His series, exhibited at Gallery Pejean until May 11, presents Dr Seuss-esque street- and landscapes that bulge and melt away.

They portray places like the First Basin, the Trevallyn shops, and East Launceston's High Street as places of possibility.

"I don't mind the word whimsical being applied to them," he laughed.

"What I'm trying to do is capture the quality of the landscape. I blu-tak lots of different photographs to a board in the way that they're going to be in a painting - always with a path in the foreground, and always with multiple focal points within [the plan]."

The end result are works that invite the audience to see instantly recognisable places in a new, more fantastical, way - simply by playing with perspective.

"If you take all the little parts of each painting, they're really quite conventional," he said.

"What I've done is sew them together in a way that invites the viewer in, to explore the painting.

"They look like the kinds of places you'd be able to go and visit, although of course you couldn't."

It is not a shocking revelation that Whittle is, in fact, a writer and illustrator of children's books, and has previously won the Children's Choice award at the Glover Prize.

He has also won several Tasmanian Art Awards and the People's Choice Award at the Bay of Fires Art Prize, and is a five-time Glover Prize finalist (judged by adults).

The Gallery Pejean exhibition, called New Perspectives, also includes more realist renderings of Tasmanian scenes, which Whittles said are much quicker and easier to paint than his perspective-warping work.

"Paintings like these ones," he said, gesturing to a realist rendering of Maria Island, "you can do in a day or two, really, whereas these ones," he said, pointing to Trevallyn Shops, "take quite a long time."

Whittles is Launceston born, and has returned to the city after time in Sydney and Tullah.

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