Artist Drake Carr Casts His Muses in Glam Fantasies—From Dive Bars to Fashion Magazines

Drake Carr, a Christian boy from a tiny Michigan suburb a few miles outside of Flint, moved to New York City in 2015 because “this is where you move if you want to be an artist.” Like many before him, he paid rent by bartending. Carr found a job at Happyfun Hideaway, a tiki-themed gay bar in Bushwick where draft margaritas come out of a blue poodle. On the wood panels around the space and in the bathroom, he painted cartoonish figures: shirtless guys with bloated biceps, dudes wearing denim micro-shorts.

Before Carr moved to New York, he met Pvssyheaven, a musician and performance artist, through a close friend. They ended up moving to Brooklyn and bartending together every Friday night for about three years. Macy Rodman—a musician, podcaster, and occasional actor—worked at the bar too. The writer Devan Díaz often DJ’ed. Dosha, an artist and musician, and Martine Gutierrez, a visual and performance artist who goes by Martine, were regulars. Carr invited these friends to get dolled up and be drawn by him for W’s art issue. Toward the end of the day, Sonny Molina, a longtime friend of Carr’s and the hairstylist on set, sat for a portrait too.

“I didn’t want it to just be like, yay, New York artists!” says the 31-year-old. Instead, he imagined his friends attending a funeral “for art, or the art world itself,” he explains. “I’m always hearing people say the art markets crashed or art sales are really low…. It’s all so stupid. But it’s also my livelihood, so it’s a bit anxiety-inducing.”

Using colored pencils, crayons, ink, and acrylic paint, Carr drew on five-foot-tall sheets of paper for seven hours straight as stylists, editors, hair and makeup artists, and friends watched. When he’s working in front of an audience, “there’s adrenaline and pressure in the moment to go faster,” he says. “It’s a way of bypassing the overthinking or self-consciousness that might ­happen when I’m alone.” His gestures, loose and louche, fall somewhere on a spectrum ranging from Tom of Finland’s beefcakes to Antonio Lopez’s exaggerated fashion illustrations.

Growing up, Carr drew superheroes and comic book characters because he liked their “crazy, snatched bodies, big muscles, big boobs.” In the 1980s, before he was born, his mother was a professional bodybuilder. As a kid, he looked at her old studio portraits, for which she flexed in a hot pink bathing suit and had her hair done in big curls. “There’s something about the superhuman ability that was ingrained in me.”

While Carr has always drawn, live sittings are a recent development. In 2023, he asked his friend the fashion photographer Ethan James Green to lend him his Chinatown studio to draw a pal. Green suggested they turn the project into a two-week residency, during which Carr could invite as many people as he liked. Among his dozens of subjects were the ’70s model Pat Cleveland and Connie Fleming, the onetime Thierry Mugler muse. The fashion world took an immediate shine to Carr, and other live drawing events—at New York’s Armory Show and at Paris’s Mariposa Gallery—followed.

Last winter, Carr stopped bartending at ­Happyfun Hideaway because, he says, six years is “a long time to be at a gay dive bar.” He’ll keep working with the artists he met there, who aren’t so much muses as they are collaborators. “I want them to feel like they’re getting something from this too, as opposed to just me extracting something for myself.”

Hair by Sonny Molina for Davines; makeup by Jezz Hill for Chanel Beauty at CLM. Works photographed by Giovanni Cardenas.

Art Handler: Colin Gallagher; Fashion assistants: Lauren Delfino, Cash Weaver; Hair Assistants: Dylan Silver, Kayla Miranda; Makeup Assistant: Isze Cohen; Tailor: Lindsay Wright; production support: Des Magness.