Annelie Solis is a Trinidadian artist drawing inspiration from fairytales, alchemy, and ancient cosmologies to invoke a preindustrial world filled with myth and magic. Using foraged earth-based pigments and traditional techniques, her work aims to reconnect viewers with the sacred imagination and a sense of awe and beauty.
Though she is mostly self-studied across creative disciplines, she earned an MA from the King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts in London, UK, in 2020, for her work in miniature painting, hellenistic astrology and cosmology. She currently lives in Spain, where she specialises in natal chart paintings.
The style of my paintings is informed by the materials and the technique. The technique is most heavily influenced by Indian miniature painting and medieval manuscript illumination, but differs in the materials; though there is similarity. The paints I use are handmade opaque watercolours made with mostly earth-based pigments that I have foraged and prepared myself, so each has its own personality and texture—some are more opaque, some more coarse, some sparkle a little—and this guides the process. There is a meticulousness to traditional miniature painting that I find I have forgone in favour of a texture and roughness that, along with the earthy softness of the colour palette, evokes a quality that is at once more organic and more dreamlike. This, for me, is the essence of the work; the forms speak of heaven and the materials speak of earth.
I paint to evoke a sense of wonder, like reading a fairytale or lying in a field of wildflowers, or looking up on a very dark night and marvelling at the sparkling beauty of the milky way. I want you to feel like you’re in a world that engages with mysteries without trying to solve them; or in a bygone age when magic was real. I want you to feel like an alchemist poring over a treatise, or a wizard with his grimoire. I paint to exalt the imagination, and enliven beauty as a virtue, and to re-enchant a world that sometimes seems to have forgotten.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
The Sun and The Moon - Art Inspired by the Celestial | Saatchi Gallery, London, UK, June - September 2026
Art of Alchemy | Haven Gallery, New York, USA, May - July 2026
The Old Order | Heart of The Tribe Gallery, Glastonbury, UK, April - June 2026
Art Mumbai | Ojas Art Booth A5, Mumbai, India, November 2025
Medieval RELICS | The Gallery at Green & Stone, London, UK, June 2025
High Seas, Open Roads | Sarmaya Arts Foundation, Mumbai, India, January - February 2025
Musawwari: Miniatures Today | Ojas Art, New Delhi, India, October - November 2024
Light, Colour & The Cosmology of Pigment | The Garrison Chapel, London, UK, August 2024
StART x PFSTA | Saatchi Gallery, London, UK, October 2023
King’s Foundation School of Traditional Arts Degree Show | The Garrison Chapel, London, UK, June - July 2022
Art REFRAMED | TATIL, Port of Spain, Trinidad, August 2022
Moving On (Solo Exhibition) | Grundlos Kollektiv, Port of Spain, Trinidad, August 2018