Artist Highlight

Carlos Serra is a prolific American artist, a seasoned scuba diving instructor trainer and former owner of a prestigious PADI 5-Star Instructor Development Center located in Key Largo, Florida. Besides art, he's a published writer and an accomplished photographer and videographer in both, above and beneath the sea. It's his love and profound knowledge of the ocean what inspires him to paint subjects mostly related to the sea.

But his creativity is not limited to marine themes. He also creates artworks that are a great challenge to any artist, like the human shape, seascapes, landscapes and portraits. Lately, he has been concentrating his work with a subject close to his heart, Hawaii and its culture. As a Hawaiian at heart, he feels a strong connection with the Aloha spirit that transpires in many of his works.

 His palette, with infusions of colors from his beloved tropics, is also an intrinsic quality in any of his works, regardless of the subject, achieving this way an embedded and supplementary signature. In addition to it, his management of light and shapes provide a sense of realism that makes the subject as authentic and full of life as you can possibly achieve in 2D, making lifeless elements like a canvas and oils or acrylics to become realistic and meaningful breathing imagery filled with inspiring metaphors.

Like Pablo Picasso said: "Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun." Take a look to the skies and sunsets he paints, and most definitively, Carlos Serra not only transforms a yellow spot into the sun, but makes a whole sky around it full of life and vigor.

Carlos Serra or Serra-Marchal, as he signs his artworks, is a member of the Ocean Artists Society, founded by renowned marine-life artists Wyland and Guy Harvey, along with the recognized cinematographer Bob Talbot.