Gorker!

Melbourne artist Michael Cain

Michael Cain is an artist based in Melbourne. His quirky, abstracted characters are created with loose, fluid brushstrokes and a vivid colour palette that immerses you in their world and makes you smile. Read more

Sneak peek at the 2012 Sketchbook Project World Tour

The Sketchbook Project collects thousands of artists’ sketchbooks from across the globe and exhibits them in cities all over the world. The crew just posted a sneak peek at some of the finished sketchbooks that have just arrived at Project HQ in Brooklyn.

Download the new EP from Melbourne’s Left Feels Right

Melbourne band Left Feels Right play a smooth blend of post-rock soundscapes with a hint of dance thrown into the mix. Their second EP, which is a split release with post punk band The Analyte, can be downloaded for free at their Bandcamp.

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.