Portraits | Dee Smart — Original Oil & Acrylic Paintings Sydney

Portraits

"I love painting people. People are my constant curiosity, my forever joy. There's no better drama than a person — and as an actor I believe I have an innate understanding of what makes a person tick. Even in just the eyes I paint."

Portraiture has always been political. Henry VIII famously sent Hans Holbein to paint Anne of Cleves before agreeing to marry her. Long before photography, a portrait was both an act of power and an act of revelation — constructing identity while quietly exposing something the sitter may not have intended to show.

That tension is what draws me in.

Painting directly from life sits at the heart of my practice. Spending hours within arm's reach of another person — watching, listening, paying attention — allows something to happen that no photograph can replicate. The small gestures. The unguarded moment. The quiet strength or vulnerability that exists entirely beneath the public face. I am interested in the moment where the armour falls away.

As an actor, I came to understand early that the most interesting thing about any person is never what they show you first. It lives deeper — in the way someone holds their jaw when they're trying not to cry, or the particular light that comes into the eyes when they talk about something they love. That is what I am always looking for. That is what I am always painting toward.

My portraits have ranged from iconic women reimagined as Sirens — Frida Kahlo, Marilyn Monroe, Audre Lorde — to intimate studies of women from my own community. Each sitting is its own conversation. Each face its own landscape.

I have also proposed a body of work exploring the human architecture of Parliament House — not only the politicians, but the curators, librarians, gardeners, security staff and public servants whose quiet work sustains the life of the building. Because democracy, like any ecosystem, depends on people we rarely think to look at directly.

That is what portraiture can do that nothing else can. It asks us to look. Really look. To move past the surface and sit with the full complexity of another human being.

Who are the people behind the institution? Behind the myth? Behind the carefully constructed image?

That is always the question. That is always the painting.