Natasha May Platt is a mural and textile artist working under the name Surface of Beauty (@surfaceofbeauty), based between Brooklyn and Mexico City. Her vivid floral murals are inspired by the rhythm and color of craft traditions, and the energetics of different emotions and states of consciousness experienced as colors flowing through the body. Her murals can be found in New York, New Jersey, Chicago, LA, Bali, Mexico, India, and the British Virgin Islands.
Natasha was born in Delaware and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with a BA in philosophy and religion. She has always been primarily interested in human consciousness and transformation, and decided to pursue art after college as a tactile means to explore individual and collective healing. She was the recipient of the 2010 Gardner Travelling Fellowship for an exploration of textile and embroidery design in India. She lived and worked in Kolkata, India for three years under the fashion designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee, where she immersed herself in the embroidery traditions of India and worked closely with hundreds of skilled artisans, becoming deeply embedded in their community of the course of three years. Her aesthetic and artistic consciousness is permeated with memories and connections of this vivid time, and the visual composition of textiles and the deep spiritual value of craft underpin her mural work. Natasha’s painting practice and meditation, therapy, and journaling practice are deeply interconnected with each other, and are a daily ritual and necessity in her life. She experiences the different emotions as colors, which she channels through her body and transforms as she paints.
Natasha May Platt lives and works between Bushwick, Brooklyn and Mexico City. Her mural work has been commissioned by Netflix, Google, Apple TV, Disney, Coach, Governor’s Ball Music Festival, the Howard Hughes Corporation, the SoNo Collection, NYNow, and Yumi Kim, among others.
