Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Charlie Mackesy has achieved something that most of us, pontificating critics and pretentious artists, can’t even imagine. This sixty-something man, born in Northumberland, has turned simple ink drawings into a global phenomenon, selling over two million copies of “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse” and winning an Oscar for the animated short film based on his book. But before you scoff at this massive commercial success, stop for a moment and ask yourself why his seemingly naive scribbles touch so many people around the world.
Mackesy is not an artist in the traditional sense of the term. He never completed higher education, having dropped out of university twice in the space of a week. His artistic journey began out of emotional necessity rather than aesthetic ambition, after the death of his best friend in a car accident when he was 19 years old. Since then, he has drawn compulsively, as a form of personal therapy that has evolved into a universal language. This raw authenticity, this absence of academic training, paradoxically gives him a freedom that many trained artists do not even dare to claim.
His work fits into an artistic tradition that dates back to cave paintings, that of direct and emotional communication through images. But Mackesy operates in a specific contemporary context: that of social networks and the global mental health crisis. His drawings, first published on Instagram without any particular commercial strategy, respond to a collective need for comfort and human connection. This organic approach to artistic dissemination via digital platforms represents a break with the traditional circuits of contemporary art.
Mackesy’s aesthetic is striking in its deliberate simplicity. His thick brushstrokes, his characters with often hidden faces, his stripped-down compositions evoke outsider art more than academic conventions. This economy of means is not accidental: it allows immediate identification of the viewer with the characters represented. The boy whose face we never really see becomes a receptacle for everyone’s projections. This visual strategy recalls the techniques used by some masters of comic strips, where graphic simplification paradoxically increases the emotional impact.
The texts that accompany his drawings are particularly interesting. Far from the conventional aphorisms or inspiring quotes usually found on social networks, the dialogues between his four main characters possess an undeniable literary quality. They evoke the universe of philosophy for children, a tradition that dates back to Socrates and can be found in authors like Saint-Exupéry. The way Mackesy has a boy, a mole, a fox and a horse discuss fundamental existential questions, courage, love, vulnerability, recalls Platonic dialogues adapted to our era of instant communication.
This philosophical dimension is not coincidental. Mackesy consciously draws on the tradition of British moral philosophy, which privileges lived experience over abstract theorization. His characters do not state definitive truths but explore universal questions together. This dialectical approach, where wisdom emerges from exchange rather than authority, is in line with British empiricists like David Hume, who asserted that our moral knowledge comes from our feelings rather than our pure reason.
The phenomenal success of Mackesy raises important questions about the nature of contemporary art and its relationship with the public. While artistic institutions are becoming increasingly entangled in hermetic conceptual debates, this self-taught artist has managed to create a visual and textual language that speaks directly to the concerns of millions of people. This popular success disturbs certain artistic circles, which see it as an excessive commercialization of art. Yet, this criticism mainly reveals the unconscious elitism of an art world that has lost touch with its potential audiences.
The analysis of Mackesy’s work cannot ignore its explicit spiritual dimension. The artist does not hide his Christianity and considers his work as a form of artistic ministry. This religious dimension, far from limiting the scope of his message, on the contrary gives it a depth that transcends confessional divides. His drawings evoke unconditional love, forgiveness, redemption, all universal themes that resonate beyond religious borders. This assumed spirituality contrasts with the dominant secularization of contemporary art and partly explains the emotional impact of his work.
Mackesy’s artistic technique is also interesting. His ink drawings, sometimes enhanced with watercolor, deliberately adopt an aesthetic of the unfinished. This gestural approach, where the strokes overflow and overlap, evokes the spontaneity of the sketch rather than the perfection of the finished drawing. This calculated imperfection creates an intimacy with the viewer, as if witnessing the creative process itself. The haptic dimension of these drawings, their tactile and immediate character, contrasts with the growing virtualization of our relationship with images.
The transmedia expansion of Mackesy’s universe illustrates the contemporary mutations of artistic creation. From book to animated film, through musical collaborations with Paul Simon, his characters migrate from one medium to another while retaining their narrative essence. This multi-platform adaptation testifies to an intuitive understanding of new modes of cultural consumption, where audiences expect an immersive experience rather than an isolated artistic object.
I must also mention the recent collaboration between Mackesy and Paul Simon. This encounter between two generations of artists, one trained in analog culture, the other a digital native, produces a remarkable creative synthesis. Mackesy’s drawings, created while listening to Simon’s album “Seven Psalms,” illustrate the persistence of inter-artistic inspiration in the era of technical reproduction. This collaborative approach recalls surrealist experiments, where different media fed each other to create hybrid works [1].
The claimed therapeutic impact of Mackesy’s art raises important questions about the social function of contemporary art. His drawings are used in hospitals, detention centers, women’s shelters, transforming art into a tool for social care. This positive instrumentalization of art, far from diminishing its aesthetic value, on the contrary reveals its hidden potentialities. It reminds us that art is not only an object of disinterested contemplation but also a vector of social and personal transformation.
The critical reception of Mackesy reveals the tensions that run through the world of contemporary art. Ignored by most specialized journals, snubbed by major museum institutions, he nevertheless finds his place in prestigious locations such as Sotheby’s, which dedicated a personal exhibition to him. This belated recognition from the traditional art market illustrates the difficulty of established institutions in integrating artistic practices that emerge outside their usual circuits.
Mackesy’s work also challenges our conceptions of artistic originality. His drawings, infinitely reproducible on social networks, question the Benjaminesque notion of aura. Far from losing their power in reproduction, they seem to gain it, creating a global community of viewers who reappropriate and share these images. This viral circulation transforms art into a common language, a visual esperanto of contemporary empathy.
The sociological analysis of his audience reveals interesting data. Unlike traditional audiences for contemporary art, Mackesy’s followers span all demographic categories, from children to the elderly, from popular backgrounds to educated elites. This rare social transversality in the world of contemporary art suggests that Mackesy has succeeded in identifying and expressing universal emotional needs that institutional art struggles to satisfy.
The commercial dimension of Mackesy’s success cannot be overlooked. With sales figures in the millions of copies and omnipresent merchandising, his work is fully part of the contemporary market economy. This financial success, far from invalidating the artistic dimension of his work, on the contrary illustrates the possibility of authentic creation within cultural capitalism. It demonstrates that popular art and aesthetic quality are not antinomies.
Mackesy’s influence on a new generation of artists is beginning to be felt. Many creators are now adopting his direct approach, blending text and image to create content that is both artistic and therapeutic. This emerging school of empathetic digital art could well redefine the contours of contemporary creation, reconciling art with its original social function.
Mackesy’s work ultimately asks a fundamental question: what should art be in the 21st century? Should it continue to address a cultured elite or rediscover its universal vocation? Can it be both popular and profound, commercial and authentic? The answers that Charlie Mackesy provides to these questions through his work perhaps outline the contours of a post-contemporary art, freed from its elitist complexes and reconciled with its primary mission: to touch the human soul in what it has of most universal.
His journey, from compulsive drawer to global cultural phenomenon, illustrates the profound transformations that affect artistic creation in the digital age. More than just a commercial success, Charlie Mackesy’s work represents a necessary revision of our aesthetic categories and our cultural hierarchies. It reminds us that true art does not reside in conceptual complexity or technical sophistication, but in that mysterious ability to create human connection where isolation and misunderstanding reigned.
In a world fragmented by political, social and cultural divisions, Mackesy offers a language of reconciliation. His four characters, in their endless wanderings through dreamlike landscapes, teach us that shared vulnerability is perhaps the only path to a common humanity. This lesson, simple in appearance, in reality reveals a philosophical depth that our contemporary societies urgently need to rediscover.
- Paul Simon and Charlie Mackesy, “Seven Psalms, Illustrated by Charlie Mackesy, Inspired by the Words and Music of Paul Simon”, exhibition Frieze No 9 Cork Street, London, September 2023
