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

Among all the figures in the ancient world, Apollo occupied a unique position: he was the god of light, but also the god of art, music, poetry, and prophecy. He represented the idea that creativity and illumination are the same thing. The artist and the truth-teller are doing the same work.

Guillo Pérez 3 painted Apollo as a rooster. The connection is not coincidental. In Greek mythology the rooster is one of Apollo's sacred animals: the herald of dawn, the creature that announces light over darkness every morning. Guillo found that ancient association and made it deeply personal.

His grandfather, Maestro Guillo Pérez, raised roosters. He kept them as companions, painted them, honored them. The studio where Guillo took his first steps as a child was alive with those birds. The rooster was the first image of the world he knew. It was where he learned, without words, what it meant to be an artist. When he paints a rooster, he is painting his grandfather. He is painting the origin of everything.

In Dominican and Caribbean culture the rooster carries its own weight: pride, vitality, the announcement of a new day. Across cultures and centuries, in Greece and in the Caribbean, the rooster means the same thing. Light is coming. Something is beginning.

Apollo is a painting that holds all of this at once: a Greek god, a Caribbean symbol, a grandfather's studio, a child's first steps, and the unbroken line between a man who raised roosters in Santo Domingo and the painter who stands before a canvas in Tampa today.

Collector's Note

Apollo is among the most personally meaningful works in the collection. It is the painting where Guillo's mythological practice and his deepest personal history meet. For collectors building across his body of work, it belongs in conversation with every other rooster he has painted and with the three-generation lineage that defines his practice. The mixed media format makes it visually distinctive. The story behind it makes it irreplaceable.

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. Virtual viewings available for collectors anywhere in the world. Contact us to inquire. New to collecting? Read our collector guide →

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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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