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This post is one in a partnership between the Rochester Beacon and veteran reporter Will Cleveland, featuring articles published on his Substack site, Cleveland Prost.
Scar Markham’s energy is intoxicating and contagious. (Sometimes I can’t help myself with the obvious beer puns.) Stand in his presence for just a brief moment and you can sense the passion and spirited outlook that seeps out of his art.
Markham, 37, is a one-person creative cyclone who works under the Flour Pail Kids moniker. He’s the kind of artist who makes Rochester feel like both a backyard gig (which makes sense, because Markham is also a fantastic drummer) and a tiny, brilliant art fair at once (which also tracks as Markham is an avid organizer of yearly record and art fairs at Radio Social). If you’ve seen a mural that looks like it drank a skateboard and a Saturday morning cartoon (check out the vibrant one on the outside of Ugly Duck Coffee or the one at the Roc City Skatepark), or a beer can that seems suspiciously sentient, there’s a decent chance Scar had a hand in it. Markham, an East Irondequoit native who now resides in the North Winton Village neighborhood with his husband Joe, is a self-taught, multidisciplinary artist working across painting, sculpture, woodworking and graphic design — and he wears the DIY badge proudly.
“Once I have the idea in my head, I won’t drink water. I won’t eat. Nothing,” Markham excitedly shares. “I put off going to the bathroom. I am just in it. I will work 10-, 12-, 14-hour days. My husband will come home from work and he’ll be like, ‘Did you eat?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did you drink any water?’ ‘No.’ I get that crazy look in my eyes. I’ll dream about it, too. All of my brain is devoted to it.”
And now Markham’s work adorns something that’s close to my heart — beer cans. Last year, Markham teamed up with Honeoye Falls-based Okay Beer Co. for a series of special-release beer labels. The next one, a fresh hop India pale ale, is slated to come out in the next few weeks. Markham also created a Strangebird Beer label last year.
And it’s not an understatement to say Markham loves beer as much as I do, something that makes these Okay collaborations even better.
“I have a love affair with beer,” Markham says. “Obsessed. (Genesee) 12 Horse Ale is by far one of the best beers I’ve ever had in my life. I could bathe in the stuff, it’s so good.”
(I’m manifesting the day that Markham’s art is on a limited-edition Genesee beer. I’m writing it into existence, because it needs to happen.)
Style-wise, Markham’s stuff sits where skate culture, pop nostalgia and a little bit of garage-band fuzz collide. Think bright, punchy characters with off-kilter expressions, layers of recycled materials (hello, repurposed decks and salvaged wood) and a sense that every piece was made by someone who’d rather be in the studio than filing paperwork.
Markham notes that he adds a touch of gray to the bright pastel paints and utilizes a recurring “blue dude” character in a lot of his work. That tempers the cheeriness with a touch of melancholy, he says. But it’s all grounded in realism. Markham just wrapped up an exhibition with artist and friend Bradd Young (AKA Young Salut) at the Rochester Contemporary Art Center.
He got the original inspiration from his skateboarding background and some time to let his thoughts wander while working retail.
“I would hit the feed button on the cash register and doodle on the receipt paper,” Markham recalls. “Ever since I was a little kid, I was really loved drawing weird, old men. I wanted to be a weird, old guy when I got older. I just didn’t know how I was going to make that happen, being born in a girl’s body. I like manifested it.
“I felt like I needed an avatar to represent me and the world around me.”
Being a trans artist is part of Scar’s public identity, and it threads quietly through the work — not always as explicit messaging, but in the choices of subject, the communities he shows up for, and the earnest, unvarnished way he claims space. That visibility matters: it gives the local scene a more honest mirror and makes Scar’s art a kind of familiar, welcoming weirdness for people who don’t always see themselves on gallery walls.
“It’s part of my identity and I never want to hide it, because visibility is so important,” Markham says. “A lot of the time it has little to with my art. It’s amazing how much it locks me out of stuff. That’s the biggest part about how it impacts my art. Access. There are companies who won’t work with me. I prefer to work locally. But there are bigger companies, you won’t hear back from them and you know why. It’s a bummer.
“It’s harder fought to be acknowledged or seen. I’ve always been that way, even before I transitioned. I was a woman in spaces that were predominantly male.”
He’s spoken about the interplay between music and visual art in his practice and how being present in Rochester’s DIY ecosystem shaped him — which explains why his work is as community-minded as it is visually stimulating.
“I didn’t know it was going to turn into a career,” Markham admits. “I haven’t taken an art class since the eighth grade. The art teachers were bossy and they would make me mad, because I didn’t want to be told what to do. I am defiant in that way.”
As he’s done throughout much of his life, Markham made his own way in the art world around a dozen years ago. He started with pen-and-ink illustrating, to painting, and “I’ve added a lot of my woodworking into it,” Markham says, noting that he often uses recycled skateboarding wood and makes his own frames for all of his pieces.
Okay Beer Co. and Markham are a match made in craft-beer heaven: both lean into retro charm and local character. Markham’s label work for Okay Beer Co. takes his hallmark playful figures and grungy-pastel palette and funnels it into cans that look like they belong on a cassette-tape shelf next to a mixtape someone made for your 2003 heartbreak. The result: brews that pop off the shelf because the art suggests personality before the pour ever touches your lips.
Seth Wile, Okay Beer’s co-owner and head brewer, was introduced to Markham’s art through a buddy who gifted him one of Markham’s signature Genesee Beer-influenced stickers. That sticker still adorns Wile’s hop cooler at the brewery/bowling alley. In a wild, almost kismet-like coincidence, Wile received the sticker before he ever moved to this area. (He’s from Massachusetts, but he met his wife, Meghan, while they were living in San Francisco. They eventually moved back to this area, because Meghan is from Honeoye Falls.) So Wile was a fan of Markham’s art before moving here.
“It instantly resonated and one day I just reached out through Instagram and asked if he wanted to do any beer labels,” Wile says. “I like throwing an idea to Scar when we have something that needs that little extra pizzazz, a special label, not just something from a template.”
Wile continues, “(Scar’s work) is a bit nostalgic. I liked the motif right out of the gate. It’s very original, a little quirky, and it’s got that special something that elevates certain brands as something fun to lean on. It almost feels like a special release when I get Scar to do a label for me. It fits our vibe — we’re about staying chill and trying to have a good time.”
Wile will approach Markham with a potential beer name and then allow the artist the freedom to create. Markham comes up with four to six rough sketches, presents them to Wile, and then fully fleshes it out when they agree on something.
Markham is prolific: gallery shows, murals, merch runs, t-shirts, craft fairs, sign installations, and so much more. He’s as comfortable installing a public mural as he is stitching together a limited-run run of screen-printed shirts — and that versatility is exactly what makes collaborations with small breweries work so well.
For more information on Scar’s work, I encourage you to follow along on Instagram. You can get a glimpse of what he’s working on and also remained informed on his next musical gig.
Will Cleveland is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer. A former Democrat and Chronicle reporter, he writes about beer in the Finger Lakes region and Western New York on Substack.
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