Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville is an absolute inspiration for my painting practice. I have known about her as an artist for years, I feel as though she is discussed in almost all of my art classes because she is such a force and a badass in the art world. The contemporary British painter is known for her work involving the female body, body dysmorphia, and large-scale paintings of the human form. A lot of my work, or the work I am hoping to produce in the near future, involves similar ideas. The female nude is a subject in painting that we have seen dating back thousands of years. From figurines of Venus dating back to the Stone Age, to reclining female nudes of the renaissance. I could discuss for pages about how women, and the female body, have been displayed in art throughout the ages, all resulting back to the male gaze and sexualizing the body as the main subject, but we all know all about that. What has made Saville stand apart in that is the undeniable presence of her paintings, making them bigger than lifelike - forcing the viewer to stare at the massive female nude. However - they are nothing like the nudes of classical renaissance paintings. These paintings merge the natural with the grotesque, featuring women at “unflattering” angles, displaying body mutilation and plastic surgery, and massive and intense brush strokes and painterly qualities making them look so unbelievably bodily. The scale and the painterly qualities of Saville’s paintings make them impossible to ignore, a quality I would really like to take to my own paintings. As I am still working to figure out what painting style works best for me, I would like to work with both her style of massive brush strokes and her color palette of creams and muted reds and browns in my next few pieces.