Skip Liepke’s work makes me happy. Since first discovering it years ago, it has made me want to paint recklessly, with big wet wads of colour, because at the end of the day, character beats photo-realistic control every time. Moving from the Impressionists through Jenny Saville to reach a most edible and inspiring destination.

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I had some art teachers when I was a kid tell me that painting from a photograph was inferior to painting from life. Ecuador-based artist Maureen Gubia proves my teachers wrong with her gorgeous paintings that play on the unique qualities of photographs and their interplay with memory and fantasy.

A master of juxtaposition, Canadian photographer Liz Wolfe has updated her site with her newest series which focuses on characters and confection. The photos are never what they first seem, revealing something a little more macabre on closer inspection: a meat tree, a diseased dear, a melting icy pole dripping blood. It’s all presented in hyper-real candy colours.

The photography of Rohan Hutchinson is amazing, his subject matter of late focusing on the rapidly disappearing back alleyways in China which are being demolished for the Olympics, leaving thousands of people displaced. Hutchinson captures his images on large format negatives, meaning the processed photo can be enlarged almost to the size of a wall in a small room! He has his first exhibition between July 17-31 at the Flinders Lane Gallery in Melbourne.

The photographic-based artwork of Miami’s Lisa Torske is stunning. Tiny snapshots of every dream I’ve never had.

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Lu Hao is an incredible Chinese artist who paints meticulous and insanely detailed depictions of organized everyday collections in China, like shelves of CDRs, all painted with ink on silk. You won’t believe it even when you see it!

Photographer and web designer Jan Sochor was born in the Czech Republic but moves between South America and Europe often. Over the past five years he has lived and worked in Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Spain, the Czech Republic. His photographic work ‘focuses on showing and documenting the Latin American continent, the everyday life, social and cultural issues’.