Last Thursday night, French artist Shan Sa was at the Marlborough Gallery for the New York premiere of her latest exhbition, “Time in West, Light in East“—which doubled as the book party for the English-language edition of her latest novel, Alexander & Alestria. As the publicity team from Harper hovered nearby, she explained to me how she went back and forth between the two media. “Painting is an exercise for me to visualize things,” she added. “I use that ability in my writing; people say my novels are cinematic.” She can see the settings of her stories in her mind’s eye as she writes, she explained, and has been working for some time to train her brain to convert those inner visions into language.
But even though she’s been publishing her literary efforts since she was ten, the painting isn’t just a sideline; after studying art history at the Louvre, she landed a position as an assistant to Balthus in the mid-1990s. Now, she says, “whenever I don’t write, I paint.” And quite lucratively, at that: After I snapped this photo, and Shan Sa wandered off to speak to some of her other guests, a Harper staffer sidled up and told me that the painting behind her was listed in the exhibition catalog at nearly $200,000.