Written by Alexa Carrasco
It’s Sunday and Sadie Laska is in Forrest Hills, Queens. An average day finds her traversing the city, between Forrest Hills, Chinatown, and Industry City, carrying art supplies for either herself or an artist she works for, playing drums in her band I.U.D, going to art shows, painting. “I’m a painter and I can be a pretty messy painter,” Sadie says. Looking at her work, a collage of loosely shifting colors and shapes that together form an uneven, imperfect whole, the label ‘messy painter’ feels fitting.
“I like chaos and randomness. I like to communicate that I don’t completely know what I’m doing and I’m okay with that,” she says, open and defiant. “Paintings are most exciting to me when they are open and they can fail but they don’t. I like to look at paintings that I can’t quite understand, where you wonder why the artist made a particular decision and you wonder if you even like the work. I don’t want all the information or connections to be made. I want to be confused by paintings.”
An artist who celebrates process and error, Sadie seems to be in a state of constant shift. “I work on the floor and then later hang the works on the walls,” she says. “I work on many pieces at once, moving from one piece to the next with everything at various stages of completion. Sometimes I finish paintings really quickly, while others I work on over long periods of time. I’ve been throwing away a lot of paintings recently. If it doesn’t work, I just tear it apart and start again. There’s a lot of labor happening to make unlabored feeling paintings.”
I like to communicate that I don’t completely know what I’m doing and I’m okay with that.
Although her current obsession is painting, Sadie once focused more on music, a member of the band Growing and drummer for I.U.D. Naturally, the two influence each other. “The experiences performing and making music have contributed to my painting practice a lot,” she says. “I learned to improvise and just go. My painting practice has a performative aspect. Playing music requires a particular focus and playfulness and I try to recreate that while painting. It’s sort of an attitude like there are no mistakes. When I first started playing shows the best advice I was ever given was, ‘Whatever happens just don’t stop playing.’ I kind of take that attitude to my painting.”
Now, among a busy year with two solo exhibits, a residency in Paris, and a show in Luxembourg, Sadie is looking forward to having the time to create a new body of work that she doesn’t necessarily have to show right away. She’s excited to morph and grow as an artist. One way she finds her work changing, is through color. “I’ve recently changed my approach to color,” she says. “Mostly, I’ve minimized the colors in my paintings and started planning the palettes in advance. Color can convey anything. It can be ugly or beautiful or garish, subtle or loud, cool, warm, unsettling. Color is a lot about taste. I like color. It’s disruptive and often regarded as irrational, emotional, and chaotic. Color can completely define an artist, I’m still defining my colors and I’m exploring my heavy use of the color yellow.”
Photos: Nina Mouritzen
