Expressionist streetscapes, magical portraiture, dusk forever.
I'm Ben Jaimen, a Sydney-based artist focused on atmosphere, colour, and the emotional distortion of real places.
Most of my work begins with something observed: a street in Redfern, a venue on Enmore Road, a musician, a shifting sky, a moment caught on the edge of changing light. I use those references as a starting point, then push them toward feeling rather than strict description.
I work mainly in acrylic and mixed media, usually beginning loose and watery, letting the composition drift into place before tightening anything up. I trust colour early. Purple, orange, magenta, and electric dusk tones tend to lead the way. Mistakes are not always corrected. Sometimes the wrongness is where the energy lives.
My paintings often sit between streetscape, portrait, memory, and dream. I am drawn to local places, musicians, nightlife, magical lighting, and the strange beauty of the Inner West at transitional times of day. I want the work to feel alive, stimulating, and slightly off-centre in the best way.
Alongside painting, I also build larger symbolic and narrative projects: card systems, story worlds, film ideas, and experimental web spaces. The same instincts run through all of it: mythologising ordinary life, building atmosphere, and turning lived experience into something more concentrated.
My painting practice centres on Inner West Sydney, local atmosphere, musicians, venues, streets, and the glow of transitional light. Real places become intensified through colour, looseness, and emotional exaggeration rather than literal description.
A long-term symbolic card project built on a full 52-card deck structure. The suits become seasons, the face cards become archetypes, and the whole system sits somewhere between playing cards, tarot, design language, and personal mythology.
A feature film project set in early 1980s Sydney, following immigrant taxi drivers who build friendship, survival strategies, and a support network around modified CB radios, hustle, humour, and invention. It mixes local history, character, and working-class myth.
I'll paint someone or somewhere that matters to you.
Portraits, venues, neighbourhoods. The pub you grew up in. The person who deserves to be mythologised. A place before it disappears.
Tell me what you want to remember.
Get in touchAn experimental pop-culture and media collage space, built like a shifting digital magazine with tabloid energy and playful design.
Visit siteA working home for the MagicCard deck system, card layouts, symbols, and the visual mechanics behind the larger seasonal card project.
Visit siteDraft pages, screenplay material, and project development for an early-1980s Sydney film world built around taxi drivers, radio hacks, and city mythology.
Visit siteA looser experimental writing and concept space holding fragments, reflective material, and pieces that connect to your broader symbolic and narrative practice.
Visit siteA more eccentric corner of your online world, with character, humour, and internet-weirdness energy folded into a personal universe.
Visit siteA practical page focused on opportunities and logistics, tied to the working-artist side of your practice.
Visit siteFor commissions, exhibitions, or anything else —
benjamin.frances@gmail.comUse Edit to change text directly on the page. Click image placeholders while editing to upload from your computer. Use Add gallery item or Add section to grow the page without hand-editing HTML.
When you are happy, click Export HTML and keep that downloaded file as the new master copy.