BIOGRAPHY
Beto Candia is a Brazilian visual artist, illustrator, and educator with nearly four decades dedicated to art, education, and creative innovation.
Beginning his professional career at the age of 15, Candia has developed projects across advertising, animation, muralism, publishing, and digital media. In the 1980s, he became one of the pioneers of graffiti art in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil, later contributing to animated commercials and early internet projects during the 1990s and 2000s.
Alongside his artistic practice, Candia built a significant career in education and visual storytelling, creating characters, educational content, games, and multimedia projects for major Brazilian educational institutions and platforms.
In recent years, his work has focused on watercolor painting, urban narratives, and atmospheric landscapes that explore the relationship between memory, digital imagery, and contemporary visual perception. His current series, Skies in Watercolor, transforms fleeting cinematic skies, inspired by shared digital images and social media fragments into poetic and immersive paintings.
Candia has exhibited in Brazil and internationally, has received awards and honorable mentions in salons and watercolor exhibitions.
He received his artistic training over decades in various studios such as the New York Academy of Art, the Art Students League, Scottsdale Artist School, and Angel Art Academy, among others. Currently works also as Visual Arts Teacher and Inspirational Educator at Escola Concept in Ribeirão Preto, Brazil.
CV
EDUCATION & ARTISTIC TRAINING ::.
2024 — PleinAir Studio — São Paulo, Brazil
Watercolor and atmospheric landscape studies.
2018 — New York Art Academy — New York, USA
Watercolor, figure and landscape, portrait and oil painting studies.
2018 — The Art Students League of New York — New York, USA
Figure and portrait drawing.
2018 — The Metropolitan Museum of Art — New York, USA
Master Copying Program — William Merritt Chase: At the Seaside, 1892.
2018 — The Design Gym — New York, USA
Design Thinking Bootcamp.
2012–2016 — Scottsdale Artists’ School — Scottsdale, USA
Studies in color, portrait painting, watercolor and still life.
2013 — Grand Central Atelier — New York, USA
Portrait Painting, 10 Heads in 5 Days with Rick Piloco.
2013 — PleinAir Studio — São Paulo, Brazil
Watercolor studies with Gonzalo Cárcamo.
2011 — Angel Academy of Art — Florence, Italy
Portrait Painting and Caravaggio Master Techniques.
2010 — Ringling College of Art and Design — Sarasota, USA
Figure and portrait drawing.
2007 — AAAD – Academia de Animação e Artes Digitais — São Paulo, Brazil
Advanced 2D Animation.
2002 — Quanta Academia de Artes — São Paulo, Brazil
Drawing and painting studies with Marcelo Buccaríe.
1999 — Associates in Art — Los Angeles, USA
Character Animation, Figure Drawing and Character Design.
1997–1998 — HGN Produtora — São Paulo, Brazil
Training in Traditional 2D Animation, from basic to advanced levels.
STATEMENT
My work exists between observation and memory.
Through watercolor, I explore landscapes not as literal representations of place, but as emotional atmospheres shaped by time, light, silence, and contemporary visual experience. I am particularly interested in the way digital culture has transformed our relationship with landscape, how skies, horizons, reflections, and fleeting moments are constantly captured, shared, and consumed through screens.
In my series Skies in Watercolor, many compositions originate from fragments of images similar to those we encounter daily on social media feeds, stories, and digital archives. What interests me is not the photographic record itself, but the emotional residue these images leave behind.
Watercolor becomes an ideal medium for this investigation because of its instability, transparency, and fluidity. The technique allows me to balance control and unpredictability, creating surfaces where atmosphere becomes more important than description.
Although my artistic background includes illustration, animation, muralism, and educational visual language, my current work seeks silence, contemplation, and emotional suspension. I’m interested in creating paintings that feel simultaneously intimate and cinematic, images that exist somewhere between reality, memory, and imagination.
More than depicting landscapes, I seek to paint transient states of perception.
