Rising Stars: Meet Natacha Sochat

Today, we’d like to introduce you to Natacha Sochat.

Hi Natacha, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
As a child, I overheard that I would be a healer. For me, this was a magical and spiritual declaration, for at the age of 5, I did not understand what the curandera meant when she spoke to my grandmother in my presence.

At that age, the drawings that I created with my hands about the world around me and within me were as natural as breathing. I had not made a conscious connection between healing and art. It was much later, when I decided to become a physician, that I had the epiphany that art is for the expression of knowledge, sharing of ideas, and healing.

I am now 73 and have had a full and complicated life. As a young woman, I became ill for a short period of time, and I discovered the epiphany of the positive of being able to live to become old. I decided to fight against the negative of illness.

As time has passed, I discovered that we live in a world that treats its citizens like machines that exist to be manipulated to serve the interests of literally a handful of others.

What could I do as a healer and artist to live in this world? I would be a role model to others, and I would also create images to heal. I would share my knowledge; I would teach others and my children the concept of Ubuntu as they began their journey. I would teach them the concept of enough so that they would not fall into the abyss of a never-ending need for more. There are those who never reach personal satisfaction and actualization in a chase for more.

I live my life on this simple journey to this day. I live well and have enough. But I am perturbed at the way society has nurtured greed and endless gluttony of money to the extent that we no longer have a middle class. Every profession that they could take over has been destroyed for the need to make a profit by an unnecessary middleman. The few that are never satiated (despite so much wealth, they cannot spend it in a thousand lifetimes) continue to steal every penny that they can hoard.

My story cannot exist outside the reality that is our current society. I am very successful because I have more than one profession. I realize that what makes a society rich are all the people who contribute to the mundane everyday machinery of society and not the people who hoard money for money’s sake.

We have a greedy oligarchy that has taken ownership of society by the dominance of the media and ownership of the government. Corruption is rampant. Even our beloved Supreme Court is owned by money. The Supreme Court gave billionaires and corporations ownership of our government through their Citizens United ruling. The media is our gatekeeper, and it manipulates incessantly such that we are polarized and rendered powerless.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Our lives are hardly ever smooth. The struggle has been to nurture and develop self-awareness within the realm of the constant barrage of what we should think and value. Too many people are easily manipulated to bicker with each other and not think independently. They don’t realize that it is the oligarchy that is the problem.

Too many people accept the constructed right vs left binary they have been assigned. Too many people have lost the realization that we are not binary but complex beings that exist in both conditions. Too many people believe that giving billions to corporations is good for the economy, but if we give millions to citizens, then it is called socialism. When are we going to wake up as a society and see the toxic lie that we are indoctrinated to believe?

We are a nation of immigrants, yet we have developed a whole slew of people who blame immigrants for their problems and are blind to that it is the gluttony and greed of the oligarchy that has stolen the quality of our lives.

In terms of the world of art, there are too many institutions and curators who only look at an artist if the artist is giving the message that the institution or curator wants to promote. They are not interested in what many artists need to say in subtle ways to enrich society. They only exhibit their agenda, so we have the same message nationally, and it becomes very banal even if it is important.

I am lucky to have a partner in life, and this has made things easier. We all benefit from emotional support. Not all of us are lucky to have supportive families, and some of us come from destructive families. Don’t let the negative of others decide your fate. Don’t give them power by letting negative people affect your decisions.

Trust and respect your gut. Believe in yourself. A dose of self-doubt may be useful (not to take things for granted), but self-doubt that freezes action debilitates and is never good. There are good times, and we all have bad times. Create work that is authentically yours, and don’t let anyone decide what your work needs to be.

Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I span two categories: professional and artist/creative. I discovered that it is not necessary to narrow one’s development and exclude possibilities. Self-actualization and nurturing of one’s potential does not have to be singular. My aim has always been excellence and not perfection.

I have been a physician as well as an artist simultaneously. I worked as an emergency physician and did public health emergency preparedness. All the while, I still created art objects. I did not find this problematic, but rather, it was so enriching of my journey that I could not imagine it any other way. Each fund of knowledge continually adds to the richness of the other.

I am a painter, printmaker (woodcuts, linocuts, lithography, drypoint), and occasional one-of-a-kind artist and book creator. My latest solo exhibition was in March 2024. It was titled “Lo Que Tengo que Decir – what I must say.” I intentionally created paintings that cannot be easily seen online due to the subtlety of the words I placed in them and the patterns that are a large part of their design. They became repositories for a summary of my life’s work.

My art is in institutional and private collections. I sell via direct means to collectors and also via curators approaching me. When I was younger, I was part of a gallery. Though a gallery is a convenient way to regularly exhibit your art, it is not solely what will make you successful.

I have been involved in over a hundred juried group exhibitions, as well as a significant number of solo exhibitions. I have taught painting and printmaking for several decades. I will continue to create work for the rest of my life.

Can you share something surprising about yourself?
The problem has been that we exist in separate professional worlds such that the world of medicine was always shocked that I was an artist and medicine did not take art seriously.

The world of art initially held it against me that I was a physician, so I could not possibly be a true artist. This is where I continually had to struggle against the narrow societal preconceptions of what type of person I should be. I was successful in both worlds, but they were separate rather than in union (even if, in my mind, they were unified).

What people did not know and were surprised to learn and finally see is that one fund of knowledge nurtured the other and nurtured me as a human creative. My self-worth existed within this symbiotic duality.

Now that I am in the later part of my life, most people do not know that I have lived with a ticking bomb of disability all my life. I am very grateful that I was spared for so long. I vowed that I would not let that factor dominate my existence but rather be as good a role model and not dwell on the fear of loss.

Ironically, this made each day that was healthy even more precious. Every birthday, I declared, “I am alive,” and I would try to take in as much of the world around me as I could. When the time came that I lost some of my normal physical function, I still found ways to live a creative life and be ‘normal.’ I will continue creating with my hands. The hand is the mind.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://natachasochat.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/natachasochat/
• Other: https://natacha.net/

Image Credits
Natacha Villamia Sochat