By Sara Anne Donnelly
Photos by Michael D. Wilson
From our May 2025 issue
In a February 4 YouTube video titled “The Real Reason Artists Hate the Blank Page,” Saco illustrator Lewis Rossignol dons a new maroon suit and declares spastic war on a fresh piece of paper. “This paper has been through nothing, it’s pristine,” he says. “I’m not pristine. I’ve been through a ton of crap . . . I’ve made a ton of mistakes. I’ve hurt people’s feelings, I’ve had my feelings hurt . . . So I’m going to bring this piece of paper to a place where we’re on the same level.” With a blue marker, he scrawls “You Stink” at the top of the page in big, crooked letters. “See? Now this paper has hurt your feelings. I’m starting to like this paper more.” He draws a bulbous rat with two mouths of bucktoothed teeth and a misshapen giraffe with tusks and a trunk that he proclaims is an elephant. “None of this is going to make sense.” He pours white paint into his hand and smears it over the images and onto his suit. “When I let this paper dry it’s going to be almost white, but with a lot of crap underneath and I’ll be able to draw on it and make a beautiful piece of art.”
Rossignol’s visceral, cartoonish art and the wry videos he makes about it have attracted 750,000 social-media followers, plus celebrity clients like rapper Tyler, The Creator, whose Grammy-winning 2019 album IGOR features a limited-edition cover illustration by Rossignol of the singer in a smudged coral suit and dark sunglasses. His scribbly portraits, often depicting frightened, angry, or maniacally giddy characters, have appeared on beer-bottle labels, skateboards, guitar pedals, and in seven self-published books, and he’s sold prints all over the world. Currently, Rossignol is working on a drawing of characters from The Simpsons for the show’s writers’ room and fliers and videos for the Las Vegas music festival Punk Rock Bowling. He has a six-month waiting list for new commissions.
Rossignol’s work is often compared to that of graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, a topic he explored in a recent video. “For one thing, back in the ’80s, Jean-Michel dated Madonna, and similarly I used to have a pre-owned Madonna CD,” Rossignol says. “Also, Sotheby’s sold one of his paintings for over $110 million . . . whereas I once outbid everyone else on an eBay auction for a used Madonna CD costing me 12 bucks.”
A Sanford native, Rossignol worked as a carpenter, house painter, and restaurant server before pursuing a bachelor’s degree in illustration at Portland’s Maine College of Art & Design when he was in his mid-30s. After graduating, in 2017, he gave himself a year to make a living as a full-time artist, and succeeded. He started out creating more traditional, realistic portraits on commission and looser, childlike drawings for himself. But when he shared his personal work in online videos, “people were like, oh, I like this too,” he said on a recent afternoon in his home studio, which is equipped with a paint-spattered wooden worktable and a wall-size canvas decorated, at the moment, with doodles and the words “Shut Up!” and “RUDE.”
He now embraces the childlike approach. Illustrations begin with Rossignol dumping charcoal sticks onto paper to smudge it up or sketching figures and writing words he scribbles over or blurs with paint. Sometimes, he affixes fragments of old photographs or letters found at flea markets to create a collage. Using acrylic markers, water-soluble crayons, and colored pencils, he then churns out several versions of a single idea in an intuitive blur before landing on one that brings him joy.
The feeling is not always shared by his followers. In one image, titled “Great Britain,” a little girl gazes up at a man holding an umbrella beneath a storm cloud that is only raining on him. His eyes are beady and bloodshot, his massive mouth is agape and overflowing with crooked yellow teeth, and squiggly black hairs sprout from his nose. The coloring is manic and gleefully outside the lines and the perspective is scrambled. Both figures, shown in profile, have two eyes on one side of their head, and the man dwarfs a bright-red London telephone booth. In an upper corner, a white bird with giant teeth dripping from its long beak flies next to the word “Bird,” but an arrow beneath the label points, inexplicably, to the girl. “I want to know how the hell you make a living off of this cuz you’re not good at it,” wrote one commenter on Rossignol’s YouTube tutorial featuring the portrait. Another remarked, “Drawing left-handed with your right hand is a real talent.”
Other comments betray a kind of begrudging respect. “Why are your drawings so bad they’re brilliant?” wrote an Instagram follower, referring to “TMNT,” which depicts pizza- and soda-guzzling Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Rossignol used a similar burn (“It takes real talent to suck with such style.”) to caption a reel of himself drawing the Ninja Turtles to the tune of Vanilla Ice’s “Ninja Rap.” “These comments don’t bother me,” he said. “If you’re making art that nobody hates, you’re not making art that people love.”
Rossignol has Tourette’s syndrome, and he has found that creating art, and the calm he feels when he’s fully immersed in it, relieves his symptoms. He draws nearly every day, often while listening to music or podcasts. The background words are just distracting enough to drown out his inner critic. “I feel like if I’m half focused on something else, it’s a good space for me to work in because I’m not fussing with things too much,” he said. He keeps a running list of ideas on his phone (recent entries include “Russian dancers,” “ice fishing,” and “David Bowie”) and typically completes about 20 drawings a week.
Recently, Rossignol traveled to Seattle to record a series of online classes for Carla Sonheim Presents called “Forget Everything You Know and Draw Like a Child!” In them, he explores elements of young kids’ art that he tries to emulate, such as sketching from imagination, making important elements really big, and not planning anything out. The point is to enjoy the process, without worrying what the final product will look like. “Because, in the end, that’s what kids are doing,” Rossignol said. “They’re just having fun.”
