Keila’s Work is an Examination of Beauty

Keila Alfred Small is a noted Floridian artist whose work is infused by the support of her university degrees in Applied Mathematics. Keila was encouraged to pursue education and career interests that would lead to fulfilling my family’s goals for me. She always did artwork, often hiding my devotion to the craft I loved. When moving to the US in 2010, she immediately enrolled in college to start her engineering career. In her twenties she moved to Virginia where she began her career as a Software Engineer, eventually advancing into the role of an Operations Research Analyst. She was dedicated to this career, however, she always made time to pursue her art, to hone her craft, and to express herself through different media, including watercolor, pastel, and pencil. For her it was less of a choice, but more like an “inner drive” that once discovered, could not be stopped. Two years ago (2016), after her third child was born, she made the big decision to abandon her successful career to transition to the stay at home world. Shortly after that, she seriously started her art journey.

Keila’s work is an examination of beauty, especially different forms of the human body and the thinking that lies behind it. She uses the human body as the common denominators of our personal environment. Celebrate our bodies, the marks people make in the world, the way we walk, dance, the eccentric, the ordinary, fears and unwritten rules about who we are. Hyper-realism is often seen in my work and has helped me capture our innate attraction to beauty. She strives to capture it, understand it and translate that beauty in my pieces. In a way, she has creating a unique handmade piece. “I like my work to have an artistic significance to it, but at the same time retain its realistic qualities”, she added. Besides working on her personal pieces, she teaches art to a group of homeschoolers and host private events. Designs by Keila will travel.

Keila’s art can found here in Central Florida. She was also recently published in Emerging Black magazine.