Quiet joy by Raquel Reis
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: watercolor pencil
Dimensions: 29 x 42 cm
Year: 2025
Price: $500.00 USD
Status: available
Quiet Joy is an expressionist portrait with Cubist influences, created using watercolor pencils on paper. The composition features a stylized female figure built from asymmetrical planes, flowing contours, and a vibrant palette of pinks, purples, blues, and golden yellows. The subject's expressive gaze and subtle smile evoke a sense of quiet contentment and inner peace. Deliberately distorted facial features and the interplay of soft color transitions with bold, textured shading create a dynamic visual tension, reflecting the complexity of human emotion. The dark background enhances the figure's luminous presence, while the bright yellow collar and turquoise earrings bring rhythm, balance, and vitality to the composition. Despite its expressive distortions, Quiet Joy conveys warmth and intimacy. The work celebrates beauty beyond conventional symmetry, suggesting that joy is not always exuberant—it can be gentle, reflective, and deeply personal. The distinctive texture of watercolor pencils enriches the surface with delicate layers of color and expressive mark-making, making every stroke an integral part of the artwork's emotional narrative.
Why collect this work?
The portrait locates “quiet joy” in an emotionally unresolved combination of slight smile, direct gaze, and pronounced facial asymmetry rather than overt exuberance.
- Reis describes her figuration as emotional translation rather than description. That intention clarifies the non-naturalistic construction here, where mismatched eyes, displaced contours, and compressed planes carry expression.
- In the photograph, the enlarged head nearly fills the sheet while folded hands seal its lower edge. Dense dark marks press around the figure, and the angular yellow collar separates face from body.
- Catalogued as watercolor pencil on paper, the medium combines drawn contours with layered color. Visible pink, blue, and violet strokes cross the face, keeping its divided planes active rather than smoothly unified.
- Dated 2025 and measuring 29 by 42 cm, the work provides a compact case study in emotional ambiguity: composure remains legible even as distortion and theatrical color complicate it.
About the Artist
Raquel Reis
Raquel Reis is an artist on Mondoir Studio. Artistic discipline: painting. Based in Madrid, ES.
Nationality: Brazilian
My work is rooted in sensation, perception, and gesture.
