Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Sasha Davydova. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Sasha, thanks for joining us today. When did you first know you wanted to pursue a creative/artistic path professionally?
Exploring any kind of art fired me up since I can remember myself, the joy of making something holding a special kind of magic. It was just what I have always done, though I often struggled to reconcile the stubbornness to commit my educational path to art with uncertainty about the future.
Even when I was studying Illustration at the School of Visual Arts, my concept of what I could do with it to support myself in a worldly sense was nebulous at best – I only knew that it was where I wanted to be, and what I wanted to be doing.
I never graduated SVA. I had to leave New York in my junior year to recover from a harrowing addiction. It felt at the time to be a life-ending event, but ended up being one of the greatest gifts I have ever received, wrapped stealthily into the opportunity to press a hard reset on my entire life and start over as an adult. A newly fledged and bumbling one, but an adult nonetheless.
Beginning again from scratch, every possible path seems overwhelming and enormously difficult, so it doesn’t make any sense to hedge your bets. Every choice you make for yourself is conscious, unencumbered by circumstantial trajectories, fresh marks stark against blank paper. There’s your dreams and then there’s more traditional paths, and neither is a further reach than the other from rock bottom. So that’s what I did, I reached, and took a bike to a train to a bus to a shop where they were willing to teach me, every day after my shift at Chipotle. I wasn’t afraid, or uncertain. Everything I was afraid of had already happened.
There’s a profound sense of responsibility and awe when I reflect on how deeply my recovery is integrated with my journey of building a career as an artist. Both of them demand the same things of a person – a total lifestyle overhaul, daily commitment, a willingness to face devastating amounts of fear and discomfort, the courage to break your heart open to continually expose yourself to this world with vulnerability, and faith in both yourself and the world. The latter, for me, was the hardest of all.
In my experience, it was that dogged tenacity that was necessary for me to find to fight for my life back, that is necessary for anyone who makes their way in this world as a creative professional.
Sometimes, on either of those paths, everything is working against you, inside and out.
All of that was a really long way of saying,
I knew with absolute certainty that I wanted to pursue the creative path professionally on the same day I knew I wanted to live again.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
My name is Sasha. I grew up between St. Petersburg, Russia, and New York City. I’m currently a resident artist at First Class Tattoos in the Lower East Side.
Tattooing was always uniquely interesting to me because of its transformative and visceral nature. Paintings and drawings can be preserved and observed by generations, but when you tattoo someone you become a part of them for the rest of their life. You often never see that piece that you made ever again, but you know that it roams free, imbuing the wearer and their story – and in it, a piece of you. That feels way more permanent to me than any painting I could make, even if it outlives us all.
Again and again, all kinds of people that couldn’t be more different from each other sit down in my chair and trust me with their innermost selves. We talk about the most significant things they have experienced, about all the things in this world that hum for them with recognition and resonance, and we create something beautiful. It is a living, breathing, healing thing, and it wouldn’t exist without both of us working on it together. They endure long hours of pain with a patient resolve right there by my side, trusting me to etch their skin, permanently altering their body. It is almost an alchemical process, for so often I believe that I am witness to the alterations of the spirit as well. It can be nothing short of sacred.
What I hope to be my defining feature as a tattoo artist is the utmost respect for all the aspects of this craft that move beyond creating a beautiful design. Tattooing is brimming with ritual, intimacy, and mutual transformation. Tattooing is a way to take control of, to process, to honor something, and to unfurl towards the world. I love making art and I love people and their stories, making me dizzying grateful for this being my vocation. I learn so much from each one of my clients, and each one of them is as much a necessary part of the creative process as I am, expanding and elevating my own capacity by orders of magnitude – not just as an artist, but as a human. What I do couldn’t be possible without them.
I strongly believe tattooing to be a process of revealing, as opposed to adding. From what I have experienced so far, this concept stretches way beyond the images we conjure and wear. What I would want all of my clients to know is how reverent I am of this process, and how grateful I am to be a part of it with them.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I am still unlearning my discarding of the value of creative play. There is a ton of results-oriented pressure as a tattoo artist – for very obvious and necessary reasons, of course, but it has taken a toll. I feel as though I have strayed too far from the joyful, relaxed nature of just making art for the sake of Making and nothing more.
I try to nurture this by engaging with things I am totally cool with being bad at like clay, collage, film photography, ukuleles.. this act of reaching is often accompanied by a wretched, offensively compelling inner critic posing as a perfectionist, droning heavily a boring anthem of personal incompetence. Every time I tell it to shut the hell up, I am unlearning the disempowerment of letting it roam free in my head. Separating myself from this voice, being gentler with myself, and connecting back with the value of having fun with my creative practice are all things I’m currently focusing on.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
Neil Gaiman’s 2012 commencement speech at the University of the Arts, “Make Good Art”
Olivier de Sagazan’s Transfiguration
Nick Cave’s Red Hand Files
the Only Worlds We Know by Michael Lee
House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
Dune by Frank Herbert
Emergence album by Trifonic
Contact Info:
- Instagram: sashatattoo.nyc
Image Credits
All tattoos done at First Class Tattoos, NYC https://www.firstclasstattoos.com/