Atabey | Guillo Pérez 3 | Original Acrylic Painting

Atabey is an original 36 x 72 inch acrylic on canvas painting of the Taino ancestral mother by Dominican-American artist Guillo Pérez 3, available at Marcolina’s Fine Arts Gallery in Tampa, Florida, and shipped worldwide.

Atabey is the Taino spirit of fresh water and fertility, the ancestral mother who gave birth to the creator Yúcahu. The moon and the frog are her symbols. She is one of the oldest sacred figures in the Caribbean, her story carried through 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 ancestral mother 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 at the same time.

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.

Where Atabey Lives

At 36 x 72 inches, Atabey is a tall vertical statement piece. It suits an entryway, a stairwell, a narrow wall beside a fireplace, or the long wall above a console or bed, anywhere you want a single figure to hold the room. Not sure it will fit your space? Request a virtual viewing and we will show it to you on a video call.

Collector's Note

Atabey speaks to collectors drawn to mythology, to Caribbean history, and to the ongoing conversation about recovering ancestral identity in contemporary painting. Its subject connects directly to a thread Guillo has been developing across multiple works, and it places that thread at the center of his most ambitious body of ideas. His work hangs in the permanent collection of the Skylands Museum of Art and is held by collectors in over 48 countries.

Acquisition

Available through Marcolina's Fine Arts Gallery with worldwide shipping, full insurance, and professional art packaging. Payment plans available. Private viewings by appointment in Tampa, Florida, and virtual viewings for collectors anywhere in the world. Contact us to inquire. New to collecting? Read our collector guide →

A standard shipping rate is charged at checkout. Once your work is packed, we calculate the actual shipping cost for its size and destination. If there is a difference, we will follow up to either invoice the additional amount or refund the difference, whichever applies.

About the Artist

Guillo Pérez 3 is a Dominican-American painter, co-founder, and educator whose work helps define Marcolina’s Fine Arts Gallery. Born in Santo Domingo and raised in Queens, New York, he is the grandson of Maestro Guillo Pérez, 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 serious painterly practice. His work hangs in the permanent collection of the Skylands Museum of Art alongside Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso. Working from Tampa, he has developed Bauhaus Budō, a synthesis of Bauhaus design discipline and the meditative rigor of martial arts, and The New York Times recognized him as a “Star Maker.”

Guillo has painted with severely limited vision since childhood. Like Monet, who painted his Water Lilies while losing his sight, his relationship with sight has become the source of something extraordinary rather than a constraint. He paints from historical knowledge, spiritual formation, and decades of practice. Every mark is a commitment. Every color choice is an act of faith. When he paints, that is when he is seeing.

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