CHARLATAN INKSTER

Charlatan Inkster is a wandering soul who draws his life one step and one sketch at a time. Born in 1938, he came of age just as America was learning to dream in color. 

Charlatan InksterCharlatan Inkster

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, Inkster set out to see the world the slow way—on foot.

Over the next five decades, he walked across the United States three times, sketching the landscapes and people he met on scraps of paper and the backs of diner placemats.

He sold his drawings for meals, traded portraits for shelter, and considered every road his canvas.

He believes he has been married seven times to women in various parts of the world, but has never been divorced.  Details like this do not bother him.

Bridge of Lions Charlatan InksterSt. Augustine Bridge of Lions

In his later years, he undertook his greatest journey: a trek from Hudson Bay, Ontario, to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America.

Inkster’s art—mostly pen and ink, tinged with wanderlust—captures forgotten towns, weathered faces, and the poetry of the open road.

He 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.

Today, Charlatan Inkster is celebrated as a modern nomadic artist whose work embodies the freedom of a world without walls.

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