Meet Natasha May Platt

Today we’d like to introduce you to Natasha May Platt, artist Surface of Beauty (IG: @surfaceofbeauty).

Hi Natasha, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers?
I have always been seeking truth and beauty. I spent my college years studying philosophy with no intention of “doing anything” with my philosophy degree, but because I was yearning to discover what gives life meaning.

Immediately after college, I moved to India and showed up at a renowned fashion designer’s factory in Kolkata, asking for a job. I wanted to immerse myself in ancient culture, and absorb through lived experience both the philosophy and the textile traditions that pervade Indian culture. I was allowed to work as an unpaid intern, and eventually, I was hired as part of the design team.

I stayed three years, and I learned Hindi, learned thousand-year-old embroidery techniques, and learned about the weaves and color palettes of the Indian subcontinent. I spent weekends in remote villages outside the city, with the factory artisans who became my friends and family. Those three years irreversibly shaped my life to come, from my approach to hard work in long hours and austere conditions to my color sense to my acceptance of the ebbs and flows of emotions and challenging circumstances.

I moved to New York City at the age of 26, and started life over again at the bottom, working my way up from minimum wage and skipped meals to becoming the manager of a luxury embroidery atelier, designing and producing exquisite couture embroidery for the world’s most sought-after luxury brands.

We did all our design and production in India, so my connection with India was nurtured every day in long Skype calls with the Mumbai factory. These were some of the most stressful years of my life, dealing with the ever-spinning wheel of industrialized fashion and its seasons, shipping and customs delays, and logistical and sourcing problems of the most precise nature.

The size was measured in half-millimeters, not inches, and time was measured in minutes, not days.

After three years, I realized I need to craft a new future for myself outside of the fashion world. I faced an existential crisis and couldn’t find my future written either in the LinkedIn corporate job listings or the Craigslist Creative Gigs section. The precious few moments of peace I felt each day came as I exited the subway station on my commute home and emerged into my beloved neighborhood of Bushwick, Brooklyn, a gritty urban art gallery of ever-changing murals and street art.

Those murals were the only light on some very dark days, and finally, I decided that I would look for a way to paint a mural. I searched Craigslist the very next day and found a posting asking for a muralist. I replied and was hired in a matter of minutes. The next day after work, I was starting my first mural, a tiny logo project for a local restaurant. Later, I was to discover that mural postings on Craigslist are few and far between.

The hand of destiny was certainly at play in the way my first mural unfolded. I was able to convince the restaurant owners to let me paint some original art as well for the grand prize of $100. Two years later, and many early mornings and late nights later, and after many subway rides with ladders and gallons of paint balanced on my shoulders, I opened my Instagram account to see a message from a creative director at Disney. A week later, I had quit my fashion job and was in LA painting a mural for $25,000.

The magic has not abated for a moment since. All my clients find me one way or another, and I have painted for Amazon, Google, Netflix, Apple TV, and many, many more. There has been much hard work, but through it all, there is a flow and an opening of doors that I have never experienced in other pursuits. Through these signs and synchronicities, I know the hand of destiny is at work and my life is finally aligned with my calling.

The deep gratitude and connection to my work and my life have inspired me to become very spiritual and I hope to expand my ability to express beauty and truth into mediums beyond painting as my life and journey progress.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
We don’t learn growing up that you can have a successful career as an artist, let alone a mural artist, so it took me a decade to find my own way into this very niche career path.

That journey was difficult and sometimes full of confusion and despair, but it is also the difficulty of the journey that makes me overflow with gratitude for my current life. As Kahlil Gibran writes, “And how else can it be? The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

As for the mural-making process itself, it is filled with physical and mental challenges of all sorts, but I appreciate and enjoy the self-contained arc of the mural-making journey. It starts with an enormous wall carrying heavy paint and either frigid blowing wind or burning hot sun to greet me on my first day. Completing the mural is an unknown obstacle, a seemingly insurmountable challenge.

Then I began to work, steadily and diligently, and help shows up from all directions. My assistant goes the extra mile, my client shows up with home-cooked food, or the sun suddenly comes out. By day 4, my body is aching and I feel I can’t go on, and sometimes I cry out of pure exhaustion. But I push through and persevere, and by day 7, the mural is done, a check is on the way, everyone is happy, and the passersby start smiling and taking pictures.

I go to the sauna for a few days and rest in the exhaustion and contentment of a job well done, seeing my mural appearing again and again on Instagram accounts across the world. I see mural painting as an extremely efficient way to experience the archetypal hero’s journey— the challenge, the self-doubt, and unsurmountable obstacles, then the help pouring in from unseen realms, and finally, the dragon is slain and the reward is won.

I get to live this whole process in a week’s time. It is mythological, and it fulfills a primal human need for adventure and challenge, and self-realization. It is not the slow burn of constant stress and the grind that wears us out and provokes despair in the face of its unabating toll on our bodies and minds, which I experienced in my former career in corporate fashion.

I am deeply grateful for the possibility to experience life at this level of intensity and then have the time and space to rest and build again.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am known for my vivid and luscious floral murals, rich and florid with color and sensuality.

I portray flowers as larger than life in urban spaces, and by this, I bring femininity, nature, and the subconscious back into our controlled environments. I see the flower as one of the most powerful symbols in nature for the qualities I value and seek in this human experience. The flower is almost unnecessarily and wantonly beautiful, beauty just for beauty’s sake.

Beauty without a purpose is divinity, the divine consciousness experiencing itself just for the play and joy of it. The flower is also ephemeral, with a beginning and an end that no one knows, illuminating the present moment and then letting itself go for the next bloom. It shows us surrender to the passage of time.

The flower is often minimized and simplified in our visual culture, as “gentle,” “girly,” “innocuous,” and “pretty” but the way I paint flowers shows their unruly creative expression that is complete of the moment and powerful. Flowers are wild explosions of color and multidimensional layers that cannot be tamed or contained.

Through painting these flowers, I have learned much about the true nature of feminine creative energy and its raw earthy power, and I seek to bring that energy back into our masculine structured cities.

Can you talk to us a bit about happiness and what makes you happy?
I am happy when I see and experience my life in a flow state, where I watch my questions answered by strangers even before I ask them, and opportunities open and connect me to learn and share more with others.

When I travel and when I paint, these synchronicities happen more often. I feel I am in a dialogue with the universe itself, and my life and my work are an offering to the divinity pervading every atom of this creation.

This is my highest state of joy.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: https://www.natashamayplatt.com/murals
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/surfaceofbeauty/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/SurfaceofBeauty