Barbershop Artist Turns Heads

As La Brea Avenue carves its way through downtown Inglewood and heads south through Lennox into Hawthorne, culture takes a back seat to commerce. It is a wide and busy thoroughfare, none too beautiful, a good place to buy a muffler or tank up on junk food.

In other words, it’s the perfect canvas for Mykel.

Few have seen Mykel, though nearly everyone has seen his work. His airbrushed likenesses of African American men and women grace the storefront windows of nearly a dozen black hair salons up and down this corridor.

Many consider Mykel, who signs his works with the only name he uses, to be the best barbershop painter in Los Angeles County.

His faces are angular and TV-perfect, staring with sexy ennui at the traffic and bodegas in their midst. Their hairdos range from sleek, no-nonsense fades to complicated architectural fantasies that would impress Frank Gehry.

In a multiethnic marketplace, they send a message that is as clear as it is valuable: We know how to cut black hair.

But it is the way Mykel captures the details that can prompt barbers such as Leon Morgan, of Close Up barbershop, to gush.

“He is an urban Michelangelo,” Morgan said, finishing up a clip job on a recent afternoon.

“Oh, he is the bomb,” said Betty Arnold, a stylist at Hair by Design Studio on Market Street.

“If you find him, would you please send him down here?” said stylist Vickie Jordan of DNG Beauty Salon, a new shop.

The artist is difficult to contact, in part because he is so busy. While La Brea Avenue and Hawthorne Boulevard display the highest concentration of Mykel’s work, he has painted scores, and perhaps hundreds, of hair salons around Los Angeles in the last decade, from Crenshaw Boulevard to North Long Beach. Some, even he has forgotten.

When he was finally tracked down, the quiet, bearded 36-year-old New York City native affirmed the widespread belief that he introduced this style of window dressing to Los Angeles about a decade ago.

“You could call me an urban legend,” he said, half-jokingly. “When I came out here, I noticed a few other guys airbrushing, but they were mostly just doing it on clothes.”

Since then, imitators have made the well-coiffed black busts part of the visual fabric of Los Angeles’ urban landscape. Some of them, Mykel acknowledged, are pretty good -- a guy named Cliff, another named Ras Picasso.

Mykel learned to draw from his father, an amateur sketch artist. He hated the one art class he took in the eighth grade. His real love was the graffiti art that he could not learn in a studio.

After high school, Mykel ended up in Chicago, where he taught himself how to decorate T-shirts with an airbrush gun. In the late 1980s, he set up inside a hair salon on the city’s South Side. Soon, salon owners were asking him to paint their windows.

In Chicago, he said, as many as five artists would compete for the salon-window business. “It was like a battle,” he said. “You had to keep your skills sharp.”

In 1995, Mykel moved to Los Angeles to pursue an animation degree. The plan didn’t work out, but he had noticed that the city’s hair salons were largely blank canvases. He took his gun and his Chicago style to the streets.

“I hit up anywhere that had the word salon on it,” he said. “Carson, Hawthorne, Inglewood, North Long Beach, Santa Ana, Crenshaw, wherever.”

The paintings fall within a tradition of homespun commercial art that has long been common in ethnic Los Angeles neighborhoods. Even today, hand-painted storefronts lend many streets a folksy feel that contrasts with the broader city and its relentlessly modern aspirations.

But barbers were not attracted to Mykel’s style because it was quaint. They liked it because it was slick, professional, and largely free of the wobbling lines and skewed proportions of the amateur painter.

Salon owners quickly realized that the portraits also made good business sense. For less than the cost of a full-fledged sign -- Mykel’s prices start at $500 -- they could get the attention of black customers in their cars. And Mykel’s attention to detail meant they could emphasize the kind of specialty work unique to African American hair salons.

Give Mykel a picture of braids or cornrows, he can paint it. Give him pictures of complicated up-dos, thermal-texturized flips, high-volume color treatments -- no problem.

“If you’re not a black woman, these are just pretty pictures,” said Sharry Sanford, a stylist at V Hair 2000 salon in Hawthorne. “But to a black woman, they can speak volumes.”

Two of Mykel’s paintings decorate the exterior of V Hair 2000. He prides himself on never painting the same image twice, and the women he created for the salon seem as different as two strong-willed sisters.

The first is painted in profile. Her blond hair, curled into wavy scallops, is clipped short, in a style suggesting the Roaring ‘20s. The second woman’s hair is more aggressive and hip-hop, curled in a kind of cherry-red tidal wave.

Barber Eric Brown heard about Mykel about four years ago, shortly after opening his Nothing But Hair barbershop in Paramount, in a strip mall dominated by Latino businesses.

“Most of the time people thought it was a Mexican barbershop,” Brown said. Mykel came over and painted four large African American busts, including a portrait of Brown, in less than a day.

Today, the barber estimates half his clients are black passersby who see the pictures.

In Hawthorne, however, similar reactions prompted Charles Nall to scrape Mykel’s paintings off the windows of the Coast 2 Coast barbershop, which was trying to add whites, Asians and Pacific Islanders to its clientele.

If he meets Mykel again, Nall said, “I’d have him put new portraits up. But it wouldn’t be all black. It’d be everybody.”

Over at A New You Barber Shop in downtown Inglewood, somebody hurled a rock into a storefront window a few weeks ago, reducing one of Mykel’s better paintings to shards on the sidewalk.

“If you find him, tell him to call me,” said owner Eric Muhammad. “Tell him I got some work for him.”