CheasArt
Who is Carrboro, NC Artist Chea?
Mercedes Castillo Terrell, aka Chea, was born to a family of eight children in a small village in the southwest coast of the Dominican Republic in 1958. Through her own efforts, she acquired secondary education and beyond that led her through a series of careers starting as an elementary school teacher, social worker, clinical psychologist and sex educator. Chea has a university degree in Psychology (Lic.), a Master’s in Public Health (MPH), and a PhD in Clinical Psychology and Mental Health. She has lived and/or worked in Central and South America as well as the United States. Chea has resided in Carrboro North Carolina since 2006 with her husband of 30 years and has two grown children.
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Chea began painting in 2000, first as a hobby with her children, and developed her interest in contemporary art. She began to seek out information on her own and was largely self-taught. Her artwork has been inspired by the creations of various artists such as Matisse, Modigliani, and Picasso, among others, but most of her artwork comes from her imagination. Her art reflects various emotions and feelings of women about their visibility and roles. Those emotions stimulate the observers to identify and immerse themselves in art as related to their own experiences.
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She began her Tropical Fruit Women series more than ten years ago and recently decided to go back and finish them. This series of paintings was one of the ways she used to deal with her breast cancer diagnosis and subsequent bilateral mastectomy in 2010. These paintings are intended for women undergoing the same process to realize there is still beauty and health without breasts. For these women breasts are not only for admiration and pleasure, but also serve as nourishment as tropical fruit.
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In addition to her painting and drawings, Chea started working with fluid art three years ago after being introduced to the medium by her dear friend and mentor Frinee Rodriguez. Since then, she has studied various courses on the understanding and mastery of fluid art and pouring medium. She has been inspired by the work of fluid artists such as Molly Artistry, Rinske Douna, Olga Soby and Mina Villegas among others. She has exhibited her artwork at Red Dot in Miami (2021) and as digital representations of both her paint brush and fluid art paintings through Artboxy in Spain, Italy, Germany, Dubai, Miami and Switzerland. In addition to the artwork for sale on this site, Chea also does original art on commission.