Today we’d like to introduce you to David Macias.
Hi David, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
My journey as an artist began as a young child. I had two primary passions growing up, sports and art. More specifically, I loved drawing, sketching, and coloring, and I could draw for hours on end. I knew at an early age that I was fortunate to have a talent for drawing. For whatever reason, creating accurate compositions, proportions, and shading all came naturally to me. I would sketch my favorite cartoon characters, create mosaics out of construction paper in art class, paint Christmas ornaments, and my 6th-grade “business” was creating paper-mâché figurines of my favorite athletes and selling them to friends. I loved it all.
However, like many teenage boys who grow up in Texas, I got sucked into Friday night lights, or high school football. And it was during this time that art started to recede into the background. I did take one art class and happened to win a state-wide competition for a hand-drawn car while participating in the Industrial Tech club at Denton Ryan High School, but for the most part, sports and academics dominated my time. After high school, I attended the University of Texas at Austin and had an artistic-ish major, Advertising with a concentration in art direction. It wasn’t quite studio art, but I did learn some valuable Photoshop and Illustrator skills during that time. I ended up going back to UT for an MBA a few years later and fell into a product marketing career within the tech industry. For a little over a decade, my art “career” consisted of the occasional doodle, sketch, or slide deck. Throughout this entire time – from high school to being a product marketer in tech – most everyone I met probably never knew I had any artistic ability.
The oil painting part of my artistic journey started in 2019. When my wife found some animal prints for our soon-to-arrive daughter’s room, I told her I wanted to paint them myself using a small oil-painting kit I’d bought. I approached them more like sketches, but they turned out worthy enough of being hung on the walls. Thankfully, the drawing background translated pretty well to oil painting, and those three little paintings ignited something in me. I quickly bought more canvases and started painting places we had visited, animals we had seen on safari, and watching as many YouTube and Instagram videos as I could of artists talking about their processes or preferred materials.
For the next several years, I painted on and off but always while juggling a career in tech and two little ones at home. In Summer 2025, the time finally came to take a career break from tech and pursue painting full-time. Since then, I have pushed myself with new subjects, styles, and larger canvases (my largest so far is 5’x3′), and participated in the Austin Studio Tour for the first time. The reception I’ve had so far has been amazing. One of the best things is when old colleagues, friends, etc. reach out and say, “I had no idea!”, and others have said congrats to me for sharing my gift. I’m not sure what the future holds, but for now, I’m just getting lost in sharing what I’m inspired to paint with others and enjoying the creativity and constant learning that art brings.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I have definitely thrown away a few paintings while in the process, or questioned my own abilities. I have gotten quite frustrated a few times when feeling I have wasted hours on something I’d be embarrassed to show. Thankfully, it usually works out, but if I hit that moment pretty early on in a painting, I will sometimes pivot to a different painting or paint over the early mishap. I’m just getting started getting embedded into the Austin art scene, but I’m sure there will be more bumps along the road.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I’m an oil painter. I have yet to specialize in any specific style or subject, but there have been several Texas-based pieces. One thing that’s a commonality across all my paintings is that they’re relatively colorful, whether a more saturated version of what you might see in real life or a completely unrealistic, but bright palette of colors. Sometimes I paint with a brush, a palette knife, or both. I intentionally like to keep things varied. When I hosted my first art show with 20 original pieces, I kept hearing how varied it was, which I took as a compliment. I like it that way. I don’t want to paint the same thing over and over, and I assume people don’t want to look at the same things either.
What sort of changes are you expecting over the next 5-10 years?
I honestly don’t know enough about the art industry to really know. However, coming from tech, I’m not too worried about AI taking over original oil paintings. I think at least half of what makes people gravitate toward them is knowing they’re hand made, and even more so if they know the artist.
Pricing:
- Pricing for originals can be found on my website.
- Pricing for commissions can be found on the /commissions page of my website.
- Pricing for prints will be shared when they’re available.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://davidmaciasart.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/dmacias.art
