THH70′s subversive artwork

The best street art of 2011

There is a great collection of some of the most innovative improvised street art from the past year from various artists on this French website. Read more

Hell Ton John: a street artist from Tahiti

Hell Ton John is a brilliant young artist and graphic designer from Tahiti, in French Polynesia. His painting is largely inspired by tattoos and Polynesian imagery, combined with patterns taken from street art. The contrast between the ancestral signs and urban graphics is beautiful. Read more

Art on pencils by Ghost Patrol

I had the chance to meet Ghost Patrol this summer and he’s a great chap. I love how he combines illustrative and narrative elements to his street art, and his fondness of folklore and nature really make his work stand out.

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.