I’ve always marveled at Greg Harrison’s mezzotint prints. He is one of a small number of Australian artists specialising in this probably the most painstaking printmaking technique. His strange animals, mythological characters and landscapes create a fantastical world where Durer’s Rhino turned 3D and Medusa is in the city.

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WhiteSpac3 is a recently launched arts community website. Instead of meaning a blank space, the suggestive name refers to an important element in the aesthetic composition. In design, the white or negative space is what enables objects to exist due to the contradiction with the positive (non-white) elements. It’s a very appropriate concept for a project that wants to be a free space for Australian creative minds, connecting them with galleries and art lovers.

I love the sense of mystery and adventure in Australian artist Louisa Jenkinson’s illustrations: it’s fantastical in scope without ever weaving into outrageous fantasy in themes. [Discover more Australian artists on The Colour]

Dosh is a super-slim, go-anywhere wallet, built for a go-anywhere lifestyle. This Dosh Wallet was designed by Joanthan Zawada, a Sydney-based artist who has created commercial works of art for Ksubi, Modular records, The Presets and Tina Kalivas.

I love it! With the CD now being eclipsed by the MP3, I find myself feeling even more nostalgic for the simple charm of the cassette. Australian artists Andrew Smart and Jared Schmidt create ‘large scale hand-made wooden cassette tapes, routed, sanded, bogged, primed, and painted with a high quality paint finish’. Aha! The perfect way to memorialize my old mix tapes.

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Having just finished up two solo shows, one in Melbourne at Lee Gallery, and the other at Palmer Projects in Sydney, Justin Williams’ solo show, Between a Ghost and a God, is now heading to Brisbane’s Nine Lives Gallery, with the opening night on August 21.

Maps represent a landscape, but they can also mean much more. Victorian artist Siobhan Punshon has recently been working with all sorts of maps and charts, using them as source material then fictionalising the landscape with colour and patterns to create new interpretations of the technical documents. The results then push the viewer in several different directions, as familiar names and symbols are rendered confusing and nonsensical, taking on compelling and dreamlike qualities. Siobhan Punshon has held solo shows in both Melbourne and Sydney, been an artist-in-residence at the Melbourne Aquarium and a finalist in several major art prizes, including the Mosman, Paddington, the ANL Maritime Art Prize, the Fleurieu Peninsula Water Prize and most recently the Albany Art Prize.

Painter Dan Sibley appropriates the Aboriginal technique of dot painting for his contemporary creations of idyllic luxury hotels and homes on fire, particularly resonant considering recent events in Victoria. The use of dots gives his work a computer generated bent, while the bright colors are reminiscent of the pop culture art of the 60s and 70s, and the absence of people in his idyllic images lends them an eerie, almost artificial feel.

I love the sense of escapism and richness of colour that seeps through the work of Shintaro Marky, an Australian-based artist who resides somewhere deep within Braidwood, in remote Southern New South Wales.

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Alex Noble is the artist behind the most recent poster in Don’t Panic Magazine, a beautiful piece of work based around the theme of Desire. Originally from Australia, Noble moved to Singapore in 2000, and later Japan, where, until recently, he was an art director at Apple Japan.

Exploding cupcakes, violent shark attacks, volcanoes, flying men and the pastel coloured remains of a café latte have all been depicted by emerging Sydney artist Tony Curran, who describes his works as experimental neo-paintings. Sitting somewhere undefined between sculpture, installation and conventional painting, Curran distills images onto layers of acetate or resin before physically reconstructing them into a completed work. It’s a precarious process, with the alignment of each layer crucial in the making of the image and the acetate layers easy to steal, an unhappy discovery made at his first solo show.

He has also toyed with visual perception and optical illusion in his works, painting portraits in red and green and supplying galleries with hand crafted 3-D viewing glasses. Currently locked out of his Sydney studio (due to carelessness not expulsion), he is concentrating on his curating his second show, for arts based club night The Wall at World Bar in Kings Cross, Sydney, to be launched as part of the Worlds Collide Australia Day celebration on January 25.

A nerd at heart, Curran is a keen consumer of both scientific and artistic journals, so committed to his craft that he admits to eating blueberries to improve his visual strength. Having been exhibited in artist run spaces, commercial galleries and museums in Australia and overseas, starting work as a curator and arts writer, Curran is eager to contribute to a greater arts dialogue. He is currently developing ‘Realperspectives‘, which he hopes will become a funded research body that showcases and supports the divergent works and worldviews of other creators.

Australian artist Christine Stoner likes to paint unusual buildings, including this one of an ice hockey arena called Globen in Stockholm. ‘The metaphor I see’, she says, ‘is one of a giant jellyfish with the houses at the end of its tentacles’.

The work of Australia’s Ben Frost is always interesting. He’s known for his controversial art juxtapositions that confront contemporary Western paradigms in our advertising obsessed society. Crapitalism is on display until November 3 at Opus Gallery in Newcastle, UK. I do hope any disgruntled viewers refrain themselves from slashing his work with a knife, unlike the infamous 2000 Australian episode.

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Australian artist Claire Kurzmann creates bright, luminous work that reminds me of misspent childhood days down by the local candy store. Of her artwork, she says: ‘I’d try and draw realistic beings but they’d never work, they always looked odd. They turned out the same way each time. Then I realised that they looked actually looked half-decent in their own way.’

Courtney Brims is a talented young Australian artist with an exhibition of new running at Sydney’s Monster Children Gallery until August 7th.

The intricate, surrealist paintings of Australian artist Cameron Hayes recall the work of Hieronymus Bosch in scale and detail, but the actual style of his images draws a lot from children’s books and folk art. The cheerful and dreamlike quality of his pieces contrasts with the seriousness of the topics he engages — his most recent show at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York tackles the impact of colonialism on his native country.

I love the muddled vibrancy of Australian artist Rhys Lee’s paintings. His work is like half-remembered dreams.

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

Melbourne-based illustrator Sarah Beetson has her second solo exhibition opening on June 6th, featuring Australia’s first Art Vending machine. 50 Bucks: Bring On The Sluts is a collection of 500 moleskine-sized artworks which will be priced at $50 each. Those interested in buying one will be able to make their purchase through a donated Pepsi vending machine, which will be dispensing the artworks in a ‘message in a bottle’ fashion. Should be fun.

The artwork of Australian painter Elbereth Moore seems to be held in a deep, dark and dreamy place only available to those with truly greedy eyes and heart speakers. I came across her work on MySpace about a year ago and have since taken to random penpal emails and trading images of new works. When will she bring her work to the United States I wonder? Elbereth is seemingly shy, quiet, and sits in her studio day by day painting masterpieces waiting to be scooped up by lucky onlookers.