Maestas grew up as a graffiti writer and skateboarder in Los Angeles and graduated in 2013 from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where he studied automotive and industrial design.¹ He began in acrylic, oil-based enamel and spray paint before moving into digital and, later, generative AI, and describes himself as part of the last generation trained to sketch on paper before digital workflows took over.^1,3

In urbn artfct, a body of work he later described as a turning point, Maestas reconstructed the New York graffiti scene entirely from magazines, films and television, since he had never visited the city himself. One recurring image, of figures wearing North Face Steep Tech jackets favoured by 1990s New York graffiti writers, led him toward Synthetic Bloom, in which fabric folds and fragments of clothing are assembled into botanical landscapes that read as Impressionist paintings until seen up close. Worn Currents turned that vocabulary inward into intimate close-ups of seams, zippers and worn fabric, using water as a symbol of change and contour lines drawn from Nihonga painting.³ One piece from the series, Turning and Tucked, was made with a custom LoRA model and ControlNet before being finished in Photoshop.⁴ His following series, Pattern Memory, arranges folds and seams into grid-like structures while letting glitches and digital interference disrupt their order.³

In Flowing Through Form (2024), a three-piece release with Fakewhale's Solo Series on objkt.com, he turned to industrial trains, dissolving their rigid steel forms into fluid, wave-like shapes.¹ His work was included in “Groundwork”, a 2025 group exhibition at Heft Gallery in New York alongside artists such as Qubibi and LoVid.^5,6 It has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York and Europe.²