Man with Sharpie > You

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Man decorates basement with $10 worth of Sharpie

When Charlie Kratzer started on the basement art project in his south Lexington home, he was surrounded by walls painted a classic cream. Ten dollars of Magic Marker and Sharpie later, the place was black and cream and drawn all over.

There are fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, Winston Churchill lounging with George Bernard Shaw — and the TV squirrel Rocky and his less adroit moose pal Bullwinkle.

There's Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. There is Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Winston Churchill, and the Cornell Law School, of which Kratzer is an alumnus. There is Kratzer's dad. There is the harlequin pattern — alluded to in culinary culture today by the Panera bread bag — and a fake fireplace facing a real one.

There are both The Walrus and the Carpenter (from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There), and William Shakespeare. The Marx Brothers peer around a corner. A flip-top garbage can is transformed via marker art into Star Wars' plucky little beeper R2D2.

How did this Sharpie world start? With a single swipe of the marker.

Kratzer started mid-wall, with the Salon by Picasso. Then he thought, well, taking a design out to the edge of the wall wouldn't be overwhelming.
Then the rest of the basement flared off that first wall.

Kratzer's basement suggests that the great cultural influences wandered out of college humanities class — here a Churchill for eloquence during harsh times, a Joan Crawford for cinematic vampiness, Holmes and Poirot for great literary characterization — and set up shop together in the carefully hand-drawn markings of an educated imagination come to life.

Look carefully in this basement o' dreams and you'll see a drawing of the Kratzers' upstairs library — with Claude Monet, the greatest of the Impressionists, at the doorway. It's a tribute to Monet, but it's also a way of living with cultural influences: Kratzer and his wife, Deb, don't just keep them within book covers or admire them in museums. Their Picasso spends each day close to their pinball machine. Agatha Christie's shrewd little Belgian detective and his carefully pruned mustache hover over the deck door.

From the main floor leading down to the basement, there is a color mural inspired by Picasso's The Dream.

Kratzer likes the Impressionists, but he's also inspired by Picasso — in particular the artist's ability to convey a lot of information with just a few lines. A gathering at Picasso's Paris salon in 1919 dominates a far wall, featuring a pantheon of artistic greats including Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Clive Bell and Olga Picasso, striking a kind of Sharpie synthesis of marker art between film, music, dance, literature and the muse.

Damn that's pretty good.

Impressive.

What creativity and skill. Just wow.

"Decorating a room" = drawing crap all over the walls?

I want a pinball machine......

At the very least his drawings are better than what Dwyane Wade drew on his mansion.

Holy crap that's awesome. I wish I could draw half as well on paper.