Tag: figurative art
Perth-based artist Rachelle Dusting brings portraiture, still life and symbolism together in paintings that explore womanhood, heritage, identity and transformation. Through her luminous oil paintings, she invites us to look closely at the people, objects and stories that shape who we are.
Dominika Luszcz creates contemporary portraits of women surrounded by flower wreaths, embroidered textiles, and earthy colors inspired by Polish folklore. Her paintings explore heritage, identity, nature, renewal, and belonging while reinterpreting traditional imagery through her own contemporary style.
Leigh Witherell uses the human figure to explore the emotions people often struggle to put into words. Working primarily through figurative painting, she creates intimate images shaped by grief, love, vulnerability, loss, and resilience. Her practice is deeply intuitive, beginning with emotion rather than anatomy or gesture, and her figures have evolved alongside her own experience of grief after the unexpected loss of her daughter in 2021. Witherell’s work also examines male vulnerability, unspoken feelings, and the stories carried quietly by those around us. Through projects such as The Invisibility Project,…
Discover the Portraits Virtual Exhibition by Women in Arts Network, featuring an inspiring collection of women artists from around the world. Through painting, photography, textiles, sculpture, and mixed media, these selected works explore identity, memory, emotion, culture, and human connection, revealing how portraiture continues to evolve as one of art's most powerful forms of storytelling.
Diana Strandin creates surreal collages that deconstruct the human figure and rebuild it through unexpected combinations of flowers, plants, photographs, and fragmented imagery. With a background in fine art, sculpture, and photography, Diana found collage offered the freedom to bring images from completely different contexts together and create new visual realities. Her work explores the connection between humans and nature while embracing contrasts between strength and fragility, attraction and repulsion, and the familiar and uncanny. Working with magazine cutouts and paper, she rearranges existing imagery into compositions where bodies merge with…
Amélie Yerly creates oil portraits that unfold slowly, built through delicate layers of glazing that reveal depth, emotion, and quiet presence over time. Rather than relying on bold colour or immediate impact, her work invites viewers to lean in, discovering the subtle tensions and dualities each face holds. Influenced by patience and intuition, her process allows each painting to evolve gradually, capturing not just appearance but the inner life beneath it. Her figures exist in a space between strength and fragility, visibility and privacy, where emotion is suggested rather than declared.…
Heidi Weiss creates paintings that sit between memory and interruption, drawing from paused television stills and transforming them into fragmented, emotionally charged compositions. Cropping, distortion, and layered oil surfaces allow her to withhold information, leaving viewers inside unresolved moments that feel both familiar and distant. Influenced by her background in painting and fiber art, her process embraces repetition, slowness, and accumulation, building surfaces that echo the instability of memory itself. Rather than telling complete stories, her work focuses on what lingers, the quiet tension, the partial view, the feeling that something…
Jessica Fisher creates intense, close-up portraits that eliminate distance, pulling viewers directly into the emotional core of the face. Her work explores memory, identity, and the subconscious through gestural brushwork and tightly framed compositions where the eyes become the focal point. Drawing from personal experiences of trauma and healing, painting became her language when words failed. Her Blasphemous Saints series shifts focus away from identity, using cloaked figures and gesture to express vulnerability and tension. Now working on larger scales, her paintings feel both intimate and confrontational at once. Each piece…
Lauryna Rakauskaitė creates luminous portraits that shift the idea of what a face can hold, not weight or tension, but warmth, stillness, and quiet presence. Her paintings glow from within, using soft color, open space, and gentle gestures to create an emotional atmosphere rather than a fixed narrative. After more than a decade away from art, she returned to painting with urgency, driven by something she could no longer ignore. This return brings a freshness to her work, where exploration and intuition guide each piece. Rather than directing emotion, she allows…
Ligia Fascioni creates layered portraits that merge photorealism with hand-drawn floral and figurative elements over real urban textures. Using photographs of the Berlin Wall and torn street posters, she builds faces on surfaces rich with history and meaning. Each piece reflects the idea that identity is formed through layers—cultural, emotional, and historical. With a background in engineering and design, her work is both structured and deeply expressive. Her compositions transform decay into beauty, turning overlooked materials into powerful foundations. The result is art that invites viewers to look closer and uncover…