About Sottil

Luis Sottil was born in 1959 in Mexico City.  He was raised in Tampico, an exuberant port in the Gulf of Mexico with an abundance of natural resources.

He demonstrated throughout his life, an unparalleled ability to express his emotions in a totally unorthodox fashion.  He exhibited a strong artistic inclination spending time creating visual effects that were full of exciting innovation, from paper planes with glued bird feathers to textured paintings on canvas with the use of confetti

Sottil’s family in Mexico reared him in a strict Catholic environment where he was molded, as the oldest son of his family, to take over the fishing industry his father pioneered.

Throughout his upbringing, his family supported his talent for painting, thinking it was never going to develop into anything other than a hobby.  Sottil’s desire to paint only grew stronger over the years, to the point that only one year before he was to graduate from business school at Mexico’s leading university, he called for a meeting with his parents and told them he was leaving the country to find his real purpose in life.

Sottil moved to New Orleans in 1984 in order to make a living on his own and support his artistic endeavor.  He had never worked a day in his life but his drive to find his true calling gave him the endurance to find six jobs in a short period of time.  He found himself working day and night, from modeling to waiting on tables.

Sottil’s new found freedom allowed him to concentrate in exploring the emotions of nature, his ultimate passion.  This led him to the creation of his own technique he named “Naturalismo.”

While experimenting with gold leaf and natural pigments applied in layers, he discovered a unique effect that resulted in an intense luminosity reflecting from his canvases. At the same time, he observed a change of hue in the colors depending upon the intensity of the light.  He was so excited with the result that he continues to use the same process in his paintings today.

A very important lesson he learned was not only the fact that all human emotions are represented throughout various elements of nature, but also a new found realization that we can learn about who we truly are when embracing such emotions.

As a result Sottil studies his subject matters in their natural habitat in order to find the emotions that move him.  Then he brings them to an art form through the application of the Naturalismo technique.

Sottil has been the recipient of numerous achievement awards and his works are included in over 2000 private and corporate collections around the world including Rupert Murdoch, the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, and the Tupperware Collection.  He is represented by 14 galleries internationally, including two of his own, located at The Walt Disney World’s Dolphin Resort, Florida, and El Madrigal Resort in Cuernavaca, Mexico.  He is considered by many critics as one of this centuries greatest colorists and as a leader in reviving nature’s emotions at intense levels of beauty never before achieved through other forms of art.