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 soft and strange, weaving ethereal 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, followed by a decade in the Melbourne fashion industry. The birth of her first child during the pandemic led her away from the corporate world and into artisan chocolate. Heidi made her own silicone moulds to craft luxury neon chocolate bars, and also ran a course on how to make Holographic Chocolate. Her dark fashion style and this neon holographic aesthetic of the chocolate have followed her into her fine art career.

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. 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.

Heid’s art draws from the childhood holidays spent on her grandparents’ remote Australian outback farm, as well as her personal battles with secondary infertility and PTSD. When painting Heidi aims for her art to have both an intimate and visceral quality to it. While each piece comes from Heidi’s own experiences and emotions, she wants the viewer to be able to see their own story in the work.

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

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