About the artist

Heidi Lustig is an Australian artist known also by her Instagram handle Violet Portrayal.

In her work she aims for a balance between the soft and the strange, creating ethereal and somewhat surreal portraits with a stoic gaze. Her graphite and oil paintings explore themes such as loss, sacrifice, fertility, female rage and surrender.

Heidi finished a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Fashion Design in 2009, with a personal interest in fashion illustration followed by a decade in the Melbourne fashion industry. 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 fine art as an outlet to process the challenges she was facing with secondary infertility and recurring ectopic pregnancies. Every piece created helped her to come to terms with the unpredictable nature of fertility and loss. The gaze of some of her subjects while at first glance seem blank are infused with rage, while others have a surrendering or an innocence to them.

Along with her personal battles with secondary infertility and PTSD Heid’s art also draws from the childhood holidays spent on her grandparents’ remote Australian outback farm. Hearing the willy wagtails chattering,  magpies singing and seeing the tiny fairy wrens flitting about. While each piece comes from Heidi’s own experiences and inner world, she wants the viewer to be able to 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.

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