It takes a special sort of artist to draw for both a children’s computer program and a porn mag, and Mike Lee is just that sort of artist. Founding member of the two-man art crew Team Rekloos, Lee (a/k/a Mr.) is a 30-year-old Cambridge native who has recently done work for both Scratch, an MIT Media Lab–sponsored animation project aimed at kids, and the skin rag Players Pictorial. To be clear, plump-bootied naked ladies and hoodied little kids don’t overlap in Lee’s graffiti-inspired oeuvre (he isn’t drawing anything that nasty). But both types of characters are drawn in the same cartoony style.
That was evident last week in the East Cambridge apartment of Lee’s Rekloos partner, Raodee, a long-limbed and laid-back 22-year-old with a nest of dreadlocks. As a visual aid to help explain their aesthetic, Raodee pulls out a hand-drawn sketch that the pair drafted for a horizontal mural at Beverly’s Montserrat School of Art. Thinking that they were designing something for an internal-gallery wall, they’d roughly outlined an image of a fish-lipped, barebacked woman brandishing a pistol. Then they learned that the piece would go up downtown.
“We’re probably going to have to tone that down a little bit,” admits a slightly chagrined and heavy-lidded Lee, who is nursing a 40-ounce Miller High Life at four o’clock on a Thursday afternoon. “I could easily just flip [the woman] into a little kid.”
Last April, Lee and Raodee assumed the Team Rekloos rubric. They’d known each other for years — both went to high school at Cambridge Rindge and Latin — and had admired each other’s work. But then they lost touch until last spring, when they ran into each other. Since then, they’ve collaborated on T-shirts, street pieces, and paintings that have been shown at places such as the Middle East and Legends of Style. And right now, they’re both painting shoes for “Sneak Attack,” this Monday’s 20-artist sneaker-customizing exhibition, which they co-organized at the Middlesex Lounge. Showing off a pair of pink-and-blue ladies’ Pumas on whose heels he has drawn faces, Lee explains simply, “Sneakers is just mad fun.”
Raodee’s style is graffiti-inspired symbols with “bright, loud colors that catch your eye.” Pagers are recurring emblems. “They’re paperweights now,” he says, “but I still like them. They remind me of my childhood.”
Lee’s little kids are colorful and cartoony, with thick Afros, droopy eyes, and baggy pants. But his undressed women are pure pictographic sleaze: pole-grinding strippers, crawling girls spray-painting the phrase GET WET, females with severe wedgies spanking their own apple bottoms. Lee says he started drawing digital porn because few other people he knew were doing so. “I used to hang out with all these art people, and I’d go to their shows. I’d be like, ‘Come on, man, do something freaky.’ They’d be all afraid to show a girl’s snatch.” Lee wasn’t. So he did. And he has drawn them again and again. Lee says his girlfriend isn’t at all threatened by his nudes. “She likes ’em. She gives me tips. She likes the big booties.”
