I first learned about Mr. Doodle from Justin, an ex-roommate’s ex. To diffuse the awkwardness of our being left alone together, he pulled out his phone and showed me a series of videos from the British artist who, at a feverish pace, would cover bare white walls with black-lined cartoons; smileys, doodads, and gamma rays abounded. This was 2016, a time when Mr. Doodle — who now has 2.8 million Instagram followers and 135,000 YouTube subscribers — was netting tens of thousands of views on YouTube, marketing himself through time-lapse videos featuring his millennial, awesomesauce aesthetic that leans into the graphic, twee, and quirky.
While I didn’t necessarily agree with Justin that the work was “really cool,” it was interesting, or at least tickled some elementary -school nostalgia, to see an artist doodle on such a large scale. The work didn’t necessitate much commentary; I probably nodded and said “Cool!” Perfect roommate’s boyfriend convo fodder.
The videos, however, must have left an impact, because when I first moved to Downtown Las Vegas in 2019, I assumed the pop art murals that decorated Seventh and Carson were the work of Mr. Doodle. The cartoonish figures and crowded black lines were straight from Mr. Doodle’s art-senal.
Come 2020, these murals were on the route of my daily lockdown walks. With tourists gone and nothing but time and a mass death event on my hands, I slowed down on one of these strolls, looking for Mr. Doodle’s signature, but was surprised to find instead the Instagram handle @PrettyDone.
If you’ve spent time in any Instagrammable Vegas spot, you’ll recognize Pretty Done’s work, even if you aren’t familiar with his name. His work appears in buzzy Downtown spots like Makers & Finders, Discopussy, Bungalow Coffee, and the Fergusons back alley. Beyond joints peddling coffee and whatever a Discopussy is, higher-profile sites including Marquee Dayclub, Area15, the Absinthe courtyard at Caesars, and Allegiant Stadium feature Pretty Done murals.
I’m not alone in drawing the comparison between Pretty Done and Mr. Doodle. I ask Brent Holmes, an artist who’s worked in the city’s art scene for decades (and is also a Desert Companion contributor), if he’s interested in talking about Pretty Done, and he clarifies, “... the one that draws all those little happy faces, right?” He then adds, “It’'s a take on what Mr. Doodle does.”
Paco Álvarez, Vegas native and CEO of arts industry start-up Psionic Art Works, says Pretty Done’s artwork is “... nothing that hasn’t been done before. We’ve seen it with Mr. Doodle and Doodle Boy, and of course the king of this style of artwork, Keith Haring.” Doodle Boy, or Joe Whale, is a tween who has also picked up Mr. Doodle’s branded aesthetic, garnering boilerplate kid-genius headlines.
The similarities between Mr. Doodle and Pretty Done, evident when viewing their art side by side, run deeper than style. Both muralists operate under pseudonyms. Mr. Doodle — born Sam Cox in Kent, England, in 1994 — told Artnet in 2021 that he remembered showing up to art school classes “fully dressed up in my hand-doodled attire.” A professor gave him the nickname Mr. Doodle, which stuck and made for a succinct Instagram handle.
Pretty Done, who also dons a doodle suit from time to time, moved to Las Vegas in 2010, and, in those days, was better known as DJ Adam or Adam the DJ. The Ohio native’s given name is Adam Rellah. While neither DJing nor the monikers it spun seemed to stick, Pretty Done has stuck to Vegas like glue.
Proliferation, according to Rellah, is part of his process and vision. “I want to paint the world,” Rellah says in a Las Vegas Weekly profile (he didn’t respond to Desert Companion’s requests for an interview). “I want to have art in different countries — art shows, sculptures, animation. I want to paint a plane. I want to do an air balloon — big scale … There’s a whole list of things that I’m trying to accomplish on this mission.”
Cox, who last year covered every surface of a $1.5 million mansion in his signature scribbles, sees a similar muralist’s destiny. His intention is to paint until “the entire Earth is covered in doodles.” (He declined to be interviewed by Desert Companion.)
Of intention, Cox also says, in The Millennial Source, “My art makes me happy, and if it can make someone else feel the same, my goal is achieved.”
Spreading happiness isn’t a bad goal; actually, it’s commendable. But hard-to-define happiness can be gleaned from any number of artists, including Las Vegas artists who have more interesting things to say about the city. Plopping a flamingo and Fabulous Las Vegas sign on a background of doodles — as Rellah does in his mural at ice creamery Sorry, Not Sorry, where you can also purchase Rellah’s scribbles on hoodies, shirts, and water bottles — isn’t commentary; it’s a brand recognizing a brand.
Cox and Rellah have both been compared to the pop artist Álvarez invoked, Keith Haring, an activist who rose to prominence during the AIDS epidemic, which ultimately cut his life short at 31.
Cox has bristled at accusations that his work lifts heavily from Haring. He has dismissed such claims by incorrectly, or perhaps purposefully, interpreting the criticism as a critique of doodling or pop art as a whole, telling The Millennial Source, “Every form of art has its critics … (Doodling)’s something that has existed since the beginning of human civilization, perhaps before any other form of art.”
Haring does not own pop art, a genre that is inherently referential. Among his own influences, he cites Belgian artist Pierre Alechinsky and French painter Jean Dubuffet. In his 1991 authorized biography, Haring recounts finding photographic backdrop paper in an alleyway, hauling the nine-foot rolls to the School of Visual Arts in New York, and creating “these ink paintings similar to Alechinsky’s, but bigger.”
In that act, Haring was riffing on an artist’s style by playing with form, medium, and perspective. Cox and Rellah, on the other hand, appropriate Haring’s globally recognizable brand, a brand which, through the Keith Haring Foundation, has licensing deals with Zara, Target, Levi’s, Tommy Hilfiger, Adidas … the list goes on. Cox has had his own success with this tack, landing brand deals with Fendi, Puma, MTV, and Samsung, and in 2020 he became the fifth most successful artist at auction under 40 years old, selling a doodled canvas for just less than $1 million in Tokyo. It’s easy to see why one would aspire to, or cop, Cox’s approach.
Neither Cox nor Rellah, although invoking the Haring brand, offer fresh spins on Haring’s conception of pop art, and there most definitely is no play with Haring’s embrace of political art. Haring murals such as “Todos Juntos Podemos Parar el SIDA” (1989) confronted government inaction on the AIDS epidemic. In 1985, Haring printed 20,000 posters of his “Free South Africa” design and canvased New York City to mobilize support against the country’s apartheid regime. Crack cocaine, and safe sex are among several other topics Haring tackled with wall and paint.
While I am “happy” Haring was and his art is in this world, the subject matter his art confronts makes me feel overwhelmed and depressed.
It may be unfair to compare to Haring to an artist whose pièce de résistance is cloistered in a $1.9 billion, partially taxpayer-funded NFL stadium. And it’s especially naive to expect an artist who lands such deals — only a few years after pivoting from sampling music to sampling visuals — to lean into politics. Yet advertorials from Psycho Bunny and Swagtron have drawn the direct comparison, writing, respectively, “his work evokes the late legend Keith Haring” and “His style (is), a modern mix of freestyle line-art reminiscent of Keith Haring.” Rellah, via Instagram bio, has aligned himself with the pop art movement, describing his product as “immersive abstract freestyle pop art.” Rellah and Cox work in a space that has history and context, but neither that history nor context come through in their copy-paste branding.
“They’re businessmen. They know which side their bread is buttered on, and they hustle really, really hard to get murals up on walls,” Holmes says, adding that hustle is commendable.
For his hustle, Rellah credits the 2020 COVID lockdown — which was only three years after Mr. Doodle posted the video he credits as launching his viral career. Even with all he has accomplished in such a short time, “It’s still a long way to go,” Rellah told Las Vegas Weekly. “There’s a whole world out there that doesn’t know about Pretty Done.”
Respectable though it may be, Rellah’s hustle has its limits. He has drawn himself into a neon cage. Rellah may plan on “painting the world,” but it’s only a matter of time before he hits a wall in L.A. or London or Tokyo or anyplace where a single critic, Instagrammer, or roommate’s boyfriend can point and ask, “Is that Mr. Doodle?”
The answer is no. It’s the Mr. Doodle this wall space could afford. This is a roommate’s boyfriend’s time killer; it’s not art you show someone you really know or care about, because the art, or formula, itself is only passing through.