BROOKLYN STREET ART LOVES YOU MORE EVERY DAY
El Mac, the LA based aerosol Caravaggio has just illuminated a university wall in Boston with a portrait of his wife as alchemist, a glowing vision completed on the side of Northeastern’s Meserve Hall this month in time for Spring graduation.
El Mac (photo © Todd Mazer)
“The meeting of art and sciences is key to this campus,” says Todd Mazer, who lives in the city and who spent a lot of time with the artist while he painted, shooting incredible photos of the process. The image based on a photo of Kim presents a perfect marriage of symbols for the university, but also may refer directly to the artists’ personal lineage, he confides.
El Mac (photo © Todd Mazer)
“Mac’s father went to Northeastern and studied Engineering where he met Mac’s mother, who was an artist going to MassArt at the time,” he explains, “so the lightning, which is science, and the brush, which is art, just may represent his parents. In his distinctive style that includes scientifically chilling paint cans in a cooler with ice, El Mac renders an heroic, comely, and gentle figure even on this rough surface using a circular patterning that appears alternately mechanically digitized or smooth as a Vermeer, depending on your angle and distance from the work.
Even the starry sky may be a reference to his father, we learn, because of his father’s history with things astronomical. “Also the stars above could be of significance too because although Mac was born in LA he moved to Phoenix because his father was pursuing a career in the space program.”
El Mac (photo © Todd Mazer)
On breaks from plowing through 150 or so cans of paint, El Mac also took time to see art at his dad’s Alma Matter, poking inside the Museum of Fine Arts, Todd tells us. “He mostly painted but since he was just across the street from the MFA it was on his mind and when he got some small windows of time he would head over there,” says Mazer.
“It was nice to see him get off the lift and put down the iced out cans and catch some inspiration from a different surface. I remember him with a pencil and a sketchbook in front of a sculpture and just like earlier in the day at the wall I got a sense he was somewhere he belongs.”
Our sincere thanks to Todd for sharing these images with BSA readers.
El Mac (photo © Todd Mazer)
El Mac (photo © Todd Mazer)
Northeastern University (photo © Todd Mazer)
El Mac (photo © Todd Mazer)
El Mac (photo © Todd Mazer)
El Mac (photo © Todd Mazer)
El Mac (photo © Todd Mazer)
El Mac (photo © Todd Mazer)
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