Milena Makani
Milena Makani’s paintings continually return to the shifting boundaries between presence and absence, where memory, perception, and sensation converge and dissolve. Recurring motifs—water-like structures, circular forms, and layered transparencies—function less as symbols and more as atmospheres. For Makani, they carry fragility, resilience, and constant change. Living with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and permanent pain has made her acutely aware of physiological fragility, but also of emotional strength and the capacity for joy. Her work reflects that awareness of presence as something always in motion, dissolving and reforming.
Her creative process begins with hours of staring—at nothing, at paints, at a blank sheet of stone paper. She visualizes the work long before she starts layering paint and then spends even more hours watching it dry. When inspiration is low, she does not force it; instead, she sits with the blank sheet or turns to nature, allowing stillness to create the space for perception to shift.
Makani describes her work not as delivering fixed messages, but as offering invitations. Each painting is intended as a threshold into reflection—one day evoking calm, another expansiveness, another energy. Abstraction, for her, fosters connection, and the most fulfilling moments come when a viewer feels understood by a painting and allows it to accompany their journey. She remains true to her practice by staying loyal to slowness: “Trends come and go,” she says, “but connection lasts.”
Although pain is not the subject of her work, living with it has heightened her sensitivity to transience and the intensity of moments of joy. This outlook informs the emotional and material layering of her paintings. Outside the studio, she finds renewal in nature and especially in scuba diving, where the silence and weightlessness of the underwater world offer a meditative kind of restoration.
Makani is open to collaboration across disciplines, particularly with poets and musicians, where abstraction can meet rhythm and silence. She recently released a new series titled Circular Thoughts, exploring cycles, memory, and perpetuation. Two further series are now taking shape: The Full Picture, which examines selective perception and omission, and Inside Out, which celebrates anatomy, its imperfections, and its relationship to emotional and mental states.
