Original acrylic painting by Guillo Pérez 3 · Dominican-American contemporary artist · Available at Marcolina’s Fine Arts Gallery, Tampa, Florida · Ships worldwide

Atabey is the supreme goddess of the Taino people: the mother of fresh water, the moon, and all living things. She is one of the oldest spiritual figures in the Caribbean world, her story carried across centuries of oral tradition before colonization sought to replace it with another faith entirely.

Guillo Pérez 3 grew up in a deeply religious Christian household. His faith was not imposed from outside. It was the language of his family, his community, his formation. But alongside that tradition ran a lifelong curiosity: how did other cultures answer the same questions? Where did the world come from? What force moves through living things? What do we owe to the sacred?

Atabey is the product of that curiosity turned inward. As a Dominican-American artist of Caribbean descent, Guillo found in the Taino goddess not a contradiction of his faith but a deeper root of it. It was a creation story that belonged to his ancestors before the arrival of any church. Painting her was an act of recovery and of reverence simultaneously.

The painting does not illustrate mythology. It inhabits it. Guillo paints from an interior world built on faith, ancestry, and historical knowledge rather than conventional sight. Something in the work feels alive in the way that sacred images have always felt alive to the people who kept them.

Collector's Note

Atabey is one of the few works in the collection that speaks equally to collectors drawn to mythology, to Caribbean history, and to the ongoing conversation about what it means to recover ancestral identity in contemporary painting. Its subject connects directly to a thread Guillo has been developing across multiple works and places it at the center of his most significant body of ideas. For collectors acquiring early in an artist's recognition arc, this is a meaningful entry point.

Acquisition

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About the Artist

Guillo Pérez 3 is a Dominican-American painter, co-founder, educator, and cultural ambassador whose artwork and vision help define the identity of Marcolina’s Fine Arts Gallery. Born in Santo Domingo and raised in Queens, New York, he is the grandson of Maestro Guillo Pérez, one of the Dominican Republic’s most respected painters and a recognized figure in the U.S. State Department’s Art in Embassies program, and the son of master painter Willy Pérez. Three generations of unbroken serious painterly practice. His work hangs in the permanent collection of the Skylands Museum of Art alongside Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, and is held by private collectors in over 48 countries.

Guillo has painted with severely limited vision since childhood. Like Monet, who painted his Water Lilies series while losing his sight, and Matisse, who created his most celebrated works when illness took him away from the canvas, Guillo’s relationship with sight has become the source of something extraordinary rather than a constraint. Unable to rely on conventional vision, he paints from a place of total interior conviction: from historical knowledge, spiritual formation, and a bodily intelligence built over decades of serious practice. Every mark is a commitment. Every color choice is an act of faith. When he paints, that is when he is seeing.

He grew up in a deeply religious Christian household and has spent a lifetime in serious study of world history, comparative religion, and international affairs. His paintings are not decorative mythologies. They are the work of a man who has read the texts, lived the contradictions, and paints from the inside of those traditions.

In Tampa, he was mentored by the late Theo Wujcik, longtime USF Graphicstudio director whose work is held in the Tampa Museum of Art’s permanent collection. In 2022, The Straz Center commissioned him for a mural connected to their production of The Little Match Girl, and during the interview their team described him simply as art royalty.

Working from Tampa, Florida, he has developed Bauhaus Budō: a synthesis of Bauhaus design discipline and the meditative rigor of martial arts. His work has been exhibited across the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe. The New York Times recognized him as a “Star Maker.”

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