Jenny Saville
I am writing this as an analysis of the work of Jenny Saville which I feel is controversial. Jenny Saville was born in England in 1970. She is an artist well known for her paintings of big fleshy nudes of women. She studied at Glasgow in 1998 and then went to Cincinnati University for 6 months. She is a feminist and is fascinated with the human body. She spent a lot of time in the malls in America where big women walked around in shorts and t-shirts. She was influenced by feminist texts, photography by Cindy Sherman, fleshy women in the malls and Gustave Courbet’s paintings. These influenced her painting ‘Propped’ and her degree show in Glasgow. All her paintings sold out at her degree show. Charles Saatchi, a gallery owner spotted her work in 1993 at London’s cooling gallery and he bought all the paintings. Jenny Saville spent a lot of time observing plastic surgery in New York which also influenced her. Her work includes ‘Plan’, ‘Hyphen’, ‘Hem’, ‘Fulcrum’, ‘Brace’, ‘Torso’, ‘Passage’, ‘Propped’.
Passage
This is a painting of a transvestite. Jenny Saville wanted to paint a body that was between genders. The transvestite has silicon breasts and the name of the painting ‘Passage’ means a visual passage through gender, from the penis across the stomach to the breasts and then to the head. It is a gender landscape because Jenny Saville said that thirty years ago this sort of body wouldn’t exist.
Hyphen
This is a painting of Jenny Saville and her sister. It looks like a two headed woman. You can see raw canvas splattered with red that looks like blood or mucus membrane. Looks like
She uses pinks, reds and brown to define shapes of huge naked bodies. It is a painting of 3 sleeping huge women. She used strips of tape, painted over them and then tore them off.
Her techniques are oil figure painting. She paints in layers and uses patches of oil colour. She concentrates on disfigurement and graphic detail of the skin. She sometimes uses photography. She used a sheet of glass to distort her body by squashing it and taking photographs from underneath the glass.
Jenny Saville has also painted transsexuals and transvestites. She multiplies the bodies on her paintings so they fill the whole painting. Her paintings are usually larger than life size. She paints the reverse of other figure painters. They paint beautiful so to some people, Jenny Savilles paintings could appear offensive and ugly. Women in our society are obsessed with their appearance. Jenny Saville paints our worst anxieties and shows the bad points instead of beauty. She shows reality and what people can really look like. She concentrates on obesity and paints a lot of detail on the skin pigmentation to show flaws, disfigurement, and the bodies fill the whole paintings.
My conclusion is that her paintings are Frank and show real women and how they think about their bodies. She shows reality because not everybody can have a beautiful body but she thinks big is beautiful. Some bodies are scarred by plastic surgery and she paints these because they are a reality. She has created a place in our society for over weight women. She is the most daring painter of our time. There is feminism in her pictures because men are shut out. She shows human vulnerability. The media presents women as having a perfect body and she does the opposite.
Webliography
Eyestorm.com
guardian.co.uk
artbank.com
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