The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
MAN WITH THE RED BEARD: HOW ARTIST GROWS HIS SUCCESS
How the whimsical street art of Kyle Brooks made him a darling of corporate Atlanta.
Kyle Brooks’ canvas was an old interior door, white wood veneer, hollow inside. The handle was removed but for the internal locking mechanisms still inside the circular hole. On one side, he painted an undercoat in shades of muted orange, bordered by gray dots. Atop that base, he stacked three emotive faces vertically down the facade. In all-caps down the right side he used a Sharpie to print: “The Bear & The Buffalo & The Man with the Red Red Beard.” At bottom right, he signed it simply, “Brooks.”
With the door complete, Kyle did what he’d done with most of his art since 2008; he took it out into the world and left it there. It was late in the evening when he finished installing the door in an alley across the street from the Krispy Kreme on Ponce de Leon, next to the half-painted monkey king made by some other artist.
Satisfied, Kyle opened the creaky door to his old Tacoma where his rat terrier Pup sat in the passenger seat. The pair made their way home to their condo in East Atlanta Village where his wife, Maria, was sleeping.
A half-mile away and a few hours later, Bryan Schroeder woke up at 4:30 a.m., dug a pair of sweatpants from the drawer and clipped a leash onto his golden retriever George. Together they slipped out the front door of his Midtown home, careful not to disturb Schroeder’s still-sleeping wife, as they headed out into the night for Central Park.
Bryan takes pleasure in nature; he is the senior director of development and marketing for the Georgia Conservancy. And he values loyalty; he has worked for the conservancy his entire career. He and George moved quietly through the hush of urban predawn darkness. The whole city was asleep when he spotted something strange leaning against an alley wall next to The Atlanta Eagle bar.
A closer inspection revealed three heads framed in polka dots,
a muted orange undercoat. A painting on a door. What a strange and wonderful thing, he marveled.
Schroeder examined the work in the darkness and looked around.
How did this thing get here? he wondered. George sniffed the air. Neither was sure.
By the time he returned home, Bryan was resolute. He unclipped George from the leash, gathered his keys and drove back to the spot. It wasn’t quite dawn when he loaded the door into his trunk.
By dinnertime, it hung on his foyer wall.
Kyle Brooks woke up the following morning without knowledge of the slow-churning machinery that was silently set in motion in the night. And so he drank tea and blogged about his installation on Ponce that was already long gone.
2 Resisting conformity
Five years later, Kyle and I strolled into his favorite Thai restaurant where he greeted the waitress by name.
Tall and slim with extra-long arms, Kyle sat hunched forward as though he was perpetually cold. He wore white overalls covered in pastel paint splatters, a handkerchief tied around his neck like an ascot. At the next table, two muscular police officers sized us up. Perhaps it was Kyle’s colorful presence that caught their eyes, or maybe it was his epic beard, a bright red tumble of whiskers that ended at a point a foot below his chin.
“I was born in Columbus, Ohio,” he tells me between bites of his vegetarian basil and rice dish, “but the Brooks are a long line of Georgians.”
His family moved to Atlanta before Kyle was out of diapers. He attended Mt. Carmel Christian School in Stone Mountain from kindergarten until seventh grade. He spoke of those years with reverence. It was a good childhood.
That changed in eighth grade, when Brooks enrolled at Stockbridge Junior High. He likened his first days there to being “the newest convict in the prison yard.”
He was horrified at the way kids treated one another, and for the first time in his life he got into a fight.
Realizing the social stakes, Brooks conformed as much as he could. But he entertained himself by writing silly poems for friends and doodling strange beasts onto the backs of tests and quizzes. He loved to get a laugh. His imaginative flights of fancy helped him pass the time and eventually gained him social entrée. The girls loved his artful ways, and his chill demeanor won over most of the guys, even his would-be bullies.
But by his senior year, Kyle was lost. His parents assumed he would attend their alma mater Milligan College, a private Christian liberal arts college near Johnson City, Tennessee, but Kyle didn’t want to go. Instead of talking about it with his parents, he quietly slipped unnoticed into June without applying.
When they found out, they were angry and disappointed. Family pressure redoubled, and Kyle eventually acquiesced. He didn’t have a better plan for his life, anyway. Hasty arrangements were made to get him in Milligan. Brooks lasted two years.
“Safe to say, no art got made,” Kyle said, as we left the restaurant.
3 Vision quest
Directionless, Kyle packed up and headed west on a road trip to nowhere in particular.
“I bought a 66 GMC Handi-van from a man in East Tennessee named Virgil Ingram for $400 and drove it up the West coast and back before I sold it to some hippie kids for more than I’d paid.”
He returned for a time to Georgia, then moved to Tennessee for while. The timeline gets hard to pin down in those years. Brooks had no school to attend, no meaningful work to do, no plans to enact. He settled where he did. For a time he worked at a hotel restaurant in Johnson City, serving roast beef in the lobby on weekends. He married a local girl. It didn’t work out. Kyle doesn’t like to talk about it. Any of it.
“No art at all,” he said, staring at the ground and shaking his head.
Kyle was now divorced, living alone in a place he hated, surrounded by people he loathed, doing a job he resented. So he decided to get even more lost
“If you’re trying to be lost,” he reflected, “then there is no place better than Alaska. Everyone in Alaska is running from something.”
Brooks spent a summer washing dishes and playing guitar at the Denali Wilderness Lodge, and for the first time in a long time, he felt like he was in the right place at the right time. The people out there in the wilderness liked his music. He made friends with other creative people.
At the end of the summer, his seasonal job concluded. Brooks bounced around, hiking the Alaskan wild before making his way south to New Mexico then east to Nashville where he recorded a demo. But nothing really stuck. Weary and worn, but aware for the first time of the man he could become, Kyle set his course for Georgia.
Kyle returned to Atlanta in 2000 and got a day job driving a courier van in Fayetteville. He got his own place, and he spent his evenings at home playing music and drawing. Then he got a break. His boss knew Kyle was a doodler and recommended him to a client who needed a new graphic designer, minimal experience required.
He quickly found himself in their employ and began learning the ropes of graphic design. It was his first professional job in art. He immersed himself. And in his spare time, he took up painting, his earliest works poking fun at the religious iconography he’d been raised around. He painted a green baby Jesus, a Jesus with two left feet, a super good Jesus. Kyle was thriving in the world.
Eight years passed, during which time painting became his obsession. At night, Kyle painted so relentlessly, he soon had no more room in which to put new paintings. So he began to paint over the old ones. He’d look around his East Atlanta condo, identify a painting he didn’t want anymore, and two coats of white later, he had fresh canvas.
4 Birth of the bear
A recurring character began to appear in his re-paintings: the face of a bear with a wry smile and cartoon eyes. His sweet visage conveyed innocence, while his smirk gave him away.
“Those bears, they have some hidden issues,” Kyle said.
Kyle had an idea: What if he put his bear paintings in the public? People might get a kick out of it. He’d toss a couple bear heads into the truck, and on his commute to work he’d keep an eye out (and mostly up) around the neighborhood telephone poles for a nice, visible spot. When he found one, he’d make a mental note.
Later that day, or that week, or whenever the mood struck him, Kyle would return with his ladder, set it against the telephone pole and climb up. He’d take that bear head and nail it in.
“That was a rush, those early ones,” Kyle said. “Just doing stuff you aren’t supposed to got the blood going. When I got to feeling tired of a certain painting, I’d paint a bear head over the top. Eventually I started taking them out on weekends and at night, just to tuck away up some pol e… see ‘what if,’ I guess.”
Kyle was evolving into a street artist not as a way to express dissent in the world but simply because he was a dude with too many paintings of bears cluttering his apartment. A dude with a penchant for harmless pranks. A dude with a ladder.
When the Great Recession hit in 2008, a lot of people lost their jobs, including Kyle. He got a temp job and turned his mind to drumming up some publicity for his art. His street art name, BlackCatTips, came to him as he sat, browser open to a GoDaddy.com URL purchase page, cursor blinking in the blank field marked “Your URL.” He took a sheet of paper with dozens of words he’d written in neat columns, selected three, and BlackCatTips was born.
“I might’ve given it a little extra thought if I’d known it would stick,” he says now.
Kyle didn’t know what was coming. It wouldn’t be until he met Maria that he would see.
5 Yin and yang
By 2009, Kyle’s bears were becoming a common sight around Atlanta’s intown neighborhoods. He also had taken to writing three or four words on scrap wood and hanging them around town in a similar fashion. He called them street poems.
Then one day he walked into his temp job and there sat Maria. She was the new designer at work. Kyle was supposed to train her, but he was immediately transfixed. They started dating during her first week. The couple later married in her family’s native Puerto Rico.
Kyle and Maria are at once alike and opposite. The ways they are the same, they are so very similar. The ways they are different, each replaces in form where the other diminishes.