Words by: Khari Clarke
From The Source Magazine Issue #270 | 2016
Most artists don’t receive recognition until they’re gone, yet Rebecca Maria only needed a year to achieve notoriety.
Visual art has evolved. For centuries art required travel to be experienced, making many of the world’s most celebrated works inaccessible. By the turn of the new millennium the world ubiquitously accepted the Internet as a realm of its own, in which an array of content could exist, subsequently changing the landscape of art forever. Half a decade after, social media became a way for millions to carve out their own piece of this new world, and artists globally were able to showcase their talents on a grand scale, right in the palm of your hand. In only two years, Rebecca Maria began her artistic journey—going from a faceless Tumblr user to making “faceless” art that is lauded across Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram and beyond. Back in May 2014, Maria, an uninspired student at Bergen Community College in Paramus, New Jersey at the time, stumbled across a painting on Tumblr by a user named “HiKirstOfferson.” The oil painting featured a highly textured rendition of Cam’ron’s iconic Rap City: Tha Basement freestyle. The painting was intentionally blurry, with Cam’s facial features removed. While hundreds of users scrolled past this image, perhaps leaving a comment or simply liking it, the visual unearthed something within Maria, unveiling her shroud artistic ability. Two days after viewing the image, she took a trip to an art supply store and immersed herself with painting. Up to that point Maria had never sketched, painted, or expressed any artistic ability besides casual writing. She experimented a bit before creating her own art form. “The first thing I was painting was Hip Hop ‘no face’ art but during that time I tried spray painting, and I tried oil painting while showing [facial features] as well,” she explains. “I created different things and ‘no face’ art just became my style.”
