Carmen Scarnecchia (a.k.a. Carmen Scar) is an Italian designer based in Turin. A former biologist with a PhD in chemistry, Scarnecchia discovered arts and crafts a decade ago, after returning from travels abroad. She studied painting with Marco Longo and ceramics with Luca Tripaldi but felt that painting is limited by its restricted use—the artist can either display her canvases on a wall or leave them rolled up in a corner of the atelier so she started exploring. After experimenting with painted garments, she realized that she especially liked the jewels represented in ancient portraits; once cut from the rest of the canvas, they still retained their nature as artistic objects. She now paints the kinds of jewels that would adorn a woman in a contemporary portrait thereby creating paintings that are exhibited in public whenever the owner wears them
