Kelly Cecilio, Shan

Shan Kelly Cecilio (born Nassau, The Bahamas) is a self-taught artist that grew up doodling portraits, flora and fauna and birds in pencil or charcoal. She later overcame a “fear of vibrancy” by adding pure color on wet watercolor paper and letting the paint flow and bend to create unique images. Through this method she achieved an unmatched layering of clean, translucent colors, evoking the wonder, myths, rituals and slices of her everyday life in the United States and her native Bahamas.

Cecilio is inspired by the beauty of all living things and maintains rhythm, humor, introspection and a deep feeling of spirituality in her work. Women are predominant subjects of her paintings, “representing power and strength and their perception of the world and its imaginative truth.”

The artist pursued a formal commercial art degree at the Tennessee Williams Fine Art Center, in Key West, Florida. Later, as a set designer, she completed a stage at Club Med in Eleuthera and Mexico. She has had solo exhibitions in Florida, The Bahamas, San Jose, California and has participated in a number of group shows in New York, California and San Miguel Allende, Mexico. Her work is in many private and prominent collections, including the American actor, Samuel L. Jackson.

Cecilio lives and works in North Carolina.