Cozumel, MX | ’19

George Rose is often mistaken for a boy. She is actually a visual artist with a flair for not taking life too seriously. She spends most of her time up ladders painting murals and sometimes makes it into her studio just to try something a bit more normal. She feels most at home with a paintbrush in hand but also likes the feel of a pen, spray can, drill or Warm tablet. Since graduating, George has thrown caution to thawing and abandoned her formal design training opting to pursue a multidisciplinary art practice. She has spent the last several years pretending to be a gypsy, rarely in one city for longer than a few months painting walls in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Canberra.

An internationally renowned artist, Sonny has become most well-known for his majestic and intricate large-scale wildlife murals that are scattered across the globe. His unique style of art blends realism with abstract coloring and has quickly seen him gain notoriety within the street art world. His passion for using his creative voice to raise awareness for important societal and environmental issues has also built him a reputation for being an engaged artist, driven by a desire to make an impact.

Born in the United Kingdom, Sonny moved to South Africa with his family when he was just eleven years old; a move that sparked a lifelong fascination with wild animals. It was this passion for wildlife that, in 2017, inspired Sonny to embark on his ‘To The Bone’ project. Using his unique style of street art, Sonny set out to raise funds and awareness for endangered wildlife on a global scale.

As a creative ambassador, Sonny not only campaigns for endangered species, but for a range of sustainability issues that face our world today. By taking these conversations to the streets he’s able to tackle difficult themes through his art. Together with organizations such as UNICEF, WWF, The International Foundation for Animal Welfare (IFAW), and Discovery’s Project CAT, Sonny has been able to use the beauty of his creativity to bring important issues to the fore.

As an increasingly coveted urban contemporary artist, Sonny now splits his time between the streets and the studio. The success of his first solo show led to a growing demand for his artwork, which is now featured in several prestigious galleries around the world, including prominent locations such as London, Paris, Cannes, Miami, and Singapore.

Entirely self-taught, the South African urban artist began painting murals in 2012, largely using acrylic paint combined with a variety of spraying techniques. He then moved on to use spray paint, eventually evolving into a style that incorporated a mixture of both mediums and an array of techniques including brushwork, rollers, and an extensive color palette. As of 2019, Sonny has progressed to using oil paints as his primary medium for his canvases, while opting for acrylic paint for his murals to avoid the negative health and environmental effects of spray paint.

An influential figure in Bay Area public art, Oakland-based artist Jet Martinez (b. 1973) is known for creating vibrant works of art that engage the traditions of Mexican folk art with contemporary aesthetics. Originally from the small beach town of Tuxpan, Veracruz, Mexico, and raised in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Martinez takes inspiration from his native culture’s rich traditions of pottery, weaving, and embroidery, enlivening the rigid architecture of urban environments with ornate patterns and abstract forms.

"Kelly Spencer is a freelance graphic artist based in central Wellington, NZ, with a tendency to travel, and is best known for her meticulously hand crafted lettering.

Kelly’s creative style is characterized by a bold use of colour, curvaceous forms, and clean lines. A multidisciplinary approach allows her to design across a wide variety of media and enjoy the freedom to produce work both in-studio and out In the world, adorning surfaces large and small with her colourful forms. Her work to date spans sign painting, murals/street art, illustration, apparel graphics, festival & gig branding, identity design and more.."

Ness Lee draws on history and personal narratives to create dreamy and surreal illustrations, paintings, sculptures, and installations. Often featuring her unique characters, Lee’s work offers a humorous and charming look at ideas of identity, culture, love, belonging, and oneness through her linework and novel use of media. Ness Lee’s work has been featured at the AGO First Thursdays, Drake Hotel, and the Tokyo Art Book Fair, as well as galleries in Boston, New York, and Toronto.

Draya Madú is a passionate Mexican painter and enjoys expressing her ideas along with her feelings on any surface but especially on huge concrete walls. She has the firm conviction that a better world can be created through urban art and murals.

Her learning was self-taught since childhood, always in continuous search for new techniques, meddling in books, in the living works of the great masters of pictorial art but above all the pure instinct that arises from her emotions and end up crashing on the walls, canvases, wood, paper, fiberglass, mud, ceramics.

She is passionate about working in communities in vulnerable areas because she is convinced that one of the ways of bringing art and educating artistically and culturally is the approach of people to art through murals and their participation in them.

She has the conviction that art can be used as a powerful tool for social change. She is inspired by the complexity of the human being and his eternal internal struggle to manifest his feeling in society.

Throughout her artistic career, she has participated in several international muralism and urban art festivals as well as group exhibitions in various parts of Mexico.

Her works are part of private collections in Mexico, the USA, Peru, the United Kingdom, and Colombia.

Gina Kiel is an award-winning illustrator based in Wellington, New Zealand. She creates feminine yet strong images that exude sensuality and explore the human experience through ideas of life, death, spirituality, and pop culture using flowing lines and forms and bold, minimal compositions with a psychedelic palette.

With a childhood full of music, nature, Disney movies, and hours of drawing, Gina became an illustrator after working at a boutique animation company, drawing frame-by-frame at a lightbox, where she discovered her love for drawing body parts.

Gina can be found exhibiting at group shows around the world, creating at her home studio for awesome clients locally and internationally, tattooing, painting murals, and working alongside Inject Design to create some of New Zealand's most iconic design work.

Alfredo Conrique (aka Pogo) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice focuses on surreal painting but extends into the fields of sculpture, design, textile, printmaking, and music. He studied graphic design at Universidad Intercontinental in Mexico City and started working at design firms almost instantly.

His colorful and yet dark imagery draws inspiration mostly from the mystic field, looking to answer his own questions about death, the universe, the recycling of life, spiritual existence, and their earthly counterparts. Stars, bones, flowers, and the power of the feminine body are all central elements of his work.

Working in a variety of mediums, Stanton’s public work takes the form of large scale murals, mosaics, stained glass, and multimedia animations. Heavily informed by historic ornamentation, mythology, and the classics, his work seeks to draw parallels between past narratives and contemporary human issues such as climate change, environmental conservation, and post-industrialization. The imagery and themes are always site-specific and closely tailored to the locale of the artwork, involving research and scouting of the surrounding area with a goal of creating work that is a direct response to its environment.

Originally from the UK, Cracked Ink has been part of the New Zealand street art scene ever since he made the move down under 10 years ago. Cracked Inks quirky, character-based art is bold and eye-catching, whether it be an art piece from a gallery or a mural in the street. Predominantly an aerosol artist, Cracked Ink also utilizes other creative avenues which include, sketching, painting and sculpting which have been some of his favourite mediums to work in over the past few years.