Lounge Kat

The Cullen hotel

Ring the bells, the first of the long-awaited Art Series Hotels has arrived. The Cullen, in trendy Prahran, Melbourne, is five star luxury with a twist: each room is plastered with prints and art inspired books. Dripping with artist Adam Cullen’s work, The Cullen offers the opportinity to experience the Art of Living Fearlessly. It’s the first in a series of Art Series Hotels, which will include The Blackman and The Olsen. Read more

Rik Lee

Melbourne illustrator Rik Lee creates images as if they were a delicate easter egg. Faces, animals, bikes — they’re all rendered with the same light touch, with some interesting juxtapositions with the pastel smeared throughout, like make-up after a night on the town.

Nom Kinnearking says button me up

I love the sense of imperfect realism about the illustrations of Melbourne-based artist Nom Kinnearking.

Ken Taylor

Australian illustrator Ken Taylor has created imagery for some of rock n’ ’roll’s great purveyors of sound, from the Rolling Stones and Queens of the Stone Age, to Nine Inch Nails and the Mars Volta. He has an easily recognizable style that screams sharp edge cool. Bold and bawdy, Taylor’s pieces use vivid colour to create a cut-out-comic-like feel reminiscent of old movie posters from the 1930s and 40s.

Kelly Smith

Beautiful, delicate, fragile, a little bit collage, a little bit sketchfull. This is the work of Kelly Smith. Combining several mediums in a collaborative expose between pencil, paint and print to create timeless works of elegant splendour, it is easy to compare Smith’s works to the last snowflake of winter, fleeting but real, avoiding the brash bright mercantile world for the prettier climes of illustrative pleasure. Smith has a twelve-day exhibition on at the 696 Space in Brunswick, Melbourne, opening November 14.

Brandt Peters

Trapped in a time warp between then and now, the work of Brandt Peters combines an old school aesthetic with a modernity bordering on futuristic fantasy, with a touch of morbid fascination thrown in for good measure. In other words, he creates wonderful imagery combining cartoon-like pin-ups with sometimes freakish attributes (large skulled beings, for instance), and every now and then seems to throw in a nod to sci-fi — such as a mechanical glass jar — for good measure. Muted tones replace the bawdy colours often associated with such mediums, giving his pieces a whimsical, dream like quality. He must live in a delightfully wispy world.