Iemanjá (African deity) Print

Claudia Reis is a contemporary painter and art teacher from Brazil. She was born in 1977 at Salvador city, Bahia state. Since childhood she enjoyed drawing, painting and sculpting. Always encouraged by her family, she took a degree in fine arts at Federal University of Bahia. There she developed her talents with abstract and figurative modern painting, particularly with the application of textures. Later she specialized in teaching art for children using art therapy, working in schools and art courses. Her fascination for the world of child art made her a reference in this area at the city. At 2009 she joined with her husband, an artist too, and founded her own art school “Company of Painting”, offering a new approach on art teaching in the city. Her first art exhibition was a collective at 1999 in the city central library, where the main theme was the environment. Her work was a critic to the devastation at Amazonia, a painting of trees bleeding. After that she did other collective exhibitions finally defining her painting style: Afro-American figures immersed in vivid colors and cultural symbols of Bahia. The preferred medium of the artist is acrylics on canvas. Her work shows the culture of Bahia and the happiness of its people which reveals the African religion myths of Candomblé, the Orixás (deities); the fighting dancing style of Capoeira; the fishers and their devotion to the Orixá Yemanjá (sea goddess); the Baianas (regional food women sellers) with their rich decorated clothes and their religion festival; churches and colonial architecture of Pelourinho and other regions. She also works with abstract painting with heavy use of textures and more subtle colors.