Artist Maasai Rees-Tabari

growinG UP?

Guiding the hand, 'An Education in Art' (the beginning of a career)

After leaving the School of Visual Arts, Maasai's initial artistic focus on how to layer of pure color. She took a three-month sabbatical to travel throughout Mexico. As she mastered how to use color, Maasai also graduated into exploring other materials that would retain solid bright colors, such as Gouache paint.

She discovered Gouache paint while working for a fabric design company, and found that the opaque paint was a perfect medium to keep the colors vibrant and pure. During this time, she began to move from pastel drawings of cactus plants to painting women with ethnic imagery, scarification and jeweled adornments, such as, bracelets and earrings.

Maasai felt her first (private) show, titled “Alive in Heaven Dead”, expressed beauty, did not express enough honesty or vulnerability. No longer does Maasai censor what she truly feels or wants to illustrate artistically, and this changed marked the start of her maturation as an artist.

Maasai's newest interest include creating oversized charcoal drawings (created as large as 10 feet x 15 feet), paper collages and digital drawings. The first, medium is paper is a collage built upon a printed image, with colored craft paper, oil crayons, and marker; and, Maasai is also creating digital drawings made on her cell phone, tablet and computer. The discovery of these three modalities have been freeing and empowering, allowing Maasai to tell the story of female vulnerability, and the beauty of painful human emotion. Thus in many ways, her work as an artist has come full circle.

Maasai's many experiences in life shape her artistic goals, style and her preferred choice of mediums, which continues to inspire helps to fully merge her subject matter and tone into a cohesive style and message that comes from an internal discourse Maasai, the artist, expresses visually.

Some artists I was influenced by: Romare Bearden, Elizabeth Catlette, Tom Feelings, and Jacob Lawrence; as well as, artists of the 80's and 90's including, Keith Haring, and Jean Michel Basquiat.

Creating wherever you can.

2012 Beacon Arts Building, Los Angeles, CA Sold to Charles King a VP of William Morris Talent Agency

1996 Commission, Lexington School for the Deaf - New York, NY

1994 Private Exhibition, at home of Art Enthusiast Dr. Cynthia Grace - New York, NY

(Dr Grace is the former owner of Synergy Spa Harlem and Brooklyn)

1994 Private Commission for Iris Lane - Las Vegas, NV

1991 Private Exhibition | Fundraiser - Harlem Youth Tennis Club - New York, NY