Born in Los Angeles in 1980 to an engineer and an artist, Mac has been creating and studying art independently since childhood. He was inspired at a young age by classic European painters such as Caravaggio and Vermeer, and Art Nouveau symbolists such as Klimt and Mucha. This was mixed with the more contemporary influences of graffiti and photorealism, as well as the Chicano & Mexican culture he grew up around.
He began painting with acrylics and painting graffiti in the mid ’90s, when his primary focus became the lifelike rendering of human faces and figures. He has since worked consistently towards developing his unique rendering style, which utilizes repeating contour lines reminiscent of ripples, Turing patterns and indigenous North American art. In 1999 he began to paint portraits of his friends and anonymous Mexican laborers in public spaces throughout the American southwest, both legally and illegally. He also started painting large aerosol interpretations of classic paintings by old European masters which led to being commissioned in 2003 by the Groeninge Museum in Brugge, Belgium to paint his versions of classic paintings in the museum’s collection. He has since been commissioned to paint murals across the US, as well as in Mexico, Denmark, Sweden, Cuba, Canada, South Korea, Belgium, Italy, The Netherlands, Puerto Rico, Spain, France, Singapore, Germany, Ireland, England, and Vietnam.