Willy Pérez
A second generation, finding its own water.
Willy Pérez was born in 1956 in Santo Domingo, the eldest son of Maestro Guillo Pérez and Ana Rojas. He grew up inside his father's workshop before he ever held a brush of his own, and the influence of that household, color, discipline, the daily presence of a working painter, shaped the entire course of his life.
He studied at the National School of Fine Arts in Santo Domingo, at the Cándido Bidó Art Center under the late master Cándido Bidó himself, and at the Art Students League in New York. He went on to earn a degree in clinical psychology, a second discipline he has practiced alongside painting for his entire career rather than instead of it.
Where his father worked conceptually, building paintings from idea outward, critics have long noted that Willy paints organically, led by gesture, emotion, and the texture of color itself. He has spent more than four decades turning that instinct toward the landscapes, waters, and daily life of the island that raised him.
Today he is a member of the Dominican School of Artists (CODAP) and has presented forty-two solo exhibitions, with work shown across the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Spain, Guadeloupe, Honduras, Panama, and major U.S. art centers including Miami, New York, and Providence.
He learned to paint by cleaning the brushes first.
Willy's earliest art education had nothing to do with a canvas of his own. As a child in his father's workshop, his job was to clean brushes and stretch and mount the canvases his father painted on. Maestro Guillo Pérez gave him scraps of paper beside his own works and a set of watercolors, and let him paint alongside him rather than separate from him.
It is the kind of apprenticeship that does not show up on a CV, but it is the one Willy has credited most directly for everything that followed: a discipline learned through proximity, long before it was learned through instruction.
"Ese gran ilustre hombre del arte dominicano, mi padre, Don Guillo Pérez, me acercó a la pintura."
— Willy Pérez, on his father bringing him close to painting as a child
The same legacy, carried somewhere new.
A lifelong study of aquatic life and the waters surrounding the island, fish, reefs, and the diversity they hold, painted with a naturalist's attention and an expressionist's color.
A recurring motif Willy added entirely on his own, figures in motion that bring rhythm and human presence into landscapes otherwise built from color and water.
Coastal towns, river light, and the geometry of the Dominican landscape, rendered with an underlying current of ecological respect for the place itself.
Critics have described the distinction plainly: where Maestro Guillo Pérez worked as a conceptist, building from idea, Willy works as an organic painter, led by gesture and feeling. He took his father's nationalist, color-driven legacy and pointed it somewhere personal, toward water, motion, and a deep attachment to the land itself.
A school built on his father's name, run his own way.
In 1984, Willy founded the Guillo Pérez School of Art, which he continues to direct today. The school carries his father's name forward as a living institution rather than a memorial, training new generations of Dominican artists in the same lineage that shaped Willy's own beginning.
He has held the role alongside his clinical psychology practice and his own exhibition schedule for more than forty years, a balance of teaching, healing, and painting that runs through everything he makes.
- 42nd solo exhibition, "Canto del Amor y de los Días," Contemporanía, Santo Domingo, 2024
- Member, Dominican School of Artists (CODAP)
- Numerous awards in national art competitions, Dominican Republic
- Works held in private collections, galleries, and public institutions
Explore the available collection.
Original paintings by Willy Pérez are available now through Marcolina's Fine Arts Gallery, with worldwide shipping and payment plans on every original work.
View the Collection