is now back in the studio balancing creating with mothering little ones.

Heidi’s works are in private collections in Australia, USA, UK, and South Korea.