Ken Taylor

Otto Rapp

I write about a lot of various artists who work in all sorts of media and styles, but at the end of the day, super intricate, gothy stuff like the work of Austrian-born, Canada-based artist Otto Rapp is what really gives me an art boner.

Vania Zouravliov’s decadent gothic drawings

Russian illustrator Vania Zouravliov’s drawings has a turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century dark gothic feel to them, mixed with the colors and styles of communist Eastern Europe and pop Asia. The result is extremely cool without being too hip. Read more

Pamela Love

Having just finished a collaboration with Marchesa, jewellery designer Pamela Love’s gothic-inspired line has been picked up by the likes of Erin Wasson, among other celebrity fans. Referencing both nature and science, Love has created a line that is both rock n’ roll and earthy, with talons, claws, peacocks, rams and bear heads all featuring heavily.

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.

The salacious creations of Tyson McAdoo

Tyson McAdoo is responsible for depicting these salacious bombshells, taking seemingly ordinary situations — like sitting on a couch, riding a motorbike or riding an invisible horse (things I am sure we’ve all done at some stage) — and adding some sassy young minx as the focal point, creating a playground for your eyeballs. Apparently McAdoo is imprisoned within his creative universe, or some dungeon according to his bio, accompanied only by ‘two pathetic ghetto rats, Squeezie and Pocket’, and forced to draw the Empress of Ink over and over each day so she dare not fade. You can pick up prints of his work online, and they are damn reasonably priced compared to what some prints go for these days.