KYLE STEED
LIFE INTEGRATED
Artist Illustrator Kyle Steed’s Seamless Approach to Work, Faith, and Family
By Suzanne O’Dell
The name Kyle Steed is about as well known in the Dallas creative community as a bottle of Shiner Bock is to the average Texan. His signature doodles are stamped with love all over our city, serving as unconventional invitations to be a little bit more thoughtful, a little less busy, and a lot more purposeful in the way we approach life. (We won’t even get into the popularity of his Instagram feed . . . he would honestly thank us for it.) Miraculously, our tall, fedora-wearing friend has been able to overcome the constant allure of self-promotion, holding his gaze steady behind the rounded frames of his tortoise colored spectacles. For Kyle, the creative life is more about discovery than pursuit, less about inspiration and more about plain, hard work, more about people and less about stuff. It would be easy for us to tell you the story of what Kyle Steed has accomplished--as an illustrator, as an iPhone photographer, as a master of branding and vision--but instead, we want to tell you who he is, the principles he lives by . . . the mantra behind a man who has pioneered our generation’s quintessential idea of “the doodle.”
“Do you ever have a feeling like you just know that there’s something you’re supposed to do?" he asks, glancing up at all of us with a knowing grin.
“I remember as a kid drawing stuff I saw in my pantry. Ketchup bottles, salt and pepper shakers, stuff like that,” he remembers, chuckling. “Even then I always knew that I was a little different.”
Fresh cup of hand-poured coffee in one hand and a notebook in the other, Kyle settles into a cozy tweed sitting-chair that faces the large front window in his living room, a welcoming portal to the Steed’s nook of a quiet and charming Oak Cliff neighborhood.
The pale morning light gently illuminates the rising steam from his brew, the ascending trails of vapor like the vague memory of a fire being coaxed into existence. He takes a sip and turns to a new page as two large Labradors—Samson and Ben—settle into their floor cushions, content for now to doze underneath the warm beams.
After a few long sips, he replaces his mug with a pen and begins to draw. Perhaps because of his stature, but most likely because of his characteristic attention to detail, Kyle leans over his work like a child engrossed in a book, never taking his eyes off the smooth lines of black ink, mouth slightly pursed under a thick beard of salt and pepper.
In more ways than one, Kyle’s work is characterized by these quiet, ordinary moments where contemplation meets the ruddy, familiar face of discipline. The subtleties of every pen flicker are landmarks down a well-worn path that the 30-something Alabama native has traveled down many times over a lifetime of doodling.
Choice brew in hand, each of us join Kyle in the living room. We talk about busyness, work, inspiration, faith, and trying to find that illusive balance in a world where work heroism and technology prevail over face-to-face interactions.
In many ways, Kyle has gone before us, carefully navigating through experiences and time, steps and missteps, with a wide net dragging behind him. This, we believe, is his greatest gift to the artistic community . . . his remarkable willingness to say, “I’ve been there, too, and this is what I’ve come to know. Let me share it with you.”
What do you think your art says about you?" we ask, hoping to hear an admission of genius and half-expecting to uncover a glimpse of ego hidden somewhere under his 164K Instagram followers.
It’s so funny, what’s happening in my life always finds a way of showing up in my work. I can totally connect those dots looking back at my older work and knowing what was going on outside of just that drawing. I like that about art: You can always see through it, like some sort of window into someone’s real life.
But I think we also have to be careful about making our work our entire identity. I learned a couple years ago that what I do does not define me. My work is more of a response. I work because God said it’s good for us to work, and it is. When we do good work, it’s like an act of worship that glorifies Him.
We are always amazed by Kyle’s purposeful lack of self-awareness. He ignores any opportunity to talk about himself in an elevated manner, and regularly forgoes the casual humble-brag to cut straight to the heart of the issue.
Our questions naturally turned to family, as Kyle’s wife Amanda excuses herself to peek in on one-year-old Savannah, who is supposed to be taking a nap, but has been unknowingly entertaining us in the adjacent room with rambunctious toddler noises.
“So, now that you’re a dad, what do you want to teach Savy?”
Man, there are so many things. I want her to know that she doesn’t have to be afraid. That she can be confident to try new things. But most importantly, that God loves her. I feel like the crux of everything we do--and even everything we don’t do--comes back to if we believe that God can truly love us perfectly wherever we are.
“How has it been balancing your time between work and family?”
As men, family should be our first and most important ministry. That perspective puts everything in order for me. It would be so easy to never turn off the work—both physically and mentally. But when the scriptures say to 'Commit your work to the Lord,' it’s referring to every part of what goes into our work: our hearts our minds and our attitudes. I know that if I’m constantly distracted, I can never be present for my wife and daughter.
Working hard is good, but we also need to rest in the fact that God has us. You can trust him. You can take him at his word. As the Radiohead song says, ‘You don’t have to kill yourself for recognition.’
It’s no mystery by now that faith isn’t merely another component of the life of Kyle Steed, it is the very pulse--a single, brightly colored thread in a seamless garment.
What’s interesting though, is the way he talks about it. He feels no need to defend his beliefs or to prescribe them. He is neither domineering nor timid, but instead, quietly delighted, like someone who has discovered something precious that was hidden underground. It makes you want to lean in. It makes you want to discover, too.
At this point, the dogs begin to stir, stretching their long legs past the warmth of their beds and onto the cool hardwood floors. The sun, now directly overhead, reminds us that it’s time to go.
“Ok, one last question, Kyle. What is success to you?”
The pause is long as he leans forward to deliberate. He never wastes a word.
Success is a weird thing because it’s measured in so many different ways. I mean yeah, it would be super awesome to be so successful financially that money never mattered. But money is just so fleeting. I mean, if you had all you could ever ask for, you would still want more, right? So you can’t measure success by that. The real meat of our lives is our family, our friends, the people that we allow to come into our lives. Enriching and strengthening those relationships is what matters most.
So, I would feel pretty successful if in fifty years, Amanda and I can look at each other in the same way we did when we first got married. To still have that deep affection for one another and to have grown more and more in love. That our daughter and other future children would love us and know that we love them. I think that would make me feel pretty successful in life.
And with those parting words, we sat silent and still for a moment, grateful to have spent a weekday morning with a friend simply sharing life together.
We wish we could tell you everything we talked about with Kyle, from “the good old days of MySpace” down to his meticulous ritual prior to every iPhone shot. The good news is, we can almost guarantee that the most important answers will emerge through the prophetic nature of Kyle’s creations, whether on the walls of Dallas’ industrial neighborhoods, the digital doodles shared by thousands, or most accurately, in the lives of a handful of people fortunate enough to know the wisdom and warmth of his friendship.
For us, this is as far as you need to look to get a glimpse of the man behind the doodles . . . just ask the people whose lives are infinitely richer because of him. They’ll point you to conversations and moments of kindness, to time invested, and life lived together.
And we can promise you this: his résumé will never come up.
