Miles ‘Mac’ MacGregor, AKA “El Mac” is an artist based between Los Angeles and Phoenix. He started out painting with acrylics and doing graffiti, moved into murals and developed a focus on faces and portraits, both in a photorealist style and in his unique signature style.
He sometimes collaborates with an artist known as Retna who adds abstract lettering and design to Mac’s portraits and faces. Mac’s signature style involves a fascinating use of patterns and lines that simultaneously add texture and definition to the forms, along with gradations, following the form like topographical maps.
Mac’s website has galleries of murals (“spraypaint”), photorealism, acrylic on canvas (“Brushwork”) and pencil drawings. Most of the paintings are accompanied by larger images and detail crops in which you can see the patterns as paint strokes. In addition, there are some photos of Mac working on the paintings that give you an idea of scale.
The scale of his mural images is likewise revealed in supplementary photos that pull back from the wall and show the surrounding environment.
El Mac also maintains a blog with additional images of murals, paintings and work in progress. He states his influences as “…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”.
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