Lewis Mallard is an interdimensional psychedelic folk artist who made first contact with our world by stepping out on the streets of Hamilton, Ontario dressed like an enormous duck with impeccable style. I really wanted to find an intelligent way to describe that aesthetic. I absolutely failed.

The artist's vibe blends modernist architecture and off-beat fashion. So my initial, half-baked attempt to describe it was "If Buckminster Fuller got really high and designed animal sculptures instead of Spaceship Earth."

From left: Spaceship Earth at Walt Disney World, taken by Lee (BY-NC-ND 2.0); and The Fly's Eye Globe at Crystal Bridges Museum of Art (CC0 1.0).

Fuller’s architecture holds an alien wonder that feels both masterfully precise and outlandishly weird. But there's also a trapped-in-amber vibe to it all — which makes structures like The Fly’s Eye feel like relics from an anachronistic, alternate dimension's past that we can never fully understand.

By contrast, meeting Mallard feels like I've made an emotional connection with an alien I could easily imagine calling a close friend. And seeing him appear in videos as a larger-than-life form of aquatic fowl out on a walk, while wearing brightly colored Chuck Taylors, just feels right. It feels nearly indescribable why it's so wonderful.

But it's obvious there is no hard-to-parse or otherwise obtuse concept that informs his art practice. If I had to describe it as simply as possible, he’s an artist inspired by psychedelics and self-taught folk art, and his art is for anyone and everyone.

Well, everyone except for the teenage boys who terrorize Mallard when the artist is on walks about the town. Mallard avoids them "like the plague." For everyone else, Mallard is a friendly space alien who enjoys taking leisurely walks about different Canadian cities. He doesn't speak, but he does wave. Waving, it should be noted, involves wriggling a large pink tongue out of the mouth hole of the duck costume.

If you don't live in a city that he frequents, you can still spot him in short-film videos on the Lewis Mallard Instagram, where he's silently yet enthusiastically appeared in day-in-the-life videos for small businesses like Detour Coffee Roasters and Odd Spot Vinyl.

In 2022, Lewis Mallard also starred in a music video for the "The Rules Guide to the Misguided" by psychedelic four-piece hardcore punk outfit RULES.

Last year, he appeared in an incredibly delightful cooking video with plant-based chef Fraser Fitzgerald.

Beyond his in-costume appearances, Mallard has undertaken clever civic infrastructure transformations that include painting streetcar stations to appear like giant shoes. If you want to bring that sort of delight home with you, you can buy original art and design objects (including a series of self-portraits in the style of Fischer Price’s wooden “little people”) from Mallard's online store.

From left: One of many Toronto streetcar platforms adorned with giant shoes. The painting series "All Canards In Dots” depicts little Lewis Mallards in the style of the Fischer Price Little People. Notably included are "Dark Lewis" variants as well as an orange alien (which is the real-life Mallard himself, while in-costume).

Even more notably, he's even taken on custom commissions ranging from hand-painted signs to a wraparound mural of a private residence. Nothing is too small or too strange.

Building the Colossus

Lewis Mallard told me his first costume, a combination of paper maché and chicken wire, was "terribly uncomfortable". The chicken wire easily overheated, the costume was difficult to see out of, and while neither of these things would have been ideal for brief appearances, the discomfort and difficulty must have been amplified by the physically active nature of Mallard's art, which often involves walking around town for upwards of an hour and a half at a time.

The original Lewis Mallard costume.

So Mallard built a second, more comfortable costume. But in his attempt to fix his uncomfortable costume problem, he soon enough discovered he'd created another small calamity — his already cramped studio space couldn't really contain both costumes.

Mallard tried to donate the first costume to some local museums and galleries. No-one returned his calls. So then he reached out to their broader community to try to see if anyone could make space for it, as a meaningful art object that simply had become too much of a "ship of Theseus" to keep patching and attempting to wear.

Some darling donut makers ultimately ended up answering the call.

Donut Monster, a scratch-based bakery with two locations in Hamilton, offered Mallard an art residency at one of their shops. For a period of a few years, that opportunity allowed Mallard to display the original duck costume in a display window overlooking street traffic — and in the process, win over numerous more fans.

The original costume on display at Donut Monster with a fresh coat of paint.

Folk Origins

When asked what types of art or what artists have felt most influential on the creation of his own multidisciplinary art practice, Lewis Mallard named the folk artist and painter Maude Lewis.

In a 2017 Artsy profile on Lewis, the writer Alexxa Gotthard described Maude Lewis as "a cult figure in Canada". It's easy to understand why. Lewis spent over three decades of her life in a one-room home in Nova Scotia that she progressively covered in colorful depictions of flora and fauna.

From left: A painted door panel from the original Maude Lewis home, taken by Under the Same Moon... (CC BY 2.0). The Maude Lewis memorial, a 1:1 replica of Maude's original home, taken by Verne Equinox (CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons).

She also sold paintings to anyone who came knocking at her door for "5 dollars a pop," reports Artsy, and her entire home as well as 55 of her works are now in the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

The Artsy article fixates, to some degree, on how Maude did this despite her disability. She was "diagnosed with juvenile arthritis that left her with a pained and crooked gait," and the author frames her success as an against-the-odds fight amidst this and other significant hardships.

I don't think this is the most interesting aspect of her story. As a disabled artist, I believe we are resilient because we have to be. It’s understandable for non-disabled individuals to feel inspired by that resilience. But if we frame disability as something to be overcome, I think we perpetuate the stereotype of disability as a deficit, not a meaningful identity. And we perpetuate the rather problematic notion that disabled people only have value when it appears they’ve “overcome” what makes them different.

Yet as Maude Lewis demonstrates, disability as a meaningful point-of-view is so much more than that.

She may have felt like someone who couldn’t ever leave a single-room home in rural Nova Scotia. But instead of focusing on that hardship, I think it’s much more interesting to explore how through her art and her uniquely valuable perspective as a disabled artist, she demonstrated that art could be anywhere and everywhere.

And for the larger-than-life duck known as Lewis Mallard, it’s clear that this ethos— that art should be everywhere, and it should be accessible for everyone — is a meaningful value that he continually reinterprets and reinvents in his own work.

Psychedelic Inspiration

Mallard isn't shy about sharing that his real-life experiences with psychedelics are another key source of inspiration. Which isn't something that I thought about too critically when I first heard about it. It's not exactly uncommon for artists to talk about how psychedelic substances have helped inspire his art. But so often in pop culture, the way we talk about psychedelics centers on themes of addiction, excess, and dissociation. And they’re often depicted as a bacchanalian way to escape from what’s ailing you.

Curiously, however, that's not the same story being shared in analyses of clinical research, including a March 2025 overview of psychedelic-assisted therapy in the Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine.

There's no shortage of evidence for how psychedelics can help others engage more deeply with difficult experiences, not less. (One landmark example? An NYU Grossman School of Medicine study found that a single dose of psilocybin "appears to be associated with significant improvements in emotional and existential distress in people with cancer.") Research also suggests that psychedelics can be effective in situations where more traditional treatment is no more effective than a placebo.

This past fall, The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs followed that lead by announcing a research study in collaboration with Brown and Yale University to assess the therapeutic value of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD and alcohol use disorder among Veterans. So rather than detailing its dysfunctional purpose as a dissociative escape hatch from reality, academia is exploring its potential to help heal complex neurological trauma responses and even potentially help others avoid addictive, dissociative coping behaviors altogether.

If research tells us that psychedelics can help release us from the paralysis of traumatic experiences and even help us creatively reimagine how to engage and be present in everyday moments, it doesn’t feel like so much of a stretch to champion the value of psychedelic-inspired art with a focus on community engagement that attempts to do the same.

This hot dog billboard only exists in our collective imagination. But the t-shirt next to it is real!

We need more imaginary billboards featuring anthropomorphized hot dogs, more aliens crying crocodile tears, and more trompe l’eoil guerilla art that camouflages essential, yet otherwise drab, civic infrastructure.

Running into a smartly-dressed duck on your way to buy donuts is certainly not the same thing as pursuing therapy. But if it frees us from overly rigid, catastrophic thinking for even a moment — and energizes us to reimagine the reality that we inhabit — we need as much of that as we can get.

All photos courtesy of Lewis Mallard unless otherwise specified