Seabastion Toast
Seeing other people

When invited to participate in Australia’s first televised Portrait Artist of the Year, Seabastion Toast had never painted alla prima (wet on wet technique) nor completed a work in under four hours. Faced with the constraint of speed and public scrutiny, she did what she always does when confronted with a challenge: she trained.

For eleven weeks, five days a week, for four hours a day, she restructured her process around immediacy and sustained observation. The resulting works, many of which form this exhibition, document that period of concentrated looking. Some remain raw four-hour studies, while others have been further developed. Together they trace a shift in method while extending an ongoing investigation into perception.

Anchored in portraiture but grounded in broader concerns of composition and attention, these paintings examine observation as both discipline and encounter. Each work negotiates the space between what is seen and what is felt, between the speed of recognition and the slower accumulation of paint.

Working from both familiar and unfamiliar faces, the paintings reflect on presence and on what remains when a fleeting encounter is translated into pigment. Some retain the urgency of their making; others carry the density of extended looking. Throughout, light, value and structure are used to test how perception shifts across a surface.

These works invite the viewer not simply to look, but to see through the changing conditions of light, time and touch.

Seabastion Toast is a contemporary Australian painter based on the mid-North Coast of NSW. Working primarily with figurative subjects, interiors and domestic spaces, she constructs structurally rigorous compositions that balance clarity, pattern and atmosphere. Her paintings investigate the act of looking and the texture of everyday life, using colour and value to carry emotional and narrative weight.

Toast has been a regular finalist in major national prizes including the Portia Geach Memorial Award, Mosman Art Prize, Glover Prize and Sunshine Coast Art Prizes. In 2024 she won the $40,000 Percival Portrait Prize and has twice received the Darcy Doyle Landscape Prize. In 2025 she appeared on ABC’s Portrait Artist of the Year Australia.