How Rachelle Dusting Uses Realism to Paint the Inner World of Womanhood
There is something about a beautifully painted face that can make us stop for a moment.
We might notice the light first. Then the expression, the smallest shift in a mouth or eyes, the way a figure sits within a room. And before we know it, we begin wondering about the person behind the painting.
For Perth-based artist Rachelle Dusting, portraiture has always been about that connection. Her paintings invite us to look closely, but they also ask us to look beyond appearances. Behind the carefully observed faces, still life arrangements and quiet interiors are stories about identity, memory, beauty, faith and the complicated process of becoming who we are.
Working primarily in oil, Dusting brings together the discipline of classical realism with contemporary stories that feel deeply personal. Her recent work has taken this even further, turning towards womanhood, heritage and transformation while allowing the objects, spaces and people within her paintings to carry layers of meaning.
Who Is Rachelle Dusting?
Rachelle Dusting is a Western Australian artist and educator based in Perth. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours at the University of Western Australia in 2012 and later continued developing her technical practice through further study, including the New York Academy of Art Summer Workshop Series in 2018.
Over the years, she has trained with and learned from artists including Robin Eley, Vincent Desiderio, Roberto Osti and Paul Newton, experiences that have helped shape her approach to drawing, portraiture and painting. In 2017, she also spent time in Los Angeles as an Artist in Residence with Robin Eley, assisting with his The Binary Project.
But Dusting’s practice extends beyond the studio.
She runs The Painting School at Goolugatup Heathcote, where she teaches adults and mentors emerging artists, and she founded The Artist Path, a creative event series created around the questions and challenges artists encounter as they build their careers. She has also worked with schools and creative organisations across Western Australia, making art education an important part of her wider practice.
A Practice Built Around Looking Closely
Dusting is primarily an oil painter, and her paintings are immediately recognisable for their careful observation and attention to light.
Her earlier portrait work often leaned towards an almost photorealistic quality. Skin, hair, fabric and facial features are rendered with remarkable precision, but the paintings are not simply exercises in technical accuracy. There is always a person at the centre of them.
Dusting has spoken about being a people person and about how the people she paints give purpose to her art. That interest in people has remained a thread throughout her practice, even as the subjects and questions within her paintings have evolved.
Light is another important part of her visual language. Her interest in chiaroscuro, the dramatic relationship between light and shadow, has influenced her painting practice from early on. It allows her to create images that feel intimate and cinematic at the same time, drawing our attention towards a face, a gesture or a particular object while allowing other areas to recede quietly into shadow.
Today, that sensitivity to light works alongside a much broader interest in symbolism and storytelling.
A piece of fruit, a patterned cloth, an inherited object or an empty domestic space can become just as important to the story as the figure itself.
From Portraits To Personal Stories
One of the most interesting things about Dusting’s practice is the way portraiture has gradually opened into something more expansive.
Her paintings can still be deeply concerned with the human figure, but increasingly, the figure exists within a larger emotional or symbolic world. This is particularly clear in her recent body of work, Sacred Ground, which became Dusting’s second solo exhibition in 2026 at Midland Junction Arts Centre.
The exhibition brought together eighteen oil paintings exploring identity, spirituality, beauty and womanhood through the experience of transformation and approaching motherhood. Rather than treating these subjects as simple themes, Dusting uses painting to sit with the uncertainty that comes with change.
What do we inherit? What do we leave behind? What parts of ourselves change when our lives change? And what continues to grow even when we are not entirely sure what comes next? These questions give Sacred Ground its emotional center.
Sacred Ground And The Beauty Of Becoming
The paintings in Sacred Ground are particularly intimate because they draw from Dusting’s own experience and heritage.
Born to Australian and English-Burmese parents, Dusting has described the collection as a visual reflection of the spaces between cultures, roles and ideas of self. Her Anglo-Burmese heritage becomes part of the visual language of the work, alongside references to faith, femininity, domestic life and motherhood.
There is a beautiful tension running through the collection. Strength and vulnerability exist together. The familiar sits beside the uncertain. Objects that might appear ordinary at first begin to feel almost ceremonial.
In paintings such as Sacred Ground, Now You See Me, The Weight Of Things and Tuesday 4pm, Dusting combines contemporary portraiture and still life with carefully considered interiors. Gingham cloth, fruit, vessels and heirloom-like objects become visual markers of memory, fertility, faith and cultural inheritance.
Even the monochromatic works have a role within this story. By reducing images to light and shadow, Dusting creates a quieter visual language that suggests something happening beneath the surface. The paintings become less about simply showing a person and more about what might be changing within them. It is this shift that makes her recent work feel so personal.
The Works That Stay With Us
Dusting’s body of work stretches across portraiture, still life and figurative painting, and her catalogue includes many pieces that reveal different sides of her practice.
Eden, a large oil on linen from 2023, carries the richness and symbolism that has become increasingly important in her work. Alongside it are paintings such as Great Expectations and Resilience, which use the human figure to explore different emotional states.
Her portrait practice can also be seen in works such as Immersion, a portrait of ultra-marathon swimmer Andy Donaldson, while earlier paintings including Legacy, a portrait of actor Chadwick Boseman, demonstrate her ability to bring a sense of presence and personality to her subjects.
Then there are her quieter still lifes.
Pomegranate Portrait, Oranges En Bleu, Flora, Primavera, First Light and Solace show how Dusting can move between the figure and the objects surrounding it. These works may appear simpler at first glance, but they carry the same sensitivity to light, atmosphere and careful observation that defines her portraits.
Her public work has taken this practice beyond the canvas too.
She has created murals, large-scale commissions and public artworks, including Flourish, Strength Rising, Renascence and ABIDE, as well as a series of life-sized portraits of Catholic saints. Her work has also included Percent for Art commissions and large-scale projects for public and commercial spaces.
Teaching Beyond Her Own Studio
Rachelle Dusting’s relationship with art does not end when she steps away from her own canvas.
Alongside her studio practice, she has built a growing body of work as an educator, creating spaces where artists can learn, experiment and become more confident in their own practices. Through her teaching, she shares the technical knowledge she has developed over years of studying and painting, while keeping the learning environment personal, practical and encouraging.
Her workshops cover different stages of an artist’s journey. For those just beginning with oils, her fortnightly beginner classes introduce the foundations through demonstrations, structured exercises and individual guidance. For artists looking to develop their portrait painting, her immersive portrait workshops focus on colour theory, skin tones and building a convincing likeness in oils, with artists working in a small and supportive group.
She also hosts regular life model sessions, giving artists the opportunity to spend time drawing and painting from a live model through longer poses. Unlike her structured workshops, these sessions are untutored, offering artists the freedom to work independently while still being part of a community of fellow creatives.
This balance between instruction and independence seems to be an important part of Dusting’s approach to teaching. She is not simply showing artists how to paint a particular subject. She is creating opportunities for them to observe closely, practise consistently, ask questions and gradually develop a language of their own.
Through The Painting School at Goolugatup Heathcote, her workshops and ongoing classes, Dusting has created an extension of her artistic practice that is centred on sharing what she has learned. Her role as an educator also reflects something that has been present throughout her own creative journey: the belief that becoming a better artist is an ongoing process.
There is always something else to look at, something new to understand and another way of seeing to discover.
And by opening her studio knowledge to others, Dusting makes that journey a little less solitary.
A Journey Shaped By Curiosity And Practice
Dusting’s career has never been limited to one kind of opportunity. Her first solo exhibition, Beauty in the Particular, was held in Perth in 2013. Since then, she has participated in exhibitions across Australia and developed a practice that moves comfortably between intimate studio paintings, portrait commissions, public art and education.
Her development as a painter has also been shaped by an ongoing willingness to learn. She received a scholarship to The Art Academy in South Australia in 2014, where she studied under Robin Eley. Later, she worked with artists including Vincent Desiderio and Roberto Osti, and in 2024 spent time working alongside Sydney artist Paul Newton to further develop her portrait painting practice. There is something lovely about seeing that continued learning reflected in her work. The technical skill is clearly there, but so is the desire to keep asking different questions.
Awards And Recognition
Over the years, Dusting’s work has received recognition through exhibitions, prizes, commissions and collections.
She was a finalist in the Kilgour Prize in 2021, the Kennedy Art Prize in 2023 and the Basil Sellers Art Prize in 2024. She has also been a semi-finalist in The Lester Prize Salon des Refusés.
Her work has entered private collections belonging to figures including former Western Australian Deputy Premier Liza Harvey, West Coast Eagles captain Luke Shuey, former WASO director Mark Coughlan and others. She has also commissioned portraits of people including ultra-marathon swimmer Andy Donaldson, Thankyou co-founder Daniel Flynn, photographer Jarrad Seng and artists Pippa McManus and Andrew Frazer. But perhaps one of the most meaningful parts of her career is how much of it has been about creating opportunities for other people too. Through The Artist Path, The Painting School and her workshops, Dusting has continued to share the knowledge she has gathered throughout her own journey.
Painting Womanhood, Heritage And Identity
At the heart of Rachelle Dusting’s work is a fascination with the human experience. Sometimes that means painting a face and asking us to notice the person looking back at us.
Sometimes it means placing fruit, fabric and familiar objects together and allowing them to speak about memory. And sometimes it means stepping into the uncertain space between who we were and who we are becoming. Her recent work reminds us that transformation does not always arrive dramatically. Often, it happens quietly. In our homes, our relationships, our bodies, our memories and the roles we slowly grow into.
Dusting gives these quieter changes a physical presence through paint. And perhaps that is what makes her work so easy to linger with. There is always something more to notice. A shift in light. A familiar object. A face caught somewhere between confidence and vulnerability. A story that belongs entirely to the artist, yet somehow leaves enough space for us to find a little of ourselves within it.
As Rachelle Dusting continues to paint, teach and build spaces for other artists to grow, her practice remains rooted in that beautiful act of looking closely. At people. At memory. At what we inherit. And, most of all, at what we are still becoming.
Discover more of her work on her Website and Instagram:
