Lía Tavío Martínez

She trained from childhood in Puerto de la Cruz, taking drawing and painting lessons at Marcos Baeza's academy and studying piano and embroidery. She later attended the Teacher Training School in La Laguna. In 1894 she took part in the artistic, historical, industrial and commercial exhibition organised by Tenerife's Economic Society of Friends of the Country, an early public appearance for her work.

After marrying telegraph official Nicolás Soto Sánchez in 1901, she lived in Madrid, where she took lessons from landscape painter Serafín Avendaño, and later in Medina Sidonia and Cádiz. In Medina Sidonia she opened a photographic studio, coloured portraits and took part in restoration work. That period did not interrupt her writing: she contributed to magazines and newspapers and translated chapters of Charles Blanc's Grammaire des arts du dessin for Siglo XX.

In 1923 she settled permanently in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Her studio and literary gatherings became spaces for making and teaching; she taught painting, drawing, piano and singing, and Jesús Arencibia was among her pupils. Landscape was the genre she practised most, but her work also includes portraits, seascapes, still lifes, popular subjects and traditional costume designs. In the 1950s she exhibited oils in the city again.