The Big Picture Fest
Frankston 23-25 March 2018

Originally from the South Coast of NSW, Smug has called Scotland home for 20 years.

An internationally renowned artist known for his realistic large-scale mural installations Smug takes inspiration from people and nature, exploring the harmony in the relationship between the two. With his trademark understanding of light and shadow Smug’s painting can often juxtapose themes together such as death, playfulness, melancholy and unadulterated joy.

Whilst his technique stays true to his foundation with traditional graffiti Smug’s murals can be seen as “stylized realism” with hyper realistic elements achieved freehand, primarily with spray paint.

Melbourne based artist Loretta Lizzio channels the uninhabited wilderness in her works. Animals, from the mildest to the barbaric are the vessel Loretta uses to burrow into and reveal her own deeply layered self. Through her obsessive line work, Loretta captures a sensuous desire for freedom, adventure and love using pen, pencil and oils.

She has spent years sharpening this sensitivity with her subjects while working across publishing, photography, and advertising industries. The artworks she creates show her subjects as creatures of substance, radiating in the life that Loretta supercharges into her artworks.

Forgotten fairy tales, spectacles of cinema, fleeting glances and dog eared National Geographics are Loretta’s inspiration to to make art and tell her stories.

Jimmy Dvate is a Melbourne based artist and graphic designer whose position in the street art scene is well established and can be seen on walls, canvas and in magazines both locally and internationally.

Growing up in Melbourne, a stone’s throw from a railway station, he was instantly drawn to the colourful work along the suburban railway lines and in 1996 began experimenting at leaving his own mark on society.

Over the past five years Jimmy’s work has been focused on his passion for local flora and fauna. It is a way for him to directly connect to the area he is painting in and highlight an aspect of the local environment that he feels is important to showcase. Where possible he will chose a plant, bird or animal that is either endangered or threatened, helping to educate and raise awareness.

With a particular interest in realism and surrealism, Lucy has won national and international art prizes including the Lethbridge and Clifton’s Art Prizes and has been a finalist in prizes such as the the Doug Moran and Black Swan. Lucy’s work is diverse, represented through painting, sculpture & installation.

Tristan Kerr (born Melbourne, 1985) is an artist and typographer whose work reflects on cultural diversity, consumerism and advertising, and the tensions between subjects who exist within these worlds, as he combines fragments of street signage, mark making, graffiti and abstraction through his works.

Through his practice, Kerr interrogates the ever-changing face of the city and its typographic ephemera, portraying the disregarded surfaces of urban life in his paintings, sculptures and large-scale installations. His fixation with fleeting urban street views was fuelled by the several years he spent working and exhibiting in Paris—as he noticed the disregarded shopfronts with fading hand-lettered signage, the sprawling graffiti and the torn metro posters that adorn the city’s walls, forming part of its cultural archive.

Kerr’s works encourage people to stop, look and question their surroundings, considering other possibilities for what public space might constitute. Kerr has exhibited locally and throughout Europe.

Zedr, birth name Ryan Peik, is a Melbourne based, Adelaide born street artist. Currently residing in St Kilda, he has been painting for around twenty years.

His entry to art in general was through graffiti as a young teenager. His style is expressionism and his work is currently geared towards the juxtaposition of the organic natural and the man made technological influence we exist within.

Seb Humphreys took on the moniker ‘Order’ in the year 2000, the journey of style development originated with the search of letter experimentation and the integration of subtle and complex forms tied to the name Order. As times have rolled out, the reliance on letters as a structural base has been left behind, with the forms emancipated from these confines and finding their own ends as individual marks.

“Over the last year and a half the murals I’ve been painting have shifted in style quite considerably, from a definite organically flowing form to now more of a geometric and organic interdependence, with almost mechanical features in some instances.

These forms now seek to tell stories or show a series of interactions and collisions utilising their inherent symbolic nature. However, the ambiguity of such arrangements request that the viewer subjectively decode the work – thus interlocking the viewers personal search for meaning with the works emphasis upon multiplying and obscuring any precise meanings.”