There are things time should not be able to take from us - a face , a story, where we come from, who we loved and what we stood for. I founded Quartrait to give those things a forever, a permanence.
Guneit Kaur Dhillon
Creative Director & Founder
Where did the name Quartrait come from?
“I’m not a princess. I’m a queen.”
Apparently, I used to say that a lot as a little girl.
My friends and family lovingly called me Queen, and I grew up with this fascination with everything that word seemed to hold — not simply crowns or royalty, but grandeur, beautiful architecture, rich colour, fine fabrics, craftsmanship and extraordinary attention to detail.
I was always interested in the things somebody had taken time over. The carving most people might walk past. The texture of a fabric. The weight of an old building. A table laid beautifully. The tiny decisions that tell you somebody cared.
I think a lot of that came from home.
I was raised with enormous love. My parents made me feel protected, provided for and deeply valued. So much so that I used to joke with them:
“I’m telling you, I was a queen in a past life.”
My mum always addresses my cards, birthday Christmas, a congratulations as a “To my Queen of Hearts…”
Looking back at photographs of that little girl in her tiara makes me laugh, but I understand her differently now.
She wasn’t waiting for somebody else to tell her she was important.
She already believed she was.
And to me, that is what being a queen came to mean. Not being above anybody else, but carrying yourself with dignity, generosity, responsibility and standards.
If you have been given love, opportunity, ability or a voice, you should do something meaningful with it.
Years later, when I needed a name for my work, Quartrait came almost instinctively.
Queen of Portraits.
At first, it was playful. But as the work developed, I realised the name had been there long before the business had.
Where did your story begin?
Southall — and, in many ways, with my first hero.
I went to Blair Peach Primary School.
Before I idolised an artist, a celebrity or some conventional idea of success, I knew the story of Blair Peach.
He had come to Southall and stood against racism and fascism. He wasn't from the community he was standing beside, and yet he chose to stand there.
As a child, you don't necessarily understand all of the politics surrounding that.
But you understand what somebody stood for.
I think growing up in a school carrying his name quietly taught me something that has stayed with me:
when something is wrong, you don't simply walk past it.
And that story existed within Southall — this extraordinary place full of colour, migration, music, food, faith, protest, entrepreneurship, family and people building lives from the ground up.
Southall wasn't just where I grew up.
It was one of my first classrooms.
Were you always an artist?
Always. I just didn't always know I was allowed to call myself one.
My first love is the pencil.
Even now, sketching is something I don't really think about. I see the tones, the shadows, the shapes — and my hand just starts working.
I remember finishing an exam early and looking at the blank page of the exam paper.
I started drawing my calculator.
Then I started drawing the rest of the exam room.
I'd sit in lessons and draw the teachers. I'd draw the students. Give me a piece of paper and eventually something was probably going to appear on it.
If anyone from my classes is reading this... this may take you back! Haha.
Art wasn't something I discovered later in life.
It was always happening in the background.
You didn't go to art school. So how did you get this far?
When you say “this far”, I feel like there's such a long way to go.
But essentially, I taught myself.
Although saying self-taught can make it sound as though you learnt in isolation, and that isn't really true either.
Along the way, I've met incredible people who each left something with me.
It starts with Aruntha, my very first art teacher.
I must have been about six or seven.
There was a community centre at the end of my road, and at the weekends I'd go to her art club.
She taught me how to draw a face. Composition. Proportion. Those classical foundations.
She shared elements of the artistic traditions of her Sri Lankan heritage with me.
But she also taught me how to be free.
I didn't understand the significance of that at six or seven years old, obviously.
I just knew I loved going.
Looking back, though, I think she gave me something I still use today:
the discipline to understand how something is constructed — and the freedom not to be imprisoned by it.
And then came my form tutor at high school...
There have been people like that throughout my life.
So yes, technically I didn't take the traditional route. There was no art degree, art-school network or established pathway waiting for me.
But I have had teachers.
Some of them taught me art.
Some taught me courage.
Some taught me that I had something unique.
Some probably have no idea they taught me anything at all.
So why did you choose Law?
Because, strangely enough, I think justice had been sitting somewhere in the story all along.
Perhaps the little girl walking through the gates of Blair Peach Primary School and the young woman choosing to study Law aren't actually that far apart.
I was interested in people.
In fairness.
In why systems work the way they do.
In what happens when they don't.
Law taught me to question.
To research.
To look at evidence.
To construct an argument.
To look beyond what somebody is presenting to you and ask:
what is actually happening here?
Those skills never disappeared when I picked up a pencil.
If anything, they became part of how I make art.
But you built a completely different career before becoming an artist?
I did.
I studied Law and went into the corporate world, working across legal and operational roles within FTSE 100 and global organisations.
And I'm grateful for it.
I learnt how organisations work. How decisions get made. How people communicate. How to walk into rooms that can initially feel intimidating and find your place in them.
Later, I moved into education too.
When I look backwards, my career can probably look quite unconventional.
Law.
Corporate operations.
Education.
Art.
But from inside my own life, it doesn't feel as disconnected as it might look on paper.
Every version of me taught the next one something.
Was there a moment when everything changed?
COVID.
Like it did for so many people, it made me think very differently about time.
About mortality.
About what matters.
About the things we keep postponing because we assume there will always be another year.
During that period I created Gifted Breaths.
Something shifted.
Art stopped feeling like simply something I happened to be able to do.
It became a way of saying something.
And once that happened, it became much harder to ignore.
Was leaving the corporate world really about becoming an artist — or was it about choosing yourself?
Probably the second one.
Because choosing yourself isn't always this triumphant moment where suddenly you're fearless and everything makes sense.
Sometimes it's terrifying.
I'd built a career. I had qualifications. Experience. A path people understood.
Art didn't come with any of that certainty.
There wasn't an alumni network.
There wasn't an established team.
There wasn't somebody handing me a blueprint saying, do these ten things and this will work.
I had to ask myself:
If I spend my life believing in everybody else's potential, when am I going to believe in my own?
And eventually I chose to find out.
What are you actually trying to do through your work?
Probably the second one.
Because choosing yourself isn't always this triumphant moment where suddenly you're fearless and everything makes sense.
Sometimes it's terrifying.
I'd built a career. I had qualifications. Experience. A path people understood.
Art didn't come with any of that certainty.
There wasn't an alumni network.
There wasn't an established team.
There wasn't somebody handing me a blueprint saying, do these ten things and this will work.
I had to ask myself:
If I spend my life believing in everybody else's potential, when am I going to believe in my own?
And eventually I chose to find out.
Your heritage appears in your work. Do you see yourself as a Sikh artist?
I'm a Sikh woman. I'm British. I'm Panjabi.
Those things are part of me, so of course they will sometimes appear in what I create.
But they're not the entirety of me.
I don't want to be put into a box — even a beautiful one.
I'm interested in Sikh history, but I'm also interested in portraiture, power, women, architecture, fashion, sport, migration, injustice, family, memory, beauty, humour, craftsmanship and the human condition.
That's the coat of many colours again.
I want the freedom to follow a story wherever it takes me.
Your work has now entered some extraordinary rooms. Does that ever feel surreal?
Completely.
There have been moments where I've had to quietly take in where the work has travelled.
Lord's.
Wembley.
Coutts.
Corporate institutions.
Private collections.
Rooms and collectors I could never have imagined when I was that little girl drawing at the community centre at the end of my road.
Those moments matter.
But not simply because of the prestige attached to them.
They matter because every time the work enters a room where perhaps somebody like me — or work telling some of these stories — hasn't traditionally been expected, the room becomes slightly bigger.
And I love that.
What do you want Quartrait to become?
I want it to become bigger than me.
Not bigger for the sake of being big.
More meaningful.
I want to create important works.
I want to tell stories that perhaps haven't been given the scale or care they deserve.
I want work to live in extraordinary collections and institutions.
I want to create things families inherit.
I want to keep learning.
And I want the success of it to create opportunities for other people too.
There's a very long way to go.
And that's exciting.
You seem almost obsessive about how the work is made. Why does that matter so much?
Because once I put my name on something, I want to know I've done everything I can to make it last.
The research doesn't end when the artwork is finished. If I'm depicting history, I'll spend hours researching the smallest details and, where necessary, work with historians and people who know that subject intimately. I want the story to be as considered as the image itself.
And I'm exactly the same with the physical artwork.
I research the paper, the canvas, the paints, the pigments, the printing and the people entrusted to produce it. For my fine-art editions, that means archival pigment processes, museum-quality papers and specialist print houses chosen for their ability to reproduce the work faithfully and with longevity in mind.
Some of these materials are designed to endure for generations when properly cared for. That's important to me because I don't create something thinking only about the person buying it today. I'm thinking about who might be holding it many years from now.
I invest in the best materials and craftspeople I can find — not because it sounds fancy, but because I've spent too much time creating the work to compromise at the final hurdle.
I always describe my artworks as my children, and perhaps that's the easiest way to explain it.
As a mother, you don't cut corners when it comes to your children.
So I do the worrying for you. I've researched it, questioned it, tested it and spent the extra penny where I believe it matters.
Whether it's your first artwork or you're an established collector, I want you to be able to choose the piece you love without having to become an expert in paper, pigment or printing.
That's my responsibility. Yours is simply to fall in love with the art... (and look after it now it's your own child!)
You once said that art saved your life. What did you mean by that?
I don't say that lightly.
I've gone through some very difficult periods in my personal life, as soes everyone. There are things I've struggled with that I don't necessarily share publicly — certainly not behind the smile you usually see.
For a long time, I worked in the corporate world. It taught me an enormous amount, but it also taught me something quite confronting: in a huge organisation, however hard you work, ultimately you are replaceable.
Someone else can sit at your desk.
Someone else can inherit your title.
The machine keeps moving.
Quartrait was different.
There were moments when I might have been ready to give up on myself, but somehow I couldn't give up on her.
And the strangest thing started happening.
I'd be going through a particularly low moment and an email would arrive. Someone would enquire about an artwork. A booking would come in. I'd be invited to an event. A collector would tell me what a piece meant to them.
And without knowing it, someone would arrive at exactly the moment I needed them.
I'm not somebody who is constantly promoting myself, so there have been times when these opportunities have felt almost too perfectly timed to be coincidence.
Almost as though that person, that conversation or that opportunity was meant to find me.
They may think they're simply buying a piece of art or inviting me into a room.
They probably don't realise that sometimes they've given something back to me too.
That's why I take the people who support my work so seriously. I never want anyone to feel like a transaction. They are part of this story, whether they realise it or not.
Art gave me somewhere to put things I couldn't always say.
Quartrait gave me a reason to keep creating when other parts of life felt incredibly heavy.
And every exhibition, every person I meet and every piece that finds a home reminds me that there is a purpose to my life that doesn't have to fit the traditional route I once thought it would.
So when I say art saved me, I don't mean that everything suddenly became easy.
I mean it kept giving me a reason to show up.
If someone has made it all the way to the end of this conversation, what would you say to them?
I'd probably start with thank you.
You've just spent a little bit of your life getting to know mine, and I don't take that for granted.
So I'd like to leave you with something in return.
If you're reading this at a point in your life where you're questioning yourself — your direction, whether you belong somewhere, whether an idea is worth pursuing, or whether there's more for you than the path you're currently on — please reach out to me.
Not because I have it all figured out. I really don't.
But sometimes you just need somebody to say, “Tell me about it.”
And I'll listen.
Equally, if you've found your way here because something in my work has stayed with you — perhaps you want to own a piece, have something created, tell me about someone you love, invite me somewhere, or simply say hello — I'd love to hear that too.
Whatever brought you here, my door is open.
Come and say hello →