THE OVERTURES

I See Myself as Pink

Color, Feeling and Time in the Work of Akira Gordon

by Miden Wood

Every month, we’re going to do an interview with our resident artist. Akira Gordon is Da Vinci Art Alliance’s resident artist for the month of June. 

“My imagination is very visual… So I have these experiences and they kind of play out differently in my head… It’s very animated to me.”

To experience Akira Gordon’s work is to be, all at once, dropped into a moment. Someone has just hit send on a text. Someone else has kicked off their shoes. It’s just occurred to a third person that it might be safe to fall in love.

When asked about how she chooses these moments, Akira says, “It’s definitely me going about life, and something comes to me in such a way that I’m like, ‘Okay, this isn’t going to leave my mind.’”

“My imagination is very visual… So I have these experiences and they kind of play out differently in my head… It’s very animated to me.” This part of Akira’s process is readily apparent on her canvases. Seeing the way Akira captures candor, one can’t help but realize that the candid moments of our lives are not discrete and isolated; rather, they’re defined by their implied before and after. When Akira distills these imagined moving sequences into the singular frame of an oil painting, the work becomes a reminder that time is of and about connection—to the past, to the future and to each other.

Connection, in all its many colors, was precisely Akira’s focus during their June residency at Da Vinci Art Alliance. “I wanted to shift away from painting myself into trying to paint others, to also connect with the community around me and other artists,” Akira says of their intentions for the month in-studio. “A lot of people have come and they’re like, ‘I’ve never been painted before so this is an interesting experience for me,’ and I kind of like that relationship between artist and whoever’s sitting there… It’s a very interesting dynamic, I think. Something’s happening.”

Over the course of the month, Akira invited friends and acquaintances to sit for portraits in their studio, then painted each portrait in predominantly one color. The choice of color varies from piece to piece. “Most of them, I’m like, ‘Okay if that’s what you think your color is, then that’s what I’m going to do,’” Akira says. Then, with a laugh: “People I know better, I’m like, ‘Okay, this is your color.”

I kind of like that relationship between artist and whoever’s sitting there… It’s a very interesting dynamic, I think. Something’s happening.”

It’s interesting to see Akira at work partly because their final pieces feel so effortless. Obviously this very effortlessness betrays tremendous skill. We don’t notice the deft handiwork behind the syrup bottle or the wrinkled bedspread because each element is wrought with simplicity and care. “I don’t like hyper-realism,” Akira says while discussing a few reference books lying open on a work table. They flip through one covering the life and works of Paul Gauguin: “I just love the way they do faces, it’s so beautiful... It just has so much form to me while being very simple.”

According to Akira, the residency has helped them focus in on that same form and simplicity: “I’m very interested in the human figure and the body, and, as much as I can draw a face and a body from memory, sometimes it’s so much up in your head that you’re not really getting everything correctly. So by having people come in and actually sit down for me and pose, I’m really able to just re-learn my skills.”

People I know better, I’m like, ‘Okay, this is your color.”

Pinned to the wall of the studio is a handwritten list of colors and their associations, with line items like “Orange – energy, happiness, vitality” and “gray – moody, conservative, formality, brutalism.”

This is not Akira’s first foray into the world of colors and their corresponding emotions. Their body of work is full of vivid hues that evoke vivid feelings. Akira touches on this when asked about their painting, Mine, Like, My Life. “That particular painting, it’s a quote from a song, a Tyler the Creator song. I was listening to it, and I was like, ‘You know what, I like my life too!’ I think my dog had died at the time, so I was kind of sad about stuff, and was like, ‘I’m just going to start liking my life, because why not?’ So I just wanted to paint that to be very happy. Yellow is a very bright, happy color to me.”

In these new monochromatic portraits, Akira expands the link between color and emotion to a link between color and culture: “For example, the color red you would associate with love or rage, but it also has a psychological thing that it does to the body, relating to, like, McDonalds. The color red also makes you hungry!” In this way, the portraits, in the subject’s chosen color, ask questions about self-definition as it’s in conversation with cultural context. “I’m just thinking about: how do people view themselves in a colorful way? That you can feel something, but maybe it represents something else—but maybe it represents something that’s more true to yourself.”

When asked, Akira laughs and says, “I see myself as pink.”