‘Duck man!’ ‘Duck man!’ A look inside the world of unsanctioned art in self-serious Toronto

He’s standing atop a concrete barrier that resembles, well, him: the long yellow beak, a stout green head and empty black eyes.

A cruiser pulls up. An officer rolls down the window, glances up at the towering duck man and back down to me.

He sighs. “Can you please tell him to get down?” I relay the command and down he hops.

This duck man is one of several guerrilla artists who paint, poster and perform in Toronto.

You’ve seen their work throughout the city: a solar system to scale with the city’s parks, a Lego tower on a street pole, a construction site turned into a park.

The artists behind such works are unsanctioned and unpaid. They work in plain sight, sometimes blending in, other times in unmissable outfits — with a goal, they say, of trying to inject some joy into a grey, often self-serious city.

They can bump up against the law; the fine for vandalism can be as much as $5,000, according to the city’s municipal code. What’s considered “graffiti” is determined by the city’s executive director of municipal licensing and standards, or a “graffiti panel.” And while there are programs to help artists create city-sanctioned murals and installations, they are often bogged down in bureaucratic processes and oversight.

For some, their public artwork is about leaving a mark on the city. The reception, though, can be a little rough.

The artist who calls himself Lewis Mallard says he’s been punched, spat at and trampled by an overwhelming throng of toddlers. But he still wanders the streets in his absurdly large paper mâché duck costume, with his bright orange tights sealed to his legs. Lewis Mallard is his artist pseudonym: Lewis for the famous Canadian folk artist Maud Lewis and Mallard for reasons fairly apparent in his work.

His newest project has been to paint the concrete TTC barriers that separate the streetcar stops from traffic. One, at Bathurst and College, is made to look like Mallard’s signature duck. Another, at Spadina Avenue and Harbord Street, is a matching sock and shoe combo. When he paints those, he says, he blends in, wearing a pair of coveralls, a vest and the “confidence of somebody who was told they could do it.”

He says he chose the barriers because he wanted something “playful to interact with: ignored parts of the city. Things that I saw as underutilized.” He got compliments from a TTC streetcar driver and a free coffee from a passerby as he worked.

“I’m only going to do street art, public art … if I truly believe I’m adding to the space and not taking away — like, I … scraped all the old paint off (the concrete barrier). I primed it professionally and painted it. It should last a while.”

A spokesperson for the TTC said the mural was “a lovely duck.” They added that the transit agency didn’t work with the artist, but “it is creative and beautiful.” The spokesperson did not answer questions around the legality of Mallard’s painting and whether the TTC would take it down.

The duck costume adds another layer to the endeavour.

“When I’m in my human costume, I was just a regular guy,” Mallard explained. “But now I see people who are looking at me with wonder and amazement and confusion, and the looks on people’s faces were really unguarded.

“This is what it’s like to be a painting, in a way.”

There isn’t a beach, at least not one attached to a body of water. But there is an empty lot at the site of Brockton High School in the Bloor and Dufferin area that became a local hangout thanks, in part, to Shari Kasman.

In the beginning the lot was empty, destitute save for two lawn chairs Kasman had set up in May 2020, in the midst of a pandemic lockdown.

Slowly, the neighbourhood began congregating there. Homemade signs declaring the “beach” a “UNESCO World Heritage Site” were hung up and “Danger: No Trespassing” signs altered to read “Linger: So Relaxing.” A community garden sprung up, adding green space to the grey, rocky expanse — flowers, fruits, vegetables and herbs. 

For a year and a half, the beach inspired songs, a Google Maps location with dozens of five-star reviews and an effort to rename a local park after the pandemic-era neighbourhood spot.

Kasman’s “urban interventions,” as she calls them, “stem from personal frustrations with the city.”

When TTC routes were mangled for the new Ontario Line construction on Queen Street, Kasman took the confusing, convoluted notices she saw plastered throughout the city and made new posters to match what she read: squiggly lines doing loops and detours in incoherent directions marked her spoofed TTC signs. “If you suspect the bus is going on some other weird route, you’re probably right,” the new poster reads.

More recently, Kasman took out her frustrations regarding the city’s new alcohol-in-parks pilot project signs. “Monstrosities,” she called them. In her eyes, they were a waste of money and an eyesore, so she tweaked them. “Alcohol in Parks” was changed to read “All cool in Parks.”

Such actions have become “ways that I’ve been dealing with frustrations in the city,” Kasman said.

The city is “very safe” with their own municipally sponsored murals and art projects, she added. “They can be interesting, but they’re just safe.”

Cities can be “more interesting, more joyful, more colourful, more playful” — there’s potential in our streets, Martin Reis says — but only if we choose to make it happen.

Reis has had his fair share of gripes with the city, and he knows there are ways to address the issues besides going to city hall or calling 311 and being put on hold.

One day, at the Sam James Coffee Bar right by his Lego tower on Harbord Street, Reis was handed an envelope by the barista. A young child had left a gift for him: a single gold brick, plopped into the envelope. It was the child’s favourite Lego piece and he wanted Reis to install it on the tower. 

“I’ve never met the kid and I never ran across that kid afterwards, either,” Reis said. “The fact that little kid would go to that effort to do that, I thought it was the sweetest thing.”

Googly eyes have a magical power — that’s what Jode Roberts discovered.

It was during the pandemic, when they walked cold, quiet streets, that Roberts and his then-11-year-old son grabbed a bag of loose googly eyes and went to town.

“There’s some strange cultural reaction that happens when you put googly eyes on things and make them look funny,” Roberts said. “Mostly, it was just to get my kid out of the house.”

Roberts, who has a day job with a non-profit environmental group, also made a version of the solar system, laid out over the city. You could bike from Mars to Jupiter, with fun facts on each sign like “At a scale of one-to-five billion, the sun would be the diameter of a hula hoop … Uranus would be the size of a quarter.”

“Joy is the ultimate outcome and connection,” Roberts said. Making art through the city can be helpful, with funding and legal approval, “but there are so many bureaucratic hurdles just because it’s been mushed through this meat grinder of bureaucracy. So my tendency is to not have an agency managing these sorts of things.”

The artists hope that some small piece might make a bad day better or a neighbourhood a little more livable — from a spoofed sign to a Lego tower to some googly eyes or a man in a duck costume — they have weaved their optimism for Toronto into each of these installations. 

As I helped Mallard get back to his home (he finds it difficult to open the gate to his house in the duck costume) we walked by a playground filled with children. As soon as the first child saw him, a discordant chorus of high-pitched voices began to yell. 

“Duck man! Duck man! Duck man!” 

He asked if we can cross the street, just so the kids weren’t tempted to swarm him. But, as we walked away, his hands, hidden inside of his duck facade, reached for a whistle hidden under his mask. 

“Quack, quack, quack,” Mallard called out. The children screamed and yelled in an incoherent jumble, their days made. How many parents heard about the duck man when their children went home that night, I wondered.