There are artists who develop a practice. And there are artists who inherit one, then spend a lifetime deciding what to do with that inheritance.
Guillo Pérez 3 is the second kind. What he has done with it is the more interesting story.
Born Into Paint
Guillo Pérez 3 was born in 1981 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and raised in Queens, New York. He is the grandson of Maestro Guillo Pérez, one of the most prolific and important canvas artists in Dominican history, a painter who created more than seventy exhibitions and was recognized across Europe and the Americas. His father is Willy Pérez, a contemporary Dominican master painter in his own right, celebrated for his vivid explorations of the natural world and marine life. From early childhood Guillo studied with both of them.
Most painters learn to paint. Guillo Pérez 3 grew up inside a conversation about painting that had already been going on for two generations before he picked up a brush. His grandfather built one of the most significant bodies of work in Dominican art history. His father carries that lineage forward in a completely different direction, toward the natural world and ecological observation. Guillo absorbed both and then departed from both, which is the only honest thing a third-generation artist can do.
He also learned, from that same lineage, that the inherited conversation is not enough. That each generation must find its own language or the tradition dies. And so, from the beginning, he worked to forge a voice that was unmistakably his own.
Queens, New York
The biography usually mentions Santo Domingo and stops there. But Guillo grew up in Queens. That matters.
Queens in the late 1980s and 1990s was one of the most densely layered places in America: a borough where more languages were spoken than anywhere else on earth, where the children of immigrants from every corner of the world went to school together and competed and collaborated and created something new out of the collision. It is a place that teaches certain things early. That identity is not fixed. That beauty comes in many registers. That the serious and the playful, the ancient and the immediate, can coexist in the same street, the same room, the same canvas.
You can feel Queens in Guillo's work if you know where to look. Not as subject matter but as sensibility: a willingness to hold multiple things at once, to find the mythic inside the ordinary and the personal inside the universal.
Bauhaus Budō
Every serious painter eventually develops a relationship with the question of how to make a painting. Not what to paint, but how. What principles govern the movement of the brush, the organization of color, the relationship between structure and intuition.
Guillo Pérez 3 calls his answer Bauhaus Budō.
The Bauhaus was a German school of design that operated from 1919 to 1933. Its foundational belief was that structure and beauty are not in opposition. That the discipline of geometry, the rigor of proportion, and the honesty of materials are the conditions under which genuine expression becomes possible. Not constraints on freedom but the architecture that makes freedom meaningful.
Budō is a Japanese word that describes the philosophical and meditative dimension of martial arts. Not combat, but mastery. The practice of being fully present in each movement. The understanding that discipline, repeated over time, produces something that looks like spontaneity but is in fact the opposite: complete control so internalized that it no longer requires conscious thought.
Put these together and you have the operating principle of Guillo's studio practice. In his work, color and line play equal roles. Structure and intuition move together. The painting looks alive because the painter has done enough work that the life can come through without interruption.
At the heart of his art, by his own account, is a sense of peace: an invitation to contemplate what he calls the deep vortex of existence. This is not a passive quality. A vortex pulls. It draws you in. The peace in these paintings is the peace that exists at the center of something powerful, not the peace of a still pond.
What He Paints
Guillo's subjects are personal and universal simultaneously, which is the only kind of subject that produces lasting work.
He paints mythological figures. Poseidon, rendered in deep oceanic blue with currents of red and magenta that pulse like heat and warning — a god who does not notice human beings the way human beings notice each other. View Poseidon →
He paints the ancient epic of Gilgamesh: the oldest written story in human history, a king who was two-thirds god and one-third man, painted as a figure contorted by the particular anguish of someone who understands exactly what they are and exactly what that means. View Gilgamesh I →
He paints Atabey, the Taíno moon goddess of water, fertility, and creation -not as an illustration of a myth but as a meditation on light and force and the particular quality of stillness that exists at the center of great power. View Atabey →
These are not illustrations of ancient stories. They are investigations into why human beings needed to tell those stories in the first place. What does it mean that every civilization, separated by oceans and centuries, produced the same kind of figure: a being that exists at the boundary between the human and the forces larger than human life? Guillo paints these figures as a way of asking that question through the specific, immediate, irreducible language of paint.
He paints figures that blur the line between the physical and the spiritual. Silhouettes that might be bodies or might be shadows. Forms that emerge from dark fields the way a thought emerges from the mind: suddenly present, not quite explainable, unmistakably real. Roosters appear in his work as protectors or as omens, symbols loaded with weight that the painting does not explain, because the painting understands that explanation would reduce what ambiguity preserves.
He paints observations about contemporary life that carry the same weight as his mythological work. Missing Paradise, which depicts a woman absorbed in her phone against a landscape of vivid blues and greens, is not a simple commentary on technology. It is a painting about attention: about what we choose to look at and what we let recede into background.
He also paints the places he lives. South Tampa's Victorian houses appear in his work with the same care he gives his mythological subjects. This is significant. It means he does not sort the world into the sacred and the ordinary. Everything he looks at carefully becomes a subject worthy of serious painting.
Luminosity and rhythm run through all of it. These are not stylistic choices. They are expressions of how he sees.
Builder of Communities
Guillo Pérez 3 is not only a painter. He has founded galleries in Miami and New York. He has created community programs for emerging artists. He has spent years doing the work of building infrastructure for creative communities, the kind of work that does not appear in artist biographies because it is not glamorous, but that shapes the conditions in which other artists can develop.
The New York Times recognized this dimension of his practice by calling him a Star Maker: an acknowledgment not just of his own artistic output but of his singular capacity to identify and cultivate the people around him.
In 2021, he and his wife Marcolina Mercado co-founded Marcolina's Fine Arts Gallery in historic Ybor City, Tampa. The gallery was conceived as a space for serious contemporary art that remains genuinely welcoming, for collectors and for people who have never bought a painting before, for artists at every stage of development, for a community that wants to be part of something meaningful without being made to feel they need a credential to walk through the door.
In 2025, Marcolina's was recognized as a finalist for the Tampa Bay Business and Wealth Magazine Philanthropists of the Year award, the only Ybor City honoree among all nominees.
Collecting His Work
Guillo Pérez 3 works in original oil and acrylic on canvas. He does not produce prints or reproductions. Each painting is a singular object, made once, owned by one collector, existing in one place in the world.
This is a deliberate commitment. It means that every work available through Marcolina's Fine Arts Gallery is irreplaceable. It also means that collectors who acquire his work are participating in an artist's practice at a significant moment in his development: a painter in his mid-forties, working at the height of his powers, with a body of work that spans mythology, psychology, contemporary observation, and architectural portraiture, rooted in a lineage that connects three generations of serious painterly practice.
His work ships worldwide. Payment plans are available on all original works. Private viewings are available by appointment in Tampa, Florida, and virtually for collectors anywhere in the world.
Guillo Pérez 3 is a Dominican-American painter, cultural builder, and co-founder of Marcolina's Fine Arts Gallery in Tampa, Florida. Original oil paintings are available for purchase worldwide through Marcolina's, with payment plans available on all works. View available works →