El Mac, Master Graffti Artist

El Mac

You know as much as one generation may criticize another, I think I am falling in love with this new generation. Their ideas are fresh and edgy. They are not afraid to leave behind old mores.  They are seeing the world in new and different ways, they are interacting socially in a world environment completely out of the box.  I am thinking what would Diego Rivera or Leonardo done with technology and thinking differently about the world.  El Mac's world tour taking graffiti to new heights, putting art where everyone can enjoy it, not in some cooperate board room...bringing the average person to art and seeing the world in a different way.  El Mac(click for link) takes ordinary people and paints them large in a space that people see on their way to work or to the store and bam!, there is art.  He takes pictures of people in one country and paints them in another...a sort of a giant world howdy!!!!

A better explanation of his history and work is from his own bio...here is an excerpt from his site.

"Born in Los Angeles in 1980 to an engineer and an artist, Mac has been creating and studying art independently since childhood. His primary focus has been the lifelike rendering of human faces and figures. He has drawn inspiration from the surrounding Mexican & Chicano culture of Phoenix and the American Southwest, religious art, pin-up art, graffiti, and a wide range of classic artists such as Caravaggio, Mucha, and Vermeer. He began painting with acrylics and painting graffiti in the mid ’90s, and has since worked consistently towards mastering his signature portrait style. Around 1998 he began to paint technicolor aerosol versions of classic paintings by old European masters. This led to being commissioned in 2003 by the Groeninge Museum in Brugge, Belgium to paint his interpretations of classic Flemish Primitive paintings in the museum’s collection. He has since been commissioned to paint murals across the US, as well as in Mexico, Denmark, Sweden, Canada, South Korea, Belgium, Italy, The Netherlands, Puerto Rico, Spain, France, Singapore, Germany, Ireland, and Vietnam."

source El Mac website

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 A NEW GENERATION TO ADMIRE! ART CAN BRING PEOPLE TOGETHER AND DO GOOD

WELCOME VIET NAM!

Welcome Viet NAM! Congratulations, we added a brand new country to our growing blog. I am humbled and thank you all sincerely! I look forward to hearing about Viet Namese Artist and your art work.

Detail from New Work

I thought I would highlight

close ups of my most recent piece, " Wet Dreams". Sometimes it is easy to miss the details for looking at the larger piece. There is so much symbolism that one can intuitively tap into just by being a conduit of a time and society. Artists are often that, a conduit, expressing our times just by living in a culture, a time and place. My time in South East Asia at the end of the Vietnamese war effected me deeply. When Viet Nam fell and refuges fled, I was a young art teacher on Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines. People came on rafts, in boats and any thing that would float...as teachers we were ask to help get names, and settle children. We processed through 70,000 adults and children . War is never good, people die, people are injured, lose their homes, separated from families...remember the song, "War, What is it Good For"?