Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville is an artist that I have previously looked at again and again and again, she is a painter from Cambridge as well as one of the YBA's (Young British Artists). She is most well known or her paintings of naked women, and her controversial album cover for The Manic Street Preachers.

"I'm not painting disgusting, big women. I'm painting women who've been made to think they're big and disgusting, who imagine their thighs go on forever....I haven't had liposuction myself but I did fall for that body wrap thing where they promise four inches off or your money back."

Torso 2

The main recurrent theme throughout her work is how women are depicted in the media, her work is generally a reaction against that. Above in Torso 2 is a classic example of Saville's work, here the piece woman has transformed into a piece of hanging meat. She's describing how women fell in her work, and how they are treated. A lot of the women she paints are overweight and she uses special camera angles to exaggerate the size (usually taking photo's from below). Another thing she does is paint on massive canvas and uses household paint, so the actually painting seems sort of overwhelming because of the scale. In the painting below it shows the use of camera angles as well as the marks on the contours of the body, where a surgeon would draw lines.

Plan

"Jenny Saville’s monumental paintings wallow in the glory of expansiveness. Jenny Saville is a real painter’s painter. She constructs painting with the weighty heft of sculpture. Her exaggerated nudes point up, with an agonizing frankness, the disparity between the way women are perceived and the way that they feel about their bodies. One of the most striking aspects of Jenny Saville’s work is the sheer physicality of it. Jenny Saville paints skin with all the subtlety of a Swedish massage; violent, painful, bruising, bone crunching."

Closed contact No.8

In the above painting, it is Jenny Saville herself pressed against glass. I completely adore this, she looks in pain, it's unusual and it makes you look twice. Saville has created a niche almost for overweight women in a society that today is obsessed with appearance and beauty. I love how a passion for something she believe's in is the driving force behind her work.

Here are some other examples of her work that I particularly like:

Branded

I love this because it is full of emotion, the woman's face is almost hidden, the camera angle is there and the woman is holding onto her flesh, which is what a lot of women and men do when they look in the mirror and see spare flesh. I also love how words have been scraped away from the top layer of paint.

Fulcrum

This is just marvellous, again she is saying that people are used and portrayed like pieces of meat, it's so unusual and uncommon to see things like this become popular.

I completely adore Saville's work and why she does it, although I know that the way the media depicts women and makes women feel is very real and many women are affected by it, I am not one of those women. I would love to create something I am passionate about, and spread the word. She is generally painting feelings, how people have made these women feel, I could also look at how other people feel about certain things cause by other's, I could focus on words.