Amid the scrapyards and warehouses and tire shops of industrial East Williamsburg—or maybe it’s Bushwick or possibly even Ridgewood, depending on who you ask—painter India Sachi, 25, studies the female form. In the summers, she starts her days early. She works until noon, sketching or researching or putting paint to canvas. Then, when the heat of the day hits its peak, she takes off all her clothes, wets them in the communal sink of her studio building, puts them back on, and lies on the floor until she’s cooled off enough to continue the project.
“I’ve been making really large-scale paintings that touch on the intersections of mythology and gender, which has always been part of my work,” Sachi says. “But I’m really leaning toward using mythology to look at the time that we’re in right now. These women that appear throughout the paintings are me performing history or mythology or some sort of erotic scene.”
Pulling from scraps of paper across her studio, Sachi lists her current references: American whalers, the bed as stage for a posed body, the Waqwaq tree of Arabic and Persian folklore, the artist Alice Neel, stolen large precious gems, knee-high stockings, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the Renaissance painter.
She takes particular inspiration from the theme of metamorphosis, the process of shape-shifting that occurs throughout Greek mythology. In one story, for example, Daphne, a nymph, prays to the gods to be protected from pursuit by Apollo, who wishes to make her his bride. Wanting to remain a virgin forever, Daphne is saved when the gods answer her call and transform her into a laurel tree. Each year, Sachi undergoes a metamorphosis of her own with the passing of the seasons.
“Every fall and spring, I’ll make tons of work and paint very freely, and then in the summer and in the winter, I’m battling something that’s stopping me,” she says. “In an ideal world, I would paint only in the fall and the spring, and in the winter, I would read and write, and in the summer, I would just swim.”
But for every young artist, especially one trying to live and work and succeed in New York, these blocks are something to be pushed through. “I’ll get very frustrated, and I’ll have to just let myself be frustrated,” Sachi says. “Once I get past that big frustration or anger that I’m having over not being able to make the painting or think of an idea I like behind the painting, then the inspiration will come really fast and it will launch me back into painting again. It’s like a mood swing.”
