“My hands were just shaking and I thought ‘This is shocking’. I thought, ‘Something has to happen here, what are you gonna do?”

Smart was suffering post natal depression.

“I’d come off Water Rats full time in a hyper adrenaline job to sitting in a room with a baby,” she said.

“I loved her and she was the best thing that had happened to me, but I had post natal depression. I was really beyond.

“I had no family in Sydney and I didn’t tell people because I was ashamed that I wasn’t coping, I was embarrassed.”

She picked up a piece of paper and plonked it on the table. She started drawing everytime her baby Charlie went to sleep.

“I drew and drew and drew and four years later, I’d had another child, daughter, Zoe, and I moved onto pastels and paintrbrushes and then I put an exhibition on,” she said.

“So it saved me. Art and my daughters – in a really yucky and a really great way – saved my life,” she says blissfully splattered in paint in her gorgeous bohemian house in Bellevue Hill where the art studio has overtaken the dining room, and she laughs the kids get to eat meals on the couch.

Now a mum of three, her little boy Johnny Roy is seven, Adelaide born Smart is happy to call herself an artist.

She’s just been announced as a finalist for the second year in a row for the prestigious Archibald Prize, for her portrait of dancer and choreographer Meryl Tankard, titled Lunch in the Outback.

Her first, a portrait of John Macarthur called The Mayor of Bondi, was also hung at The Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Smart fell in love with Tankard when she saw her dance with Pina Bausch’s company at Melbourne’s Palais Theatre as an 18-year-old.

At the time, she was training full time in dance at the Victorian College of the Arts Ballet School.

“The whole stage was stripped bare with fresh lawn on every inch and I was intoxicated,” she recalls of the moment that would change her life.

The serendipity of decades later her painting her idol is not lost on her.

“To me Meryl is the prize! I couldn’t care less [about winning],” she said.

“What I’m excited about is that I’ve gotten here on time with something I’m happy with and that I have had the chance to do that and meet my idol, and that life gave me that full circle.

“Well I’m really friggin’ lucky.”

The connection was organic. It started with Smart’s charity Ballet Wings [see breakout box], which she started and has now assisted over 50 talented children and secured placements in the most elite ballet schools in Sydney.

Tankard heard about Ballet Wings and called.

They did a month of workshops together in community centres in Woolloomooloo to Redfern.

“I choose people to paint who have to have done something that is admirable, they have to be really brave and they have had to changed my point of view on the world in a really great way,” she said.

“Meryl changed what we saw! Her performances took me on a journey of laughter of anger of frustration to tears.

“In that one performance she changed the way I looked at art and the world.

“She made me realise anything was possible.”

It was another performance she chose to paint.

Tankard is dressed in the original 40s cocktail dress she wore on stage when she shares a story of driving from Perth to Melbourne when her family stopped in the outback.

Her mother pulled out nylon undies and popped them over their heads to keep away the flies away so they could eat their sandwiches.

“So there’s Meryl on stage. She shimmays one pair of undies off and puts them on her head and the audience is howling with laughter,” she said.

“So I said, ‘That’s it, that’s what we’re gonna paint’.”

She admits she must have looked like a lunatic searching for a pair of underwear in David Jones. She ended up at Spotlight to make her own.

“I love this crazy painting. This one image seems to encapsulate so much of my life,” says Tankard of the work.

Now days, Smart is happy to admit you couldn’t pay her to sit in a make up chair, even if she was offered a major role.

“I lost it [my love for acting] quite a while back but because I just love it so much I kept kind of chasing it,” she said.

“It kind of distracted me from my art journey.

“I think it was three years ago and I just said no to auditions.

“With acting it’s a different buzz, it’s full of adrenaline so it’s quite addictive.

“It’s a different energy to art. Art is so quiet. It’s calm. You need to still have tenacity and patience and it’s a different thing.

“And I didn’t have earlier on the patience for it – and I kept going back to acting and looking of that hit and I thought art is never going to give me that hit and as it turned out its far surpassed that buzz of acting for me.

“This is it now. It’s my joy. Its my bliss.”

BALLET WINGS

SMART’S charity Ballet Wings is an initiative she started when she was ferrying her daughter to ballet classes in Rose Bay five nights a week.

“I was driving her every night to a ballet class and I just thought how lucky, how fortunate,” she said.

“Ballet is for the elite. It’s expensive. If you’re struggling to put a sausage on the table for dinner that night how can even think you’ll spend 500 dollars a week and be organised enough to do their hair every five minutes to drive them?”

It got her thinking how easy it would be to collect a child, “whack their hair in a bun, throw them an old uniform and into the same class and drop them back again.”

She began driving other students to classes and then through a friend at Wayside Chapel she held auditions at the PCYC and community centres from Woolloomooloo to Redfern.

The talent was extraordinary.

“Oh. The talent. Two years ago was the first Aboriginal dancer to be accepted into the Australian ballet,” she said.

“Isn’t that disgusting? Ballet is for the elite.

“That made me want to get them into these schools.”

In the last four years Ballet Wings has scouted hundreds of children, predominantly indigenous Australians, and championed their abilities and secured over 50 talented students into the most elite ballet schools in Sydney.

Also for any queries for Dee’s charity visit www.balletwings.com.au.

THE STORY BEHIND THE BARNSEY ARCHIBALD POTRAIT