Carmel Mercado is a self-taught Seattle-based artist on an unrelenting quest to celebrate life and joy with her communities. With her use of bright, bold colors, patterns, speckled backgrounds, and whimsical child-like designs, Carmel aims to evoke happy bemusement, laughter, and a sense of gratitude for the otherwise magically mundane things in one’s day-to-day that create joy. For Carmel, some of those small daily joys include good food and good company (in the form of animal friends), two common themes in her art. Carmel works predominantly with acrylics and mixed media on canvas, but she also creates digital children’s illustrations and indoor mural art. She has been a part of several juried shows and gallery exhibits throughout the Boston, Orlando, and Seattle areas and has received art commissions from institutions such as the City of Bellevue.

 

Carmel’s punchy whimsical style has been heavily influenced by her time working with children as a board-certified pediatric ophthalmologist and from her travels around the world learning folk art and visiting wildlife habitats. In particular, Carmel draws a lot of influence from her time living in Japan. Carmel obtained her B.S. in Biology with a humanities concentration in Foreign Languages and Literatures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her medical degree at the Johns Hopkins University.

 

 

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