Natacha Sochat MD MFA of Raleigh NC on Life, Lessons & Legacy

Natacha Sochat MD MFA shared their story and experiences with us recently and you can find our conversation below.

Hi Natacha, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re thrilled to learn more about your journey, values and what you are currently working on. Let’s start with an ice breaker: What is a normal day like for you right now?
I get up very early every day, somewhere between 5 and 6 am. I feed my dogs Elsa and Ziggy as well as my cat Homer. I feed a stray feral cat that lives under my deck and usually hunts in our woods for food. I call her Meow out of need to give her a name. Ziggy and Elsa have their morning run out to the part of our yard that is fenced so they can do their necessary morning toilet.
Then I make ‘cafe con leche’ which is coffee with boiled milk as I relax to start the day. Half the time my husband Michael and I do New York Times games while we sip our coffee. We also catch up with the latest news which currently is pretty unpleasant. When the sun comes up and its no longer dark I feed the deer in my woods. They are always there many times a day and though I dislike that they eat many of my flowering plants, I still have empathy for them. I give them raw oats, fresh apples, and fresh carrots. The males have huge antlers so I make sure that I am far away if any males are first to approach. They are wild animals and I do not want to have any type of confrontation with them. In general they are not ever confrontational for it is more likely that they will run away than approach me.
I shower and dress, and it is usually somewhere around 8 am by this time. I go into my studio and start the day doing research and painting or drawing, taking breaks only to walk Ziggy and Elsa. I research for ideas on my painting projects, I make sure I have the necessary materials to complete my projects. I am predominantly a painter, but I also do woodblock prints or linocut prints. I also rarely create an artist book.
I usually stop working around dinnertime. After dinner I just relax and connect with family and friends.

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I am a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, printmaking, and conceptual projects that investigate identity, ancestry, and the invisible systems that connect life. I was born in New York City and raised between Cuba and the South Bronx, I carry within me a richly layered heritage of Taíno, African, and European ancestry. These intertwined roots shape my vision and fuel a lifelong exploration of cultural memory, belonging, and transformation.
My path to art has been anything but linear. Trained first as a physician, I earned an M.D. from Boston University School of Medicine before pursuing an M.F.A. from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This dual grounding in science and art gives my work a unique lens—one that perceives the human body not only as a biological system but also as a vessel of story, spirit, and resilience. In my paintings and mixed-media works, I translate this understanding into luminous color fields, intricate facial patterns, and symbolic landscapes that speak to interconnectedness. Through pattern, portraiture, and echoes of ancestral memory, I seek to honor the complexity of heritage while illuminating the unseen codes that bind us across time and space.
My practice celebrates hybridity and healing, inviting dialogue between tradition and innovation, the personal and the universal. With advanced training in both medicine and fine art, I approach image-making as both a healer and a philosopher. My work has been recognized with the Arts and Culture Award for North Carolina by the Diamante Arts and Culture Center and is held in both private and corporate collections.

Great, so let’s dive into your journey a bit more. What breaks the bonds between people—and what restores them?
Bonds break when fear eclipses understanding, and they mend when people feel seen, safe, and needed. Repair is slow but possible — it begins with personal courage to reach across difference, collective work to build fair systems, and cultural spaces that honor our shared humanity.
When fear, betrayal, and isolation take root, the bonds between people fray. Scarcity makes us compete instead of care; lies and mistrust divide us; anger turns neighbors – even family – into strangers. Families break when love is replaced by control, silence, or unhealed hurt; when listening stops and wounds are denied.
Yet bonds can be mended. Healing begins when we dare to see one another fully – to tell the truth, to listen without defense, to repair harm instead of ignoring it. Families heal when apologies are spoken, boundaries respected, and love is shown through presence and understanding. Communities heal when we work side by side, share stories, and choose connection over fear.
The thread that rebuilds trust is small but strong: honest conversation, shared purpose, and the courage to love where anger once lived. This is how people – and families – find each other again.

Was there ever a time you almost gave up?
Though I never fully surrendered to the impulse to give up, there have been times when I was vulnerable to the negative that is a part of any normal person’s life. These were times when there was an accumulation of negatives that exceeded my capacity to cope and I had to find someone else to talk to. Luckily I have had the wisdom during these times to remember that things usually get better with time even if you have no one to speak to.
Even when no one was available, I held on to the knowledge that circumstances can shift and that, with time, life often moves toward renewal.

Alright, so if you are open to it, let’s explore some philosophical questions that touch on your values and worldview. Is the public version of you the real you?
I am not a good social media person. I think this is because I don’t want to present a fake performative persona to the world, and at the same time, I don’t want to relinquish my privacy. When I am in person – public (not social media) I am always the same person that is truly me. I am kind, honest, introspective, opinionated, and considerate. This comes naturally to me.

Okay, we’ve made it essentially to the end. One last question before you go. What is the story you hope people tell about you when you’re gone?
As a human being I am hopeful that I will be leaving many good memories to my children and grandchildren, as well as my relatives and close friends.
As an artist I am hopeful that my work will be shared with the world. Any artist that still creates despite not having fame must believe in their work to keep working. There are things that I truly know and believe about my work that are important. The story that should be written about my art is the following:
Natacha Sochat — A Synthesis of Art, Science, and Ancestral Vision
Natacha Sochat is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose work fuses painting, printmaking, and conceptual inquiry with the precision of science and the depth of philosophy and ancestral memory.
Holding both an M.D. from Boston University School of Medicine and an M.F.A. from Tufts University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Sochat bridges analytical structure and intuitive vision – creating art that feels simultaneously biological and spiritual, rigorous and poetic.
Her oeuvre encompasses interconnected projects such as NeuroMorphic Universe, Retablos, Paintings for Children and Other Adults, Face Pattern, Trees / Roots / Canopies, and Lo Que Tengo Que Decir (What I Must Say). Each function as a branch of a larger, lifelong system – a visual organism exploring identity, consciousness, and the unseen patterns that bind human experience.
Over decades of practice, Natacha has cultivated a visual language that synthesizes abstraction, figuration, pattern, and metaphor into complex universes – from face-patterned portraits to trees, playful eye guys, and neuromorphic connections. Her work stands at a singular intersection of global artistic lineages, bridging modernist innovation, contemporary abstraction, spiritual exploration, and indigenous legacies.
Describing her work visually and conceptually, Sochat’s art evokes the chromatic exuberance of Henri Matisse. Matisse liberated color from strict representation. Like Matisse, Sochat employs vibrant, sometimes discordant harmonies to convey philosophical meaning, and she extends his vision into layered complexity, weaving fractals, symbols, and organic patterns to explore emergence, chaos, and the profound interconnectedness of life.
Her engagement with ancestry and identity recalls Frida Kahlo, who transformed personal history into universal myth. Like Kahlo, she merges autobiography with symbolic form. Sochat’s faces, trees, and patterned landscapes are both metaphysical and autobiographical, merging her Taíno, African, and European roots into a visual philosophy of belonging and resilience. Through her art, ancestral memory becomes both personal and cosmic – a meditation on what it means to exist within multiple cultural legacies while searching for unity.
In her pursuit of abstraction and spiritual resonance, she aligns with Wassily Kandinsky (who transformed inner emotion into rhythmic abstraction), the spiritual abstraction of Hilma af Klint, and Alex Grey (known for his spiritual and psychedelic work). These artists sought to visualize consciousness and the invisible forces shaping existence. Sochat maps neural networks, cosmic systems, and metaphysical structures with the same urgency that these pioneers brought to charting unseen spiritual and energetic dimensions.
Her systematic, modular approaches – particularly in the Face Pattern Series – echo the conceptual rigor of Sol LeWitt and the meticulous structures of Chuck Close, while her dreamlike, symbolic universes resonate with the surrealist spirit of Jerry Uelsmann, Max Ernst, and Leonora Carrington. In these works, logic bends toward the subconscious, and imagery emerges from inner vision rather than external observation, opening portals into dreamlike spaces where metaphor and intuition reign. Her Face Pattern series, with its kaleidoscopic symmetry and emotional resonance, can be seen as a 21st-century evolution of both Picasso’s Cubism and Chuck Close’s portrait grids, reimagined through a lens of complexity theory, neuroscience, and multicultural lineage.
Sochat’s engagement with rhythm, gesture, and emergent form and her fascination with fractals, networks, and cosmic systems places her in dialogue with science-inspired and cybernetic art traditions, from contemporary artists exploring artificial intelligence, mathematical patterning, and the aesthetics of complexity. Crucially, Sochat situates this intellectual and modernist inheritance within an ancestral and indigenous framework. Her trees, symbols, and patterned forms are rooted in Taíno cosmologies and the hybrid histories of the African and European diasporas. This dimension – often overlooked in mainstream contemporary art discourse – gives her practice profound cultural and philosophical weight. She insists on the presence and vitality of indigenous and diasporic worldviews within a global, forward-looking artistic conversation. Across all these lineages, Sochat’s work remains playful and imaginative, at times echoing the curiosity and inventiveness of Dr. Seuss while sustaining intellectual rigor and spiritual depth.
Her paintings and mixed-media work refuse to choose between tradition and innovation, science and spirit, or personal and universal experience. Instead, they weave these threads into a single, resonant whole – one that is deeply personal yet universally inviting. Through this expansive lens, Natacha Sochat emerges as a 21st-century visionary — an artist whose practice synthesizes historical modernism, contemporary abstraction, indigenous wisdom, philosophical inquiry, and scientific imagination. Her art does more than reflect the world; it builds new universes of thought and perception, offering viewers portals into identity, consciousness, and the infinite systems that bind life together.
Across decades of practice, Sochat has exhibited widely. Her paintings and prints exist as maps of thought and feeling, merging biological rhythm, spiritual reflection, and emotional immediacy. Ultimately, Natacha Sochat stands as a visionary contemporary artist whose work redefines the intersection of art and science, the personal and the universal.
This is the story that a future art historian or curator should say about my work.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://natachasochat.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/natachasochat/

Image Credits
Images Natacha Sochat