For years, millions of people around the world have encountered Josh Hernandez’s artwork on a screen.
Beginning Monday, Aug. 17, they’ll be able to walk through the door and see it on the walls.
Hernandez, the Phoenix artist better known to his enormous social media following as Mad Charcoal, is opening his first permanent gallery at 7056 E. Main St. in Old Town Scottsdale.
The Mad Charcoal Art Gallery will provide a physical home for the large-scale, sometimes haunting portraits that have turned Hernandez from a graphic designer who drew on the side into a full-time artist with millions of followers and collectors around the world.
The gallery will host a formal grand opening exhibition planned Nov. 5.
In some ways, it’s an unusually traditional next step for an artist whose career took off in a 21st-century way.
Hernandez didn’t build his audience through galleries.
He built it on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
And he might not have done even that without a suggestion from his wife, Jordan.
Hernandez, born in Los Angeles in 1995, studied graphic design at Arizona State University and was already working in the field before earning his degree. He later worked as an art director while continuing to draw and paint.
Jordan suggested he start showing people online what happened when he picked up a piece of charcoal.
“I posted a video, and it immediately garnered tons of views on TikTok and Instagram,” Hernandez recalled in a 2024 interview with Phoenix Home & Garden. “I started making more videos and uploading my drawings, and it grew very naturally.”
“Grew” is something of an understatement.
By the time of that interview, Hernandez had more than 7 million TikTok followers, roughly 700,000 on Instagram and more than 600,000 YouTube subscribers. His representatives now put his combined social media audience at more than 9 million.
The audience allowed Hernandez to leave graphic design behind and make art his full-time business.
He gives considerable credit for that transition to Jordan, who became involved in the business and developed merchandising ideas around his work.
“Without her, I’d just be another starving artist,” Hernandez said.
Hernandez’s specialty is expressive portraiture that is somewhere between realism and abstraction.
He frequently begins with broad, apparently uncontrolled charcoal marks, smearing them with his fingers and sometimes erasing portions of what he has drawn. Gradually, recognizable features – a jaw, an eye, a cheekbone – begin emerging.
Although charcoal remains his signature medium and gave Mad Charcoal its name, Hernandez also incorporates acrylic, ink and pastels into his work.
“There’s overlap,” he told Phoenix Home & Garden. “I’ll use some charcoal on a painting or some paint on a drawing. I’m not too strict about that.”
He is considerably more consistent about what he draws – faces and human figures dominate his work.
“I draw faces and figures because as humans, the thing we recognize most is other people,” Hernandez said. “We’re naturally drawn to faces.”
Yet his faces often seem only partially formed—or perhaps partially disappearing.
That’s intentional, he explained.
“People will ask, ‘Is this piece unraveling or is it coming together?’” Hernandez said.
His answer can change.
“It depends on the piece. It depends when you ask me, and it might depend on where the viewer is in life,” he said. “If they’re having a fantastic day, it might be coming together. If they’re in a difficult place, it might be coming apart.”
That ambiguity has become one of the signatures of Hernandez’s work.
He also has continued experimenting, including incorporating concrete into paintings and burning portions of paper or canvas.
“I’m pushing the abstract nature so that the recognizability of facial features is challenged,” he said.
Hernandez’s work is not new to Scottsdale.
In 2024, some of his large mixed-media paintings were being shown at The Marshall Gallery, where gallery owner Peter Strub told Phoenix Home & Garden that Hernandez had found fertile territory between realism and abstraction.
“The market is poised between the realistic and the abstract, and Josh has picked up on that particularly well,” Strub said.
“He has a natural gift for portraying the human figure, and he brings life and movement to what would otherwise be static figures.”
Now Hernandez is making the transition from showing his work in other people’s spaces to having one of his own.
His new Main Street gallery is intended particularly to showcase the large scale at which he increasingly works. Some of his mixed-media paintings reach 6 feet in height.
The space also will include an Arizona connection beyond Hernandez himself.
The gallery is partnering with Arizona-based Ironwood Mills on a collection of handcrafted furniture inspired by Hernandez’s artwork and made with Arizona hardwoods.
It represents another evolution in a career Hernandez hadn’t originally expected to have.
What began with pencil drawings, moved into graphic design and then exploded through social media has become a business with employees handling shipping and merchandise and Jordan helping run its operations.
Now there will be something Hernandez’s millions of online followers have never needed to experience his art:
An address.
Information: madcharcoal.com.