Eelus builds strange, emotionally loaded scenes from stencils and screenprint. He mixes melancholic figures with bursts of colour, drawn from pop culture, cinema and classic art history.
Eelus’s real name is Lee Pennington, a self-taught, neurodivergent artist from the north of England. He emerged from London's early 2000s street art scene and found a champion in Banksy, who invited him to paint at his landmark Cans Festival in 2008.
Eelus now works chiefly from a studio in Brighton, UK. He produces paintings, prints, murals and paper cuts, all defined by a tension between light and dark, beauty and unease.
Eelus’s real name is Lee Pennington, a self-taught, neurodivergent artist from the north of England. He emerged from London's early 2000s street art scene and found a champion in Banksy, who invited him to paint at his landmark Cans Festival in 2008.
Eelus now works chiefly from a studio in Brighton, UK. He produces paintings, prints, murals and paper cuts, all defined by a tension between light and dark, beauty and unease.
Summary
Eelus builds strange, emotionally loaded scenes from stencils and screenprint. He mixes melancholic figures with bursts of colour, drawn from pop culture, cinema and classic art history.
Eelus’s real name is Lee Pennington, a self-taught, neurodivergent artist from the north of England. He emerged from London's early 2000s street art scene and found a champion in Banksy, who invited him to paint at his landmark Cans Festival in 2008.
Eelus now works chiefly from a studio in Brighton, UK. He produces paintings, prints, murals and paper cuts, all defined by a tension between light and dark, beauty and unease.
Eelus’s real name is Lee Pennington, a self-taught, neurodivergent artist from the north of England. He emerged from London's early 2000s street art scene and found a champion in Banksy, who invited him to paint at his landmark Cans Festival in 2008.
Eelus now works chiefly from a studio in Brighton, UK. He produces paintings, prints, murals and paper cuts, all defined by a tension between light and dark, beauty and unease.
Artworks by Eelus
About Eelus
Biography
About Eelus
Lee Pennington, working as Eelus, was born in 1979 in Wigan, UK. He moved to London in the early 2000s, where he began experimenting with stencil-based street art. Entirely self-taught, he built his early reputation on the street, painting under his adopted name rather than as Pennington.
A star-crossed stencil
One of Eelus's earliest widely recognised images, Shat-At, showed a young girl walking a Star Wars AT-AT on a lead. It was this and other stencils around East London that first drew Banksy's attention to his work. Banksy later invited him to paint at Cans Festival, a landmark outdoor exhibition of stencil art staged in a disused Waterloo tunnel in 2008.
Eelus went on to release print editions through the influential print studio, Pictures on Walls.
Screenprint and paper cuts
Screenprinting has remained central to Eelus's practice since those early years. His editions are often produced as handpulled prints in small numbered runs and have developed a reputation for selling out quickly among collectors.
Alongside prints, he works in paper-cutting, sculpture and mural painting. His recurring motifs, melancholic women and sharp-toothed creatures draw as much on his own neurodivergent way of seeing the world as on the pop culture references scattered through his work. Since becoming a full-time artist in 2009, he has exhibited across the UK, US and Europe, including shows in London, Brighton and Brooklyn.
Biography
About Eelus
Lee Pennington, working as Eelus, was born in 1979 in Wigan, UK. He moved to London in the early 2000s, where he began experimenting with stencil-based street art. Entirely self-taught, he built his early reputation on the street, painting under his adopted name rather than as Pennington.
A star-crossed stencil
One of Eelus's earliest widely recognised images, Shat-At, showed a young girl walking a Star Wars AT-AT on a lead. It was this and other stencils around East London that first drew Banksy's attention to his work. Banksy later invited him to paint at Cans Festival, a landmark outdoor exhibition of stencil art staged in a disused Waterloo tunnel in 2008.
Eelus went on to release print editions through the influential print studio, Pictures on Walls.
Screenprint and paper cuts
Screenprinting has remained central to Eelus's practice since those early years. His editions are often produced as handpulled prints in small numbered runs and have developed a reputation for selling out quickly among collectors.
Alongside prints, he works in paper-cutting, sculpture and mural painting. His recurring motifs, melancholic women and sharp-toothed creatures draw as much on his own neurodivergent way of seeing the world as on the pop culture references scattered through his work. Since becoming a full-time artist in 2009, he has exhibited across the UK, US and Europe, including shows in London, Brighton and Brooklyn.
