So many great artists achieve appreciation and recognition after they have left this earth. Van Gogh, Cezanne, Monet; the list is long and impressive. For third-generation Provincetown native Derek Macara, fortunately he doesn’t have to wait to be discovered. The young painter is literally living and creating in the moment—and through the power of social media, anyone can share those moments with him as he creates his art.

Macara paints in oil, and he paints what he knows: the Outer Cape. “I was a fisherman for years,” he says. “Everyone in my family fishes and has done so for generations.” After graduating from Provincetown High School, Macara made a living working on fishing boats out of one of the busiest fishing ports in New England. After he submitted some art he had casually created for a local show, Macara started to wonder if there might be another way to earn a living. “I didn’t even really think too much about it,” he explains. “But, when every piece had sold at the end of the show, I thought, well that was a much more pleasant way to earn money.” 

It wasn’t as if he stumbled upon art out of blue. In fact, since he was a child, he had been filling his free time with drawing and painting. An uncle of his was an artist and he would steal off to his studio to just hang around, absorb banter and technique from the frequent visiting artists, and accumulate a collection of any discarded supplies. “Also, I grew up near the Hawthorne School of Art, {now Twenty Summers} so I was always hanging around there,” he says as he confirms the notion that everyone in Provincetown is an artist in some shape or form.

A solo exhibition at the North Shore Arts Association in Gloucester is where Macara really saw the tide shift. “It just created a lot of buzz and was really well received,” he says humbly as he was also featured on a Boston television news segment where his growing following on social media immediately anointed him with viral status. Today his Instagram followers number over 300,000 as he posts reels of his creative process that has clearly been embraced by a whole new audience. Macara doesn’t attribute any strategic efforts to the wide audience his art is exposed to, instead he matter-of-factly says that given his limited resources, and lack of gallery representation, it just made sense to expose his work in an arena where the masses were already searching.

While his approach is unique for the art world—and particularly modern for the oldest art colony in the country—a case can be made that the fascination with his work lies at the core of his talent. His paintings are clean and sparse in their detail with a truly modern aesthetic, yet his compositions and medium are rooted in classic sensibilities. “I spend a lot of time with photos in my preparation of any painting,” Macara explains. “I will merge images to create what I want to see.” That process refines his landscapes and seascapes allowing him to render succinct detail in his paintings. It is that juxtaposition and confluence of modern technology with traditional technique that leaves the viewer captivated by the distilled images.

Derek Macara’s work can be experienced on his Instagram @dmacara and he can be contacted through his website derekmacara.com.