“Yes it’s true! Pop Up Charlie can draw anything for you!” is the slogan of Kansas City artist Charlie Mylie. Donning a gold wizard’s hat and robe, Mylie sets up pop-up events at parties, galleries, businesses and on street corners, where—like the slogan says—he will make you a drawing, a drawing of anything.
With his iconic and goofy hat and robe, Mylie hopes to appear approachable and remove the over-serious aura that hangs around so much fine art. Whether big or small, his ink and watercolor drawings have a cartoon simplicity and often a cartoon humor. Simply-drawn people find themselves in strange situations, pets deliver one-liner non sequiturs, and inanimate objects converse among themselves. Like a court jester, Mylie’s drawings are funny, but often contain deeper wisdom and criticism.
Over the past decade, Mylie has made countless comics, children’s books and coloring books, and his drawings have been featured in local zines like THINGSWAMP and Infoduct and also at the local children’s bookstore, Reading Reptile.
But his drawings aren’t just for kids. Mylie’s drawing skills have even found application in the business world, where he is artist in residence at BNIM, a Kansas City-based, international architecture firm. At BNIM’s downtown offices, Mylie has a small studio set up right in the middle of office cubicle workspace. Functioning as a sort of corporate jester, he sits in on meetings making quick drawings, often on sticky notes, of what is discussed. A kind of cartoon meeting minutes, these ephemeral drawings capture the architect’s creative processes and create a record of spur-of-the-moment brainstorming, inside jokes and new ideas, both good and bad.
Last fall, in addition to an exhibition of drawings inside Missouri Bank, Mylie showed two drawings outdoors, reproduced at billboard scale as part of Missouri Bank’s Artboards project. The work, titled Caption Contest, invited people to submit captions for his depiction of a man alone on a desert island with an anthropomorphic dollar bill.
Mylie’s Caption Contest and his whimsical drawing style are very reminiscent of The New Yorker magazine’s cartoon contests. And rather than wait around for that magazine to buy his drawings, Mylie has produced a New Yorker Covers series of drawings on his own. One fictitious cover depicts a dog a with a cellphone photographing the back end of another dog, while another shows a cat pawing at a glass window with a far-away quadcopter drone hovering in a blue sky. Just like the actual magazine covers, these surreal images give you a sense of themes without being too specific.
Mylie’s playful attitude extends beyond his drawings. Last summer, he and a few other artists led a series of silent walks around Kansas City. After gathering at a predetermined meeting point, the participants walked around together in a group, going wherever they felt like, the only rule: Never utter a single word. The participants used pantomime and gestures in order to make decisions about which direction to go.
Whatever he is doing, Mylie keeps two complementary ideas as his guiding principles. “How can I live on drawing?” and “How can I make drawings live?” Being a working artist isn’t easy, even in an art city like KC, but that second phrase about “making drawings live” is Mylie’s solution. Not only will he “draw anything for you,” he’ll draw it for anyone. Whether he is addressing children or adults, average Joes on the street or aficionados in the gallery, Mylie has a message and a laugh for everyone.
