Jenny Saville

An artist born in Cambridge England who received a BA with honors at the Glasgow School of Art Scotland, Jenny Saville went on to study at the Slade School in England where a top art collector purchased her entire final portfolio. He then commissioned her for the follow two years. This sent her into the media spotlight and secured a seat in becoming a cannon among 21st century artists. She is now 37 and lives mostly in Italy.
She is known for her large-scale oil paintings of mostly nude women. Examples would be Prop 7ft by 6ft and Fulcrum 9.5 ft by 16ft. Saville is concerned with women’s’ contemporary issues and in particular the way women have been portrayed in art history. Having been painted mostly by men she feels they have been unable to get at the core essence of women, instead concentrating on their outward beauty.
She likes to paint figures that “manifest in their flesh something of our contemporary age.” Many of her paintings are of overweight women and people in various stages of change, such as cosmetic surgery including sex change patients. Her references are gathered from magazines, medical books, Internet, photographs and surgery observations. Saville prefers not to use live models in a conventional way, rather taking hundreds of photographs of them and then working from the prints. She uses her own her own image in many of her pieces in conjunction with other studies.
When beginning a painting she mixes multiple pots of paint rather than using a palette
and can often have anywhere up to three hundred colors mixed for one painting. Study sketches are not part of her process, preferring to work the paint and the composition as an ongoing discovery.
She talks of the rhythm of painting and how it relates to music, which reminded me of the ancient Greek philosopher, Pythagorus, who its said discovered harmonic chords in music and went on to relate harmonious elements to all things including the structure of painting and sculpture.
Seville often listens to music while she paints and relates the idea of ‘ active and quiet areas’ of a piece and sometimes painting fast to convey movement.
What intrigues me about Savilles work is the level she goes to in manipulating the paint to convey the flesh in her paintings. She uses cooler blue tones in parts of the body that would have less blood circulating and then deeper reds in areas where blood circulates more. In some areas she will add more oil to the paint so as to read as sweat on the flesh. The addition of oil is also used to give more movement to the paint and so to the overall composition. The figures are often holding, pushing or contorting their flesh helping to show the pliability of the flesh. In watching plastic surgery procedures she was able to view the body as a more manipulative medium, with a sense of what takes place under the skin and so translate that with paint on canvas. She uses the paint in a sculptural way and Michelangelo, Leonardo and Bacon are some of the artists she goes to for reference.
Saville has received mostly praise from her critics, some have described her large scale as “gargantuan” and have admired her proficiency in “handling paint in such a tactile way” and noted how she breaths energy into her figures by the distortion of scale and tone. She has been called a feminist; painting the figures in the forms she does as a response to the “inadequacy of existing imagery of women." All of her one-woman shows have been in New York as she has hailed the city as “being receptive to art that reflects the language of contemporary times.”
It is no wonder then that her paintings draw much emotion from the viewer as she treats the process of painting with such study and emotion. In all of her paintings she seems to use the brush in place of a pen, using brush stokes and color and movement to channel the story she wishes to tell. They’re large format cause them to be, imposing, provocative, challenging. In the painting Prop, the figure literally pushes the boundaries of the frame with the figure dominating the canvas. In the painting, Stare the portrait of the boy is filled with much emotion, produce by the intensity of the colors and the movement of the brushstrokes. It reminds me of an accident, as if you should not be witnessing it but you can’t look away.
Her painting, 'Plan' she paints a wonderful representation of a figure ‘marked’ for cosmetic surgery, refusing to paint the lines but rather choosing to gauge them out of the paint. She has said that she looks at her painting technique as a way to discover the landscape of the body; this painting is a fine example of this.