For Lynn, moving to Melbourne was a spur-of-the-moment decision that ended up changing the trajectory of her life and her artistic process.
These days, it’s not so easy to capture someone’s attention. In our visual world, we’ve seen it all already – it’s hard to surprise us.
Yet illustrator and graphic designer Lynn Bremner’s work does just that. Her signature style features a hodge-podge of motifs showcased in vibrant, unpredictable colour palettes. Bold and busy, her pieces are, above all, eye-catching, which every artist knows is an all-important first step.
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The decor in her Footscray home is much the same; punchy artwork on the walls (much of it homemade), cutesy trinkets and bright flowers in vases. Her dog, Tui, is curled up in the corner on a mustard-coloured lounge, and a vinyl record of Scottish hits sits on another.
Originally from Scotland herself, Lynn tells me all about the winding creative journey that brought her halfway across the world.
“I’ve always been interested in design and visual arts. I went to art school in Scotland, but I did photography and video and it was all very conceptual,” she says, “it was very, like, classic art student.”
When, over the course of one turbulent week in 2016, Lynn went through a big breakup and quit what she thought at the time was her dream job, she decided she needed a change.
“I’d never visited Melbourne and didn’t know anyone here but I couldn’t pass up the promise of an amazing music and art scene, delicious coffee and food and everything else Melbourne has to offer. I’ve loved every second of living here and have never looked back.”
She enrolled in a course on illustration and her practice began to take form. Since then, she’s been commissioned for all kinds of projects: books, murals, craft beer cans and festival posters among them. Her most recent project is a collaboration with Campos Coffee. The café was in the midst of opening its newest location on the South Yarra section of Chapel St, and the team reached out to Lynn to ask her to help them design their holiday range.
She ended up making a range of multi-sized coffee bean bags and to-go cups. For the bag design, Lynn built off the brand’s signature olive green shade and added a splash of festive red, a hot pink galah, and yellow bells. They used pantone colours, which surprised her at how much they popped on the final product.
“It was just so much more colourful than I felt was possible with that printing technique, so that was just amazing,” she says.
“I work on a lot of digital artwork, so I’ll be making something on my iPad or on the computer and then I see it in print and I can hold it in my hands. I’m like, ‘This is so cool’. There’s nothing like seeing something that you’ve made and just holding it in the real world – it’s pretty rad.”
For inspiration, she looked to the Melbourne Christmas: a unique hot-weather affair that Lynn is still trying to get her head around after growing up in the shivery northern hemisphere.
“The Australian Christmas, there’s nothing like it,” she says. “Having a barbeque, getting together with friends and just putting your billy buttons and your gumnuts on the table. We just wanted to capture that spirit of big, fun, family kind of vibe.”
Lynn was the perfect person to bring on to the project as she is a coffee fanatic herself. In her kitchen, I point out at least ten different types of coffee machines, which she tells me she bought as part of a competition to win a mammoth $8000 espresso machine. Each morning, she wakes up before her partner and makes them both a brew (“double shot or nothing”) topped with latte art, of course.
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“I think that’s why I got obsessed with it, because I was like ‘Ah, I just love drawing pictures with the milk’,” she says.
Aside from the excellent coffee culture, there are a whole host of other things that keep Lynn happily in Melbourne. As a mural artist, she loves being down to walk down almost any street and stumble across an ever-changing assortment of art.
She says she is also drawn to the collaborative, welcoming nature of the city that allows female artists and those of diverse backgrounds to thrive (she lists Aretha Brown, Minna Leunig, Beci Orpin, and Tom Gerrard as a handful of her favourites).
“I think people are really friendly here and everyone just wants to lift each other up.”
To check out Lynn Bremner’s work, head here.
This article was made in partnership with Campos Coffee.
