Why Are Wall Doodles Everywhere These Days?

Good little girls do not draw on the walls with Magic Markers. It’s a rule I knew instinctively as a child, so I only colored with pencils on crisp printer paper, even covering our wood dining table with a protective cloth. The big, blank canvas of white walls taunted me. I wanted to draw on them because they weren’t meant for drawing, though no one told me why.

Last summer, when I walked into the newly opened Lower Manhattan cafe-wine bar Casetta, that childhood drive was animated. The cream walls were marked with sporadic doodles of red flowers with curlicue stems and three-pronged masses for petals. Chains of the same scribbled perennials snaked up each blade of the ceiling fan. In the year since, I’ve seen similarly whimsical wall illustrations decorate more and more homes on social media, many of them evoking youthful imagery like simplified sketches of animals or flowers, even in spaces designed explicitly for adults.

To be clear, as long as we’ve had walls, we’ve been drawing on them. Just look to the Chauvet Cave in France, with some of the earliest known figurative rock paintings and engravings. By the Renaissance period, no half-decent chapel or palace was complete without a fresco. Many 20th-century artists used their homes as canvases for all sorts of experimental markings—British photographer and interior designer Cecil Beaton’s bathroom at his country house had stenciled and signed drawings of his guests’ hands on the walls, American painter Walter Anderson covered his Mississippi cottage with sketches of surrounding flora and fauna, and French poet and artist Jean Cocteau left his mark on his famous "tattooed villa" with charcoal-and-tempera Greek gods in almost every room.

But today’s trending hand-painted wall illustrations feel like a particular nostalgia response, a grasping at a hazy image of a carefree childhood and at an era when our homes felt more attainably permanent than they do today. With millennials and Gen Z staring down a dismal housing market, even increasingly choosing not to have families because of the high cost of living, we wish our biggest problem was getting sent to "time out" for drawing a tic-tac-toe game on the playroom wall. The rate of home ownership in the United States is currently around 65 percent, and two-thirds of those homes are owned by people over 60. If the American Dream was once to scratch the kids’ heights on the doorframe of a suburban farmhouse kitchen, now it’s to mask the rental apartment’s ugly boob light fixtures without electrocution.
Earlier this year, writer Emily Jensen reported for Business Insider about the millennial renters giving up on home ownership and instead spending thousands on upgrading their rentals: "Across the country, millennials who are being forced to rent further into adulthood than previous generations are valuing present experiences over saving for a stable future that may never come—financial risks be damned." Drawing on the walls certainly doesn’t necessitate ownership, but it does signify investment. While not at the level of retiling a bathroom, there is a time commitment initially and down the line, when you’re moving out and have to paint over the wall doodles. You can’t take them with you like other renter-friendly updates like reusable peel-and-stick wallpaper. Even those who do opt for wallpaper have plenty of options for nostalgic designs that evoke the essence of an illustrated scene from one of Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline picture books or a finger-painted art project on your parents’ fridge.

This celebration of aesthetics typically considered childlike is nothing new in design. In the 1980s, Italian design collective the Memphis Group started making postmodern decor employing abstract shapes and primary colors that were counter to the design conventions of the time, which focused on function and favored a pared-down look. In the first decades of the millennium, minimalism reigned supreme, but the maximalist revival in recent years has ushered in a flood of trends rooted in the adult yearning for yesteryear, from the Y2K craze to "nursery chic" decor and Fischer-Price coded cookware. The current reclamation of scribbled imagery isn’t just happening on our walls—it’s the look du jour for just about every trendy bistro menu, and seems to be taking over the product marketing for everyday items we stock our homes with, too. Even the label on your olive oil bottle can look like a lunchbox note drawn for you.

The 25-year-old artist behind Casetta’s wall doodles, Alley Bell, has been booked and busy. She painted the ceiling mural for Brooklyn home goods store Porta, and has been commissioned to bestow her folksy illustrations on the walls of a number of New York residences. She uses handmade materials, sometimes makes her own dyes with plant matter, and prefers to work barefoot. "I think people are beginning to recognize forms of artistry like this again, wanting something that took so long and is so massive," says Bell. "I’m moving my entire body all day. I’m surrounded by my piece and I’m immersed in it, and so is everyone who enters the space."
This winsome, often informal look isn’t just Bell’s style—it’s kind of the style for many of the wall doodles I’ve seen online, both by professionals and DIYers. The aesthetic feels just as much evolved from cottagecore as the Y2K revival. In one TikTok video, for example, DIYer @happyenchantedhome paints a celestial scene on her cottage wall to the sound of dramatic violin music. The caption reads: "When you realize you are an adult and you can draw and paint on your walls if you wish to."
Top photo of artist Alley Bell painting the ceiling art at Porta in New York courtesy Studio Alley Bell
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