Summer Vibes by Raquel Reis
Explore Mondoir Studio
Medium: Watercolor pencil Caran d'Ache
Dimensions: 29 x 42 cm
Year: 2025
Price: $500.00 USD
Status: available
“Summer Vibes” grew from my affection for the tropical summers of my homeland, where heat, color, and small pleasures seem to linger long into the day. Ice cream became my playful symbol for those memories: a fleeting sweetness, enjoyed before it melts, that reminds us to be fully present. I shaped the woman through a blend of figurative form, expressionist distortion, and fantasy. Her divided, angular features suggest the many moods held within a single summer moment: languor, amusement, confidence, and quiet reflection. Using Caran d’Ache watercolor pencils, I layered turquoise, sunlit yellow, magenta, and violet to create a sense of warmth and movement. Her golden curls flow like waves of afternoon light, while the textured marks preserve the immediacy and spontaneity of drawing by hand. The ice cream, poised near her lips, adds a touch of humor and anticipation. I hope this work brings the feeling of summer indoors: bright, unhurried, imaginative, and a little mischievous. For me, it is an invitation to savor simple joys and keep a corner of life open to play.
Why collect this work?
A sharply divided face and a cone held just below the mouth turn a familiar summer treat into a scene of poised delay rather than simple celebration.
- Reis describes her figurative practice as a reconstruction of remembered experience through color and structure. Here, that approach clarifies why the subject reads less as an individual portrait than as a compressed summer mood.
- Angular planes split the face, while lowered eyelids and the upright forearm slow the implied act of eating. Golden curls and patterned clothing crowd the sheet, but the narrow gap between tongue and ice cream becomes its focal interval.
- Catalogued as Caran d’Ache watercolor pencil on paper, the medium supports both firm contour and visibly varied colored marks. Turquoise, yellow-green, magenta, and violet separate facial planes without abandoning the immediacy of drawing.
- For a collection concerned with appetite, leisure, or everyday ritual, this 2025 work complicates pleasure through postponement. Its humor depends on an action that remains almost, but not yet, completed.
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.
