- Tales
- Charlatan Inkster
CHARLATAN INKSTER
Charlatan Inkster is a wandering soul who draws his life one step and one sketch at a time. Born in Indialantic, Florida in 1938, he came of age just as America was learning to dream in color.
Charlatan InksterCharlatan goes by the nickname Shar, rhymes with car. He never did tell me his real name.
He says he chose "Charlatan Inkster" as his "nom d'artiste" for two reasons.
The first name because it means "fraud" or "imposter" and he is still not convinced he's a good artist.
He picked the last name because in his youth he enjoyed pen and ink drawings more than any other medium.
Inkster believes he is descended from Scots-Irish pioneers who came to America in the mid 1700s.
By the mid-1960s, he was a barefoot philosopher in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, where his art first took shape amid the incense and revolution of the hippie era.
Restless and curious, in the early 1970s Inkster set out to see the world the slow way—on a small sailboat.
Pacific Seacraft FlickaCourtesy Bruce Bingham
His Pacific Seacraft Flicka 20 named AWOL has been his only home now for more than 50 years.
Over the next five decades, he has sailed around the coast of the United States three times and circled the world once, sketching the landscapes and people he met on scraps of paper and the backs of restaurant place mats.
St. Augustine Bridge of LionsHe also did many beautiful murals on the walls of drab buildings around the world. He always tried to capture the history of the place in the murals he created.
He sold his drawings for meals, traded portraits for shelter or an anchorage for his boat, and considered every road and waterway his canvas.
Wife Number SomethingHe believes he has been married seven times to women in various parts of the world, but has never been divorced - as far as he knows.
He also has no children - as far as he knows. Details like this do not bother him.
AWOL At AnchorageMany of his wives lived aboard AWOL with him for short periods of time. Then either they or Charlatan moved on to different places and times.
Inkster is considered by many art experts to be a "polymath artist" in that he has mastered many styles of art.
Bridge at SunriseHe is comfortable with impressionism, cubism, pen and ink, abstract, automatism, pop art, and any medium that strikes his fancy at the moment.
Inkster’s art, tinged with wanderlust, captures forgotten towns, weathered faces, and the poetry of the open road.
Highland Avenue Mount Dora, FloridaHe says he never sought fame, only “the next sunrise worth sketching.”
He is unencumbered by modern things like permanent snail mail or email addresses, phone numbers, or exhibitions of his art. He has none of these.
Hotel Ponce de Leon, St. AugustineThe only home he has is the same one he's had for the past 50 years: his small Flicka sailboat named "AWOL."
The boat is constantly on the move and usually off the grid.
Charlatan says buying a small boat when he was young and vigorous has proved to be a blessing as he has grown old. He would not be able to handle a bigger boat at this time in his life.
Mike Aboard AWOLHis life and travels inspired me to name several of my boats "AWOL" over the years. Absent without leave is a good description of the short cruises I've enjoyed over the years.
Pop ArtToday, Charlatan Inkster is celebrated as a modern nomadic polymath artist whose work embodies the freedom of a world without walls and human imagination without boundaries.
DNA Stairway to Heaven
A Personal Memory of Charlatan Inkster
I first met Charlatan in the early 1970s when he was cruising in AWOL, his small Flicka sailboat, down the Indian River lagoon. He spent a few nights anchored off Dragon Point on the south end of Merritt Island near the marina where I kept my own sailboat.
We were the same age, but I had a family to support and an engineering career which kept me land bound. I envied the freedom Charlatan was enjoying. He had very little money but was not inclined to be tied down to a job. Freedom was his thing.
A few weeks after meeting Charlatan, I met Bruce Bingham and Katy Burke who were then anchoring off Dragon Point. Bruce was the designer of the Flicka sailboat, and Katy was his companion. She was a naval architect and author who wrote "The Complete Live Aboard Book."
Dragon Point, South Merritt IslandDragon Point suffered severe damage after a hurricane, then slowly crumbled away into history. Only memories, photographs, and paintings remain.
By Mike Miller, Copyright 2009-2025
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