El Mac

Artist Bio

Miles “Mac” MacGregor

Born in Los Angeles in 1980 to an engineer and an artist, Mac has been creating and studying art independently since childhood. Drawing inspiration from the surrounding Mexican & Chicano culture of the American Southwest, religious art, pin-up art, graffiti, and a wide range of classic artists including Caravaggio, Mucha, and Vermeer, he began painting with acrylics as well as painting graffiti in the early ’90s. He has since worked consistently towards mastering his signature portrait style. Around 1998 he also began to paint technicolor aerosol interpretations 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 and France. He was asked in 2007 to design the poster for the Broadway production of Xanadu.

A few of his murals have become mini-landmarks, especially his collaborations with Retna, and have been featured in a number of music videos and publications. His work was used for the cover of LA Weekly in 2007 for a cover story about the Seventh Letter artist collective of which he is a member. In 2008 he created a 100+ foot wide mural for an installation at the Denver Botanic Gardens, as well as participated in the Manifest Hope art show during the DNC in Denver. He has painted large murals during Art Basel in Miami the last two years in a row. 2009 will bring a two-man show with Retna at the Robert Berman Gallery at the Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, along with the publication of a book about Mac & Retna’s artwork published by Upper Playground/Gingko Press, as well as the production of a limited edition Spanish Montana spraycan with their artwork on it.

Mac is continuing to focus primarily on creating more murals, painting photorealistic canvases, creating stained glass pieces, and evolving his unique brushwork style. He lives and works in downtown Phoenix, in an old house filled with records, books and art.

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