Vision Quest

Sasha Gordon spent her formative years painting friends and classmates. Only when she turned her paintbrush on herself did she find true perspective.

- Dodie Kazanjian

Looking at Sasha Gordon’s big full-bodied paintings, it’s impossible not to feel the emotion of what’s happening in her life. “I’m definitely a little like Taylor Swift,” she says, laughing. “If something bad happens, I need to paint it. Sometimes there’s a drought—an idea drought—where I don’t really have anything going on, and other times I’m super emotionally charged and manic, and I need to paint something.” That something is always herself.

Like Froth, her most recent painting, is all about the breakup of her “first-ever dating experience.” Gordon, who is half white, half Asian, queer, and 24, had never been in a relationship before. (The painting was recently in a group show at the Rudolph Tegners Museum outside of Copenhagen, alongside works by more established artists like Cecily Brown, Jenna Gribbon, and Sanford Biggers.) Nude and vulnerable, the young, porcelain-skinned woman in the painting is sitting on an isolated rock in the middle of the sea. The reference is to Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, but the vision is pure Gordon, and there’s no escaping the pain in her eyes. “I had emotions I’ve never dealt with before,” she tells me. “It felt very necessary to paint these feelings, how upset and disappointed I was by someone I truly trusted. During the relationship, I thought a lot about how the person I was seeing was white and how that was very validating for me.” She was devastated by the breakup, but she doesn’t regret it. “The heartbreak really helped my work,” she says. “The painting is so good.”