Mr Doodle’s art is characterised by a tightly packed and visually overwhelming arrangements of letters, forms, symbols, and recurring characters, drawn with thick black lines on white backgrounds. The artist describes these improvised compositions, which can be spread across canvases, objects, walls, and even whole rooms, as ‘a growing drawing virus’.
Attention Seeker
In 2016, Mr Doodle’s first major solo exhibition, Attention Seeker, saw London‘s Hoxton Gallery covered in a continuous doodle mural. Drawing influence from everyday phenomena such as cartoons, cereal boxes, and video games, as well as a retinue of imagined characters from Doodleland, the artist decorated walls, columns, and the floor of the gallery with dense imagery. He also drew over a grand dining set and accompanying tableware with floral centre piece.
Mr Doodle has referred to his style, which packs overwhelming visual stimuli into infinite compositions, as ‘graffiti spaghetti’. The simple imagery itself has broad appeal, with the artist stating: ‘My intention has always been to create a universal doodle language that can relate to and attract people from all over the world.’
Playing to the weirdness and performative antics that make the artist’s alter ego come to life, Mr Doodle’s clothing, worn at the completed exhibition, was hand-decorated to blend in with the doodle-saturated rooms of the installation.
Art History and Icons
In the 2018 solo show Doodle World at Seoul‘s ARA Art Center, the artist showcased new works that adapt imagery of iconic landmarks, people, and artworks. Recreations of images of Donald Trump, the Queen, Kim Jong Un, the Eiffel Tower, Tower Bridge, and Vincent van Gogh‘s The Starry Night (1889) were made with complex arrangements of Mr Doodle’s signature characters.
The artist has also made colourful parodies of other famous artworks, including The Garden of Doodley Delights (2019) after Hieronymus Bosch, Mr Doodle Screaming (2019) after Edvard Munch, and the Mona Doodle (2019) after Leonardo da Vinci.
Pop Heart
In 2021, in the lead-up to his wedding to Mrs Doodle, Mr Doodle made nine sets of prints of hearts in nine colours. Contained within the heart shape are doodles such as romantic flowers, hugging doodle creatures, and ‘jellyfish falling in love’.
Mrs Doodle and Dr Scribble
Mr Doodle’s wife Alena has taken on the persona of Mrs Doodle. She collaborates with him by colouring in some of his designs with bright colours like a colouring book. Alongside Mr Doodle, Cox plays the dual persona of Dr Scribble, Mr Doodle’s evil twin brother whose artworks are the antithesis to Mr Doodle, both in their evil subjects and the altered balance of black and white.
Public Commissions
Mr Doodles often works in the outdoors and public spaces. Some of his public art commissions include a doodle-decorated outdoor sculpture for the 2017 MTV Europe Music Awards in London, a take-over of the rooftop of Fendi’s Rome headquarters in 2019, and a mural in the Mexico City Metro the same year. Mr Doodle has also worked on various mural projects on the streets of London, Bristol, New York, Brussels, and Dubai.
