"My art is a dialogue between the cosmos and the human — painted in gold, stitched in memory, felt before it is understood." · Santa Fe, NM
Nandi
Makala
Original Fine Art Catalog
Available Artwork
“Nandi Makala is a French-born mixed-media artist whose paintings do not sit flat. They rise toward the viewer — embroidered, stitched, encrusted with gold leaf and thread — creating surfaces where the raised line of a stitch carries as much meaning as color. Working from Santa Fe, she fuses painting with textile in works that explore what she calls Origins, Memory, and Resilience: the cosmic and the corporeal held together through gold, pigment, and the ancient technology of thread. With training from the National School of Fine Arts in Angers and years of precision craft at Hermès, Makala brings a rare combination of fine art vision and luxury-grade execution to every piece she makes. Her works have been exhibited from New York to London, and her abstract canvases — rich with gold leaf, embroidery, and layered pigment — now inhabit private collections across multiple continents. Commission artwork is available. Nandi works directly with collectors to create original pieces tailored to their space and sensibility.”
— Nandi Makala
The Process
Inside the Studio
The Painting Process
The Painting Process: In Nandi Makala's studio, a painting begins before paint touches canvas. She moves through her materials first — running a hand across a bolt of raw thread, holding gold leaf up to the light, laying out pigments that she'll respond to rather than direct. The process is part meditation, part precision. A lifetime of working with luxury materials at Hermès taught her that the quality of a surface is not decoration — it is the work itself. "I let the materials speak first. Then I answer them." She begins with acrylic or oil, building the painted ground in layers that establish the color field and compositional structure. Then comes what sets her work apart from painting alone: the textile enters. Embroidery, crochet, and stitching are worked directly into the wet and dried surface, raising forms that emerge organically from the painted ground like constellations breaking through atmosphere. Gold arrives in multiple forms — thread for line, leaf for luminosity, pigment for depth — each chosen for what it carries. Leather, metal, and wool are added when the work demands a different weight. "Texture is never decorative in my work. It is meaning made tactile." What anchors every piece, regardless of medium, is the same three-part inquiry Makala returns to with the consistency of devotion: Origins — the cosmic distances, the stars, the sacred geometries that precede human time. Memory — the female body, the textures of personal and ancestral experience, the inheritance carried in the hands. Resilience — the capacity to persist, to transform what is endured into something luminous. Gold holds all three. In Makala's hands, it is not embellishment. It is elemental language — light materialized, history made visible, the eternal given a surface you can reach out and touch.
