Making the Ordinary Extraordinary

© Venessa Monokian / RumBum.com

El Mac and Retna's depiction of a homeless man from San Francisco.

There’s an angel on Miami Avenue – just before the exit for I-195 and just below a sign for a pain clinic. She seems to be the ultimate advertisement for a pain clinic, some kind of divine intervention coming between you and the thing that ails you. She’s been there for years now. You can’t help but notice her.

At first, it looks as though she may be made out of tile, small like the ones arranged into flowers on the old Bacardi building. But look closely and you’ll see that she’s actually made out of paint. Her halo, her wings and face may look otherworldly but they’re just the result of some tenderly applied spray paint, and two very talented artists.

Meet El Mac and Retna. El Mac’s responsible for the portraits, while Retna contributes the embellishments around the portraits, which in the case of the Miami Avenue angel, include a halo and intricate, feathered wings.

The duo has been painting together for about 5 years now, after first meeting at a graffiti event in Tijuana© Venessa Monokian / RumBum.comThe Miami Avenue angel looks out onto the I-195 on-ramp. a decade ago.

“I had been painting women, and I saw what Retna was doing where he would paint these women in these fashion advertisements, and he’d paint around them; it looked really cool. I thought it would be cool if we could combine something. That might have been my idea or it might have been the idea of a woman named Susan Farrell, who runs the website ArtCrimes,” Mac explains. “We did our first collaboration in 2005 in Los Angeles; it was a painting of a woman – a girl’s face that I painted with spray paint and Retna embellished around it – and it was kind of an instant hit.”

Although the pair is naturally drawn to painting women, the women were just a starting point. “After a while, as much as we both enjoyed painting women and looking at women, we kind of had to slow that down a little bit, and start painting other figures and other people,” Retna says. “It couldn’t always be the best-looking person or the person that had it all together. We wanted to acknowledge that there was great imagery in other characters. We didn’t want to be pigeon-holed either. There’s a lot more that we do.”

The pair’s more recent work deals with pain and struggle, the kind of which you see everywhere – when you’re looking. And El Mac and Retna are always looking.

© Venessa Monokian / RumBum.com“I think on this piece the moral of it wasOne of their newest murals depicts a man looking skyward, his arms in the air. He looks as though he’s asking for help, or guidance, or like he’s finally giving up. It’s a scene that came from San Francisco. Mac was painting a wall when a homeless man came up to him and started talking to him. “He was very animated and was kind of waving his arms around. I thought he kind of represented a big portion of society that we don’t usually deal with. So I asked him if I could take some pictures of him and I got a really good shot of him; it’s really full of shadows and textures. For me it looked like a really powerful image; he’s got his hands up and he’s looking at the sky and it just looked like something really dramatic was happening.”

A similar thing happened when they were painting his Mural in Miami. A couple of neighborhood kids walked by, and Retna decided that they would be perfect for a mural. “We already had lights up so we could see what we were painting and we asked them if they didn’t mind if we could take some pictures of them, and they were into it. They kind of just sat and posed for pictures and we got some really great photos of these kids that I have no doubt that we’re going to turn into at least one or two murals in the future,” Retna says.

“The interesting thing is that we might do that next year in Miami,” Mac says. “Or we might end up painting © Venessa Monokian / RumBum.comThis Miami mural was created from a Photo that El Mac took in Phoenix. “What I really liked about that is that at one point we were all kids. He’s holding a piece of chalk so I looked at him as a young scribe."those kids in say, Spain or something. And that’s really interesting because even though those kids may not have any connection to Spain, and they may not ever go to Spain, and the people in Spain that live with the work may not know the kids, there’s just something amazing about the fact that we’re painting some kids from Miami that were wandering the streets at the same time we were painting some 30-foot wall.”

For them, that’s just the idea. The scenes that they paint could be happening anywhere. “These are universal ideas,” Mac says. “What we’re trying to say is that we’re all one people. We’re all the same. We’re just acknowledging the fact that we’re all human.”

“I like the idea of painting people that I see in everyday life but don’t see represented in art,” Mac says. “I almost feel like I have some kind of duty, that it’s important to somehow document these people. I don’t know if that’s some original concept, but it seems like an important concept…keeping people alive.”

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