I’m Chimica.
I go by CRE.

I was raised by a single mom in Los Angeles, California. My mother passed away in 2021. I cared for her to her dying breath. Her support and great love drive me every day to keep creating — even when I don’t want to.

Her great love drives me every day to keep creating — even when I don’t want to.

I’m a mom of three, now living in Arkansas. I met my husband online in a local AOL chatroom. We’ve been together for 21 years and counting — a bond built on board games, card games, and reality TV.

I have a master’s degree in Entrepreneurship that I worked hard to finish, even while caring for my mother. Since starting my eBay store, I’ve explored corners of the art world I never knew existed.

I love making abstract things. There’s a freedom in being free to just explore — taking my time, testing ideas, never demanding that any of it be perfect. That’s where these faces come from.

I’m drawn to eyes. They’re the first thing we read on anyone — we notice the eyes, then the smile. During COVID, our eyes were the only thing anyone could see behind a mask, and they became the whole language. So that’s where I start every face: the eyes, and what they’re holding.

Numbers run through all of it. I honestly love bingo — I’d play for hours, alone at a table with those huge hall sheets if I could. But numbers go deeper than a game. The phone number from my childhood, the house I grew up in, the digits we’re taught to memorize young — numbers are how the world keeps track of us. So I work them into the faces, by hand, the way they live in a memory.

Each figure is one painting, made once. No reprints, no second runs. Join me as I keep exploring and expanding this collection into something amazing, long term.