Andrew Hurle

Well, I might be stretching the bounds of Compressed Painting a little here. Andrew Hurle creates these amazing prints, digital works etc. by recombining photos and drawing with the clone tool. He addresses a range of social issues and phenomenon in his work, but my examples are all from his outstanding porn series.

The website has a lot of interesting stuff, especially digital art (naturally, the best kind of art to see on the web). I highly recommend having a browse.

Michael Harrison

More pop-surrealism, I know. What can I say, it's like the voice of our generation or something. I get tired of it sometimes.

Michael Harrison puts a nice spin on clean Magritte-esque symbolism. He also has a big thing for birds and naked women.

Nathan Spoor

Finding your way through Nathan Spoor's illustrations gives you a wonderful feeling of secret knowledge, like reading the Narnia books for the first time as a child, or staking out an anthill as your private kingdom.

Cheryl Molnar

Cheryl Molnar explores the broad themes of the American Dream with oil and collage works on wood panels.

Buddy Nestor

Buddy Nestor has this endearingly unselfconscious attitude, and it comes through in his work. He definitely proves that it's cool to like cult and horror movies and metal music and be inspired by them if you're frank about it, and accept who you are.

I mean, just listen to this quote from his website:

"Painting in isolation on the boat, showed me the calming effect that the creative process had on my mind and body.  I returned to school and received a B.A in Fine Arts.


The series I am presently working on is called, “Every Girl Goes to Hell”.  All of the models I use for these portraits are very beautiful.  However, when I paint them, they are very ugly."

Caroline Achaintre

These hand-made wool tapestries by Caroline Achaintre have an expressionist style I wouldn't have thought possible with the gridded rows of a fabric piece, yet here they are.

David Bayus

 

These intriguingly textural mixed-media works are produced by David Bayus. Like Daniel Sparkes, my last post, the idea involves integrating drawing and painting into photographs to create an uncanny effect.

Daniel Sparkes

Daniel Sparkes makes suprising mixed-media works that combine a street art aesthetic, pop surrealism and photography.

Chloe Piene

 

I love these totally Spartan anatomy drawings by Chloe Piene. The free-floating lines combined with a monk-like austerity produce a really interesting effect.

Sydney Hardin

"In retaliation, my work takes this marketing of female sexual identity to what I perceive as its logical extremes. These are my interpretations - both sinister and humorous - of the eroticized chimeras to which some look for inspiration, and others look for titillation." - Sydney Hardin

First an apology for a lack of updates, dear readers. I had the plague.

Sydney Hardin produces these amazingly entertaining feminist works from her desire to explode what she sees as flimsy, shallow depictions of women in the media. To this end she uses actually flimsy, shallow blow-up-love-dolls. Palin is great, but my personal favourite is 'Inflatable Love Doll Descending a Staircase' (bottom) for a superbly matter-of-fact title.

She has also somehow snapped up the enviable domain giantvagina.com

Todd Freeman

Todd Freeman plays with printmaking's credibility as a reproductive medium, using naturalist text-book prints as his sources. His work ridicules the sometimes outrageous inaccuracies found in early naturalist prints, where the artists were often working from second-hand descriptions or dessicated body-parts rather than actual animals.

I Hate Martine Emdur

 

Seriously, they remind me of those 1000 piece puzzles with the dolphins and the sea-horses. These are just photorealism, people! Not even very well done photorealism! Let me tell you, they look worse than that little picture up there as well, because in real life they're stupidly huge.They all have dorky names like 'Serenity' and 'Sapphire Tide' as well.

I wouldn't care so much, except every show of hers sells out (and I mean for tens of thousands of dollars) and I can be a bit of a jealous prick.

Danie Mellor

I think most Australian arty types have heard of Danie Mellor. A few people I know seem to hate him though, and I've never quite worked out why... the complaints given include: lack of skill (huh?), incomprehensibility, arty-fartiness yada yada.

Cynicism about art addressing Australia's horrific past is rare, and yet one of the few worthy artists working in that field seems to cop a lot of flack. Oh well.

Shane Devries

Shane Devries' cute-as-fuck pop Surrealism, because sometimes everything is ok.

Chris Aerfeldt

 

Chris Aerfeldt is one of the best painters dealing with nostalgia today (and that's saying something!). By recombining photos, toys and her parents recollections of their native Estonia she creates these dream-scapes. I think a lot of children of migrants will look at these and feel an instant kinship. Throughout their childhoop their parents have projected the land of their birth into this fairytale place- a utopia hybridized from their best memories. Aerfeldt puts this down on canvas, and the result is sadly absurd, but the beautiful rendering stops you from feeling too bad about having had the fantasy.

Adam Tullie

 

Even if Primitivism is dead (and a bit racist), Adam Tullie's drawings are still good.

Alice Leonards

 

 

Drawings with a faulty selection tool by net artist Alice Leonards

David Keeling

 

I'm a fan of David Keeling's newer work (the ones above were done in 2005), but there's something so great about these garage-sale still lifes.

Keeling is primarily interested in the environment and conservation- most of his paintings extremely naturalist, delicate forests. Keep a particular eye out for tiny leaf-shaped landscapes suspended from the tips of gum branches.

Sam Weber

 

More illustration, this time by Sam Weber. Sometimes I think it's too easy to relegate the really good ideas that happen in illustrator's work to the 'just pretty pictures' basket. This is an attitude you bump into a lot around 'serious' artists- just illustration, too graphic, too detailed.

And to some extent I agree. Like that top one, a poster Weber did for a theater production. 

The blossom things bother me. Why are they there? So do the PS filters and faux-scratching. But to ignore the good things happening is just ridiculous. It's only when a piece is nothing but prettiness that it should be designated a failure, I reckon.

BLU

 

I debated with myself whether BLU was obscure enough to warrant a post. After all, millions of people have probably seen MUTO, the incredible wall animation done in an abandoned building.

Still, why not, I guess. 

BLU's walls are elastic and sprawling. They never seem constrained by a particular thematic direction (borfyou, Isoe etc.) and their messages are never embarrassingly obvious (Banksy :p). Maybe there are way more inspiring people further underground, but hey I don't really know that much about street stuff. I just likes what I likes. Sorry if that sounds disrespectful.