Mehak Makhija is a Toronto-based painter and interior designer whose work explores quiet symbols — florals, faces, half-formed gestures — rendered on raw, unprimed canvas. Her practice sits at the intersection of two disciplines: one trained in resolving a space, the other still in the process of discovering what it wants to say.

Born in Dubai, Mehak moved to Canada with her family as a child, and has spent her adult life balancing a full-time career in interior design with a lifelong, quieter pull toward painting. She has drawn and painted for as long as she can remember — as a child, all she ever needed was paper and a pencil — and has sold a handful of commissions over the years, though never as part of anything more deliberate. It's only recently that she's chosen to build that instinct into something sustained.

Working in acrylic on unprimed linen and canvas, Mehak leaves her surfaces exposed rather than sealed, treating the raw ground as part of the finished image. Loose, gestural florals and recurring, often unresolved portraits move through her compositions — less concerned with fixed meaning than with staying open, familiar enough to invite recognition, incomplete enough to leave room for the viewer.

Figuring Out, her debut collection, marks the first public chapter of this work: ten original paintings made in the process of locating a visual language, not after having found one. It is, in many ways, a study in showing up before anything is finished or certain.