If Salvador Dali had photoshop and the access to all the awesome stock images we do today, maybe his work would look something like these photomanipulations by Paula Stirland.

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Describing the work of my friend, Melbourne artist Gervaise Netherway, it’s hard not to notice the impalpable resemblence to the likes of Basquiat and Salvador Dali. Whether deliberate or not, he constructs that same surreal neo-impressionism. I can’t wait to hang one on my wall.

Finnish graphic designer and illustrator Olli-Pekka Jauhiainen is kept busy helping Nike, Nokia and T-Mobile sell things. He’s also happy making art just for the sake of it. Commercial or otherwise, his work would make Salvador Dali proud, and possibly even hang up his lobster-shaped paintbrush.

Just when we thought the whole cupcake craze was starting to fizzle, along comes high-end shoe designer Patrick Cox with a rad new take on the scrumptious little treats. While soccer moms and sorority sisters might flock to New York’s pastel-hued Magnolia Bakery to satisfy their cupcake cravings, Cox Cookies & Cakes in London’s chicer-than-thou Soho District is the destination of choice for hipsters, fashionistas and film industry types.

In his sleek new digs on Brewer Street, Cox serves up decadent goodies inspired by Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol (think big red lips and Marilyn Monroe). And get ready for a lot of black and neon. “I want it to be a very sensual experience when you walk in’, Cox told GQ Magazine recently. ‘I think it should be somewhere between a disco, a sex shop and a cake shop’. Sex shop meets cupcakes? Nope, haven’t seen that one before.

In 1946, Spanish surrealist icon, Salvador Dali, formed an unlikely friendship with American animation legend, Walt Disney, and they spent a short time collaborating on a short film called Destino. Unfortunately, only eighteen seconds of Destino were ever shot, the project was postponed because of financial reasons, as well as word of it being too extreme for the time. In 1999, Roy Disney reconstructed the entire short using computer rendering and hand-drawn imagery based on the original sketches and storyboards. The result was released in 2003. This is what it is: AMAZING!

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Taking inspiration from Lewis Carroll, Dr Seuss, and Salvador Dali, Rose Skinner creates vibrant installation art from candy, plastic, and toys. Of her work, she says: ‘my intricate compositions of eclectic materials play tantalizing games on your senses; you are bombarded with colors and textures sounds and smells, metaphors and iconography that are used often in ironic ways’.

Barnaby Whitfield’s gleefully insane portraits look like what would happen if Salvador Dali and Ivan Albright got into a fist fight in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

Californian painter Mark Ryden creates fantastic storybook artworks which are technically brilliant and disturbingly – yet beautifully – surrealistic. ‘I often find archetypes in old children’s books and toys, so these things make up a large part of my collection. I am attracted to things that evoke memories from childhood’. [more about Mark Ryden]