Following on from her exhibition Seeing Other People at Yarilla Arts and Museum (Coffs Harbour Regional Art Gallery), this body of work was developed through an intense period of preparation for the television series Portrait Artist of the Year (Australia). For eleven weeks, Seabastion trained under strict conditions: one sitter, four hours, no revisions. What emerged wasn’t just a new way of working, but a deeper understanding of observation, perception, and the act of painting itself.
In this exhibition she reflects on the following:
The discipline of “showing up”.
The role of restriction in developing a painting.
The difference between painting from life and from selfies portraiture, authorship, and the changing nature of the gaze.
Why painting still matters in a world of fast, disposable images
These works sit between what is seen and what is felt — between direct observation and the slower accumulation of paint and if you are interested in painting, perception, or the process behind developing a body of work these works will hold you.
“When I was invited to participate in Australia’s first televised Portrait Artist of the Year, I had never painted alla prima or completed a portrait in under four hours.”
This exhibition brings together works from that period. Swift studies sit alongside more resolved paintings that extend beyond their practical origin. Together they examine portraiture as both discipline and encounter. They ask how we look, how we are seen, and what painting reveals in the space between.
“There is a moment in painting when the eye falters. When what is in front of you refuses to become an image and instead remains a presence. I have been thinking a great deal about that space between seeing and knowing. About how a face can be both familiar and unknowable. About how landscape holds memory long after we have passed through it’
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