According to smithsonianmag, Cox, who also goes by the artist alias Mr. Doodle, has turned heads in the art world with his graphic doodle art, which is reminiscent of the work of 1980s graffiti-adjacent artist Keith Haring. Per Susannah Butter of the Sunday Times, the young artist acknowledges the similarities in their work, but says that his primary inspiration “still goes back to when I was kid watching ‘Tom and Jerry,’ ‘Wacky Races’ and ‘SpongeBob SquarePants,’ and video games like ‘Crash Bandicoot.’”

The Haring-meets-SpongeBob works have fetched Cox large sums of money at auctions. In 2020, he set his own auction record by selling a large-scale drawing called Spring at Tokyo Chuo Auction for around $1 million.  With the money he made from his art, Cox was able to buy his Kent mansion for about $1.5 million a few years ago. It was the first step toward fulfilling an adolescent wish to reside in a house entirely covered in doodles. “This has been my dream since I was 18,” Cox tells the Sunday Times.

Picture: smithsonianmag: Gareth Fuller / PA Images

One decade—and, per the Washington Post, 238 gallons of white paint, 286 bottles of black drawing paint, 401 cans of black spray paint and 2,296 pen nibs—later, Mr. Doodle is living in that dream.

 After painting the mansion’s interior and exterior white, Cox first put pen to wall in September 2020. Pandemic restrictions and lockdowns left the artist with much more time at home than he was used to, which “helped accidentally,” he tells the Washington Post. “We were forced to be inside, and my main project was so easy to access because we live there.”

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Photo: kentonline

The “we” he is referring to includes his wife, Alena, who goes by Mrs. Doodle. Alena, an artist herself, often collaborates with her husband, such as on a doodled flag of Ukraine in the shape of a heart, which the couple sold prints of to raise money for UNICEF’s efforts to support children in Ukraine, Alena’s home country.

 When it came to the mansion, though, Cox refused his wife’s offers to help him doodle. “I wanted to say I’d done it all myself,” he tells the Sunday Times. Read more on this story by visiting this website.