General

If you know anything about Australian street art and muralism than you know about Everfresh Studio and it’s enormous impact on the Australian and specifically Melbourne art scene.  You might also know that for over a decade Mike Makatron has been the senior member and even director of Everfresh, lending opportunity and influence to countless artists who have called the space home over the years.  While Everfresh Studio is where he produces the majority of his studio work, it’s actually his mural work that most people know him for.  With over 20 years of painting in the streets and countless jobs and projects that have brought him to nearly every corner of the globe, Makatron’s hustle and productivity is unquestionable.  With “nature” as the loose through-line connecting all of his work from public art to studio paintings and sculpture, Makatron explores a wide range of subject matter and art making processes and materials.  

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Sandra Powell and Andrew King better known globally as SANDREW began collecting street art, or as they accurately like to specify, “artwork made by street artists” in mid 2000’s.  What started out as a frenetic fascination has grown into a long obsession and lifestyle shift which has resulted in the accumulation of Australia’s largest collection of street art and has them in the running for possibly the largest worldwide.  Their passion and enthusiasm, not only for the artwork but also the artists who make it, has endeared them to the scene which has embraced them as one of their own.  Their motivation for collecting has nothing to do with acquiring financial assets but rather supporting the artists and the scene as a whole with the ultimate goal of making the work permanently accessible to the public so that more people can enjoy it.  In that vein, they’ve just opened the doors to an exhibition in their home town of Melbourne Australia called The Oustiders Melbourne, which houses over two hundred works (less than 10% of their collection) from street art titans such as Banksy, Shepard Fairey, Rone, and Swoon along side mid-level artists and local favourites of their own.  

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The cartoon characters of your childhood, just like you, have grown up, lived life, experienced trauma, succumbed to addiction, found Jesus, have deviant fantasies, and just like you… they’re working on it.  This is the world that Australian pop artist Ben Frost has created over his 30 year art career.  His hybrid art intertwines pop art aesthetics, (flat colors and pop culture imagery) with a dark social commentary that reaches his fans on multiple levels.  Just like the feeling one gets from the drugs he references in his work, the viewer feels soothed and dirty at the same time when experiencing a Frost piece.  With over 40 solo shows in various spots around the globe, coupled with the inevitable controversy here and there that his work tends to generate, Ben has cultivated a thriving career maintaining an impressively high output without watering down the product, a feat many other artists find very hard to attain.   

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Mexican born artist Ricardo González, better know by his artists name ‘It’s A Living’ has been traveling and painting around the globe for a very long time.  From a small town in central northern Mexico he headed to Canada to study graphic design, followed by a post graduate degree in Typeface Design in New York City.  With a solid foundation established, he naturally took a job as a graphic designer but quickly began to pull away from his desk job lifestyle in exchange for a more global existence and increasingly spent his time traveling and painting murals around the US and Europe.  González developed a unique hybrid style combining his typographical background with tools and aesthetics of graffiti and tagging.  At a time when the mural art scene was exploding and mural festivals popped up all over the world, It’s a Living was in high demand and could be found on lineups everywhere.  As his stature in the mural scene grew so to did his desire for the fine art world and he began producing prints, canvases and even sculptures which hang in gallery walls and collectors homes across the world.  González now lives in Mexico City and balances his time between studio work, murals, client work, skateboarding, and running various other sneaky businesses around town.

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MVP back again. basically when we cross paths with past guests, we sit them down and catch up with Vantagepoint Alumni on what they been doing since we last spoke to them. This time recorded during Wall to Wall festival in Mordialloc  in Victoria, Australia in 2024,  this interview series is loose, irreverent and occasionally drunken. This episode features SMUG, JASON PARKER, DREZ and GEORGE ROSE. 

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As a member of the world renowned DMV collective (Da Mental Vaporz) BLO hit the urban art scene with the momentum of a freight train.  His stylised figurative work was sweet and dark, cute and grotesque, and heavily influenced by his background in graffiti.  A few years after moving from Paris to Berlin however, a shift emerged in his work.  The figures and representational elements faded and a much more intuitive form of abstract art emerged, influenced heavily by the German art scene he found himself engulfed by.  As BLO’s work changed, so did his name.  In an effort to distance himself from an urban art scene that he no longer recognised himself in, he took on his birth name and as Claude BLO Ricci he cemented his place in the contemporary art world. From canvas work to murals and now even large public metal sculptures, Ricci is always pushing forward and branching into new arenas.  

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Somewhere between reality and a dream, the work of French artist ZOER defies the laws of physics, pushing the viewer just slightly beyond the point of comfort, which is exactly what makes his work so exciting.  His color palette and forced perspectives challenge you to bend your understanding of what ‘should be’ and simply accept its beauty for what it is.  Playing with themes of urban sprawl, consumerism and excess, ZOER highlights the human impact on nature with the delicacy of a sledge hammer.  The skill and drama he displays in his paintings and murals is mirrored in his impressively ambitious installations which often include full size automobiles reimagined at art materials.  His approach to, and love of art making is inspirational and ever evolving, making ZOER one of the most exciting artist to keep your eyes on.

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Aboriginal artist Tommy Day carries a heavy load that might be too much for most artists to manage.  His rich personal heritage and upbringing however have embedded him with the strength and grace that make him the perfect person for the task.  As a contemporary artists working within traditional Aboriginal frameworks going back tens of thousands of years, Day encapsulates his culture and their values, stories, and aesthetics while embracing contemporary tools and methods such as large scale mural projects and collaborations.  Although he does not consider himself a political artists, his presence in the contemporary art world and position between traditional culture and modern Australian institutions is inherently political in nature, an orientation he embraces without hesitation.

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Insane51 has developed a mind bending painting style that incorporates double exposure images painted exclusively in red and blue (pink and cyan to be exact) showing two images at once.  When viewed through a red or blue filter, like the two lenses of traditional 1950’s style 3D movie glasses, the viewer is able to isolate parts of the painting while everything else becomes invisible.  By flipping back and forth between the red and blue filters one is able to see two different images in his art.  Although he was not the fist to play with this trick of light and color, Insane51 harnessed the illusion in a very interesting and unique way, by turning the red and blue 3d glasses into an X-Ray machine.  Focusing mainly on human portraiture, his figures beautifully painted in one color seem to be unaware that their inner skeletal structure illuminates out to the viewer in the opposite color.  His instantly recognisable murals are in high demand and have taken him around the globe and back numerous times and gained him a monstrous following on social media with over 400,000 followers on instagram alone.  Never satisfied however, Insane51 is always looking to take his art to the next level wether through interesting collaborations with established commercial brands or moving his personal work into new materials and dimensions.  

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One of Australia’s most recognisable muralist and contemporary artists Adnate, has managed to thread a needle that few other artists have been able to pull off with such grace.  As a non-native person, Adnate’s paintings and large scale murals focus mainly on indigenous people and culture, a combination with inherent potential for conflict or misstep.  His sensitive approach and altruistic intent however, are such that over the past decade of creating art on these themes, he has been embraced by Australia’s First Nations people as well as indigenous people beyond Australian borders.  By working together with communities, collaborating with indigenous artists, raising funds, asking questions and most importantly listening, Adnate has endeared himself to the culture and continues to promote ideas of acceptance and empowerment through his work.  His skill painting portraiture is undeniable and the scale of his work, sometimes reaching heights of 20-25 stories, leaves no doubt of his excellence and with highly sought after studio paintings and countless murals still to come, Adnate’s future continues to be bright.  

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