Karmella’s artwork features bold, raw colors on canvas to illustrate familiar scenes and common faces.

STATEMENT
My home town is St. Louis, MO, USA. I have been painting in oil on canvas since I was 11 years old. I have also been an avid puzzle solver and very curious about how the universe works for as long as I can remember. While I was working on my PhD in molecular genetics at Washington University, I was producing paintings and trying to “break into” the professional art scene. Today, I am an assistant professor of biomedical engineering / synthetic biology at Arizona State University.

The “future” is now. So-called “magic” is all around us. I am inspired by surrealism, afro-futurism, Yoruba/Santeria, and the artistic abstractions that scientists like myself use to communicate things that are not immediately obvious to many people. Fiction is an unnecessary distraction. Seemingly mundane facets of our real world are actually amazing. I aim to communicate this through my work.