Nate Freeman: How do you spend your time when you're not working?

Emil Sands: I read as soon as I wake up. Before coffee, before anything really. Novels and memoirs. But I'm not always so well behaved, of course. I love to party. I'm very good with very little sleep, I think I have about two more years for that to be true-and I plan on using them.

NF: You're not physically present in your paintings of young men and women, often in a state of undress, whereas, in your writing, you are discussing your own experience growing up with hemiplegia. How do both inform each other?

ES: My interest is in the classical body in ancient art, and half the book is about the idea of the "body beautiful" and 5th-century-B.C. marble masculinity, all wrapped into one.

NF: What excites me about your artwork is that the gestures that you are doing are very natural. I'm talking about the shifting of weight from one foot to the other.

ES: The transference of weight is the reason I began to love the classics in the first place. It is a completely classical idea of contrapposto, [a posel where you have a transfer of weight across both your legs that leads to one leg being flat and the other one being slightly raised or on your toes. And that, because of my disability, was how I stood naturally as a child. Then, to see bodies that I knew were lauded for standing how I did, I felt super connected to them, which was interesting because I knew that I didn’t have an ideal body, and yet I felt like these ideal bodies could be like my brothers and sisters.

NF: Where were you seeing these paintings?

ES: I was very lucky to be able to grow up in a house where every week my granddad took me to the British Museum or other museums around London. You stand in front of a sculpture and you extrapolate what you can from it. You ask questions like, “Why is this arm up?” or, “What myth does this refer to?” I had this one teacher who made the impressionists sound like the coolest people that ever lived.

NF: Were you also thinking of yourself as a writer? They’re not that dissimilar necessarily, but they are different things that a creative person does. I write. I can’t paint.

ES: I always wanted to be an artist. I always thought that would be the most amazing, romantic dream in the entire world. And then with writing, again, I’ve always thought there’s no more of a romantic career than being a writer. My mum is an amazing journalist and editor who has worked with writers her whole life. It’s a very different type of writing, but she was always an icon to me. I knew how good at it she was and how far away from that I was. I didn’t think of it seriously as something I could do until I moved to the U.S.

NF: When you were at Yale, did you meet people who encouraged your writing?

ES: I met this amazing, wonderful writer, Anne Fadiman, who is a professor of a kind of iconic Yale class: Writing About Oneself. She told me that a piece of writing that I did for her was.

NF: What was that essay about?

ES: My cerebral palsy and my body. I wrote the essay one long evening, and it flew out of me. It killed me because before I wrote it the whole point of my life was hiding and lying about my body. I grew up hyper-self-conscious, and through a series of surgeries and treatments I was able to pass as normal. I would lie about my body. I was deeply ashamed. I wanted it to be different, and I took that lie as far as I could. Until I wrote this piece, I hadn’t even conceived of it as lying.

NF: It’s relatable for everyone because everyone has something they don’t like about themselves.

ES: I was warned before the publication of The Atlantic article that I might get backlash, that it would be bad to say that you don’t like your body. In fact, I got the opposite of that. People said, “Well done for being honest.” You know, we all have stuff we don’t like. It doesn’t feel good to not like my body, but it’s at least honest to say that.

NF: And people just recognize that. The honesty is very real. And you can’t fake honesty. How would you define your approach to dressing?

ES: Anything I won’t mind getting paint on.

NF: Where do you see yourself in terms of how you’re painting, what you’re painting, why you’re painting?

ES: I’m 27, so I’m very young, and there’s a long career ahead of me that will peak at the right time. I’m so anxious to get things exactly right as quickly as possible, but I’m probably stymying myself a bit by not letting the thing breathe. I work—quickly is probably the wrong word, but as I say, quite energetically.

NF: I’ve always found the physicality of painting fascinating. Are you conscious about how your body is moving in the studio?

ES: The only reason I’m conscious is because I’m constantly falling over things, which tells me that I’m moving. Because I have all these stools, I’m constantly falling over them and tripping up. I’m so glad that I have a job where I get to stand up and work with my hands. I paint pretty furiously. So everything’s kind of everywhere, which is funny because in my life outside the studio I’m very neat. Like insanely tidy. And then I come in here and it’s… I mean, I did a bit of clearing up for you, but it’s mainly a mess.

NF: I find it incredibly neat and tidy. I’ve certainly seen worse studios. You don’t have ashtrays overflowing and all of that.

ES: I quit smoking.

NF: Which is the right move, readers. It sounds like you have a really exciting year coming up.

ES: It’s funny because I’m coming to some kind of an endpoint with this book. The whole year of writing has been, “Will I get enough words down on the page?” And now it’s like, “Oh, now you’ve done it; how do you make them really good?” The goalpost moves in. I had this weird thing the other day when I was writing, where I was quite close to the end and I thought, God, there’s going to be a time when you’re not writing this book. And that’s really weird. I like my life; I like writing. I like waking up ridiculously early and writing and then going to sleep. I like telling my friends I’m too busy to see them. I like all of these things, and I don’t want that to go away. So I was like, Great, I’ll have to write more books.

Groomer: Whittany Robinson

Production: The Curated

Local Production: Here Productions

Photo Assistants: Mark Jayson Quines and Avery J. Savage

Retouching: Nikita Shaletin

Special Thanks: East Photographic