Mariela de la Paz

Visionary Painter • Shamanic Healer • Keeper of Sacred Symbols

For nearly four decades, Mariela has woven together her twin vocations--painting and shamanic healing-- into a unified path of service. Trained at the Motherpeace School of Contemporary Female Shamanism and the World Peace Foundation's clairvoyant program, she brings deep intuitive knowledge to her creative process.

A survivor of breast cancer, Mariela now offers private, immersive art therapy sessions from her home, integrating painting, healing protocols, and diet into a restorative sanctuary for others seeking transformation. Her visionary works have been exhibited internationally and continue to inspire those drawn to the sacred, the symbolic, and the soul-healing power of image. 

Mariela de la Paz is a Chilean-born, California-based artist whose life and work are a tapestry of ancestral wisdom, healing, and creative devotion. For nearly four decades, she has walked a path that merges classical oil painting with shamanic practice, creating visionary art that serves as both personal ritual and public offering.

Her paintings—deeply rooted in myth, healing plants, and sacred feminine archetypes—are portals to the unseen. Each canvas is a ceremony in color, prayer, and presence. Influenced by the iconography of Tibetan thangkas, the mysticism of indigenous traditions, and the intimacy of her own healing journey, Mariela’s work invites viewers into a space of inner remembrance and soulful reflection.

A lifelong practitioner of shamanic healing, she studied with the Motherpeace School of Contemporary Female Shamanism and trained as a clairvoyant. Her art and her medicine walk are inseparable; both emerge from a deep commitment to transformation, earth-honoring wisdom, and the restoration of the sacred in everyday life.

She paints surrounded by botanicals she also uses in her handmade tinctures and salves—plants chosen not just for their physical benefits but their spiritual essence. Her lifestyle reflects a reverence for cycles, silence, and simplicity. Meditation, dance, and the tending of altars and gardens are part of her daily rhythm.

Despite serious health challenges in recent years, Mariela continues to create and inspire, believing that art is both sanctuary and salvation. Through her paintings, she offers not just images, but medicine.

My body of work has developed over the span of 3 decades. I began practicing my painting skills without live models with my “Underwater Series”. The tropical sea life of Micronesia inspired my bold, intense use of colors and contrast. However, my snorkeling and diving experiences would manifest themselves several years later, as I was not a painter at the time. These memories would emerged in a dreamy way, into my canvas, giving my work not a realistic image, but a surreal quality. 

I was declared legally blind on my left eye after a piece of glass flew into it slitting the cornea in half at age 8. Yet, I have learned to use this disability in my work. Through this eye, colors are muted, and lines diffused.  I use my “inward eye” to tap into the spirit world, creating art from a unique perspective, while my dominant eye guides my bold use of color and physicality. In my art are traces of the spiritual and the physical.

CHILDHOOD

At age 16 I enrolled in a foreign exchange student program which brought me to the USA for the first time. This was the most momentous escapade I could ask for: Until then, most of my waken hours were spent in a strict Catholic school and my adolescence had been negatively impacted by a military coup, which was followed by a dictatorship that imposed a hard curfew The political climate in those days had deprived our Chilean society the right to mingle and to talk with one another freely. My soul was eager for some kind of expansion, some kind of freedom.

I was able to shift my reality, my cultural mindset, allowing me to integrate values such as free expression as a driving value of myself; such ideas have clearly influenced my art’s bold explorations and feminist statements. My depictions of raw sexuality and the influxes of the Spirit world are unbridled, powerful images, created without apprehension.

EARLY ADULTHOOD

At age 21, as I traveled around the world, I accepted my first teaching job at a college preparatory high-school in Micronesia which fostered in me an understanding of tribal culture. Over many months and years, I shared my days with the students and the people, becoming immersed in their culture. This would have a lasting impact on my artistic style and exploration. The greatest gift of this experience in my young adulthood was my realization of my shared DNA with the tribes of Micronesia, with tribes all across the south pacific; from the shores of North America to the top of Tierra del Fuego, my lineage was spread and was living. This self-realization has been my most celebrated aspect of my life and my art: as a mestizo with ancestral roots in what we now call America, I was motivated to research my own indigenous roots and to discover more about my people and myself. This led to a series of works titled ‘The Women of the Earth’, based on the Cosmology and Spirituality of the Mapuche, the indigenous inhabitants of Chile, and my shared genealogy continues to influence and guide my art.

SPIRITUALITY

I have included symbols of Alchemy, Kabbalah, Numerology, Shamanism, Taoism, and Buddhsim throughout the series of my work from my various initiations in these practices. My first teacher in Chile had guided me in a private tutorial and eventually handed me over to the ‘Mother Peace School of Contemporary Female Shamanism’, from which I graduated in 1991, in Oakland, California. I have also received a Tantric Dakini initiation by the Dudjom, Pegyal Lingpa lineaged of Bhutan in 2008.

My Visionary pieces are imbued with my research of indigenous people, the land, and spirituality, and held symbols of my esoteric studies. I was inevitably guided to take part in the Sacrament of Plant Medicine. This event triggered a massive breakthrough in my self-awareness, and to this day I consider it to be the most tangible experience of “God” that I have ever had. My new physical, cellular understanding of our Creator beyond my earlier Catholic indoctrination, and it embodies all of my spiritual quests. My themes are tribal, earthly, and honor the female principles of ancient matriarchal traditions.