Tupac Shakur (and Lyrics)

What you are looking at

Tupac Shakur looks out from inside a hood, his face turned slightly to the left, eyes raised, mouth set. The face is built entirely from fine, curving parallel lines, like the engraving on a banknote, in gold against deep purple shadow. The lines swirl around the cheeks and forehead in tight concentric patterns, so the face seems carved rather than drawn. The hood is a band of white and gray lines framing him.

To the right, the dark purple background is filled with lines of typewriter-style text. These are lyrics, and toward the bottom one phrase repeats several times over: "Only God can judge me."

The subject

Tupac Amaru Shakur (1971–1996) was one of the most influential and commercially successful rappers of the 1990s, and an actor and poet. On 7 September 1996 he was shot several times in a drive-by shooting at a traffic light in Las Vegas, and he died of his wounds six days later, aged 25. The case went unsolved for decades; in 2023 Las Vegas police charged a suspect, Duane Davis, in connection with the killing. Murals, posters and digital portraits of him are now part of popular culture across the world, and his lyrics, especially lines about mortality, suspicion and judgment, are often quoted alongside his image.

The repeated line here comes from his 1996 song "Only God Can Judge Me," and the other text in the background is drawn from the same verse, about paranoia, betrayal and death.

The artist and the technique

Tony Rubino is an American digital artist whose portraits of musicians and celebrities are sold as prints online. This image was uploaded in January 2013. The engraved-line effect imitates the intaglio portraits used on currency and stock certificates, a style associated with official, permanent images; applying it to a rapper raises him to that status.

Close looking

Notice how the lines change direction to model form: they curve around the nose and cheekbones, flatten across the forehead, and tighten into dark knots at the eyes and nostrils. Where light falls, the gold lines are spaced apart; in shadow, they crowd together or vanish into purple. The text, by contrast, is flat and mechanical, which makes the face look more alive.

Where to see it

This is a digital work available as reproductions; we have no record of a unique original. For other portraits that deal with fame and death, see Death in Art and Memento Mori & Vanitas, and Jonathan Horowitz's media-based portraits such as Hillary Clinton is a Person Too.