Jenny Saville is a British painter, who studied just a half hours train journey west in the Glasgow College of Art. I only recently became confronted with her work (the only fitting verb to describe experiencing Saville’s art) at the ‘NOW’ exhibition in the Modern art Gallery in Edinburgh. The very first painting I saw was the one pictured above, ‘Propped’, painted in Saville’s final year of university. The self portrait depicts Saville propped atop a stool, dwarfed in comparison with her voluptuous form. Her large muscular legs clawed at uncomfortably, for me showing the uncomfortableness of the subject in her own body. Something I have working to depict within my own paintings and drawings. Scrawled into the surface of the oil paint is a quote from the Belgian Feminist writer Luce Irigary: ‘If we continue to speak in this sameness – speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other’. The writing is not written for the viewer however, but is written backwards as if for the subject to read. When I witnessed the piece first hand, it was hung across the room from a to scale mirror, allowing me to see me self in context with the work before looking at it naturally.
Throughout her career Saville has depicted every size and shape of the female form in brutal honesty, her fascination with flesh and fat caught masterfully in in her oil paint colour palettes, often balancing blocks of colour with realistic skin tones. Jenny talks about this process, ‘I put yellow and red all the way through the painting… then mixing up something that actually works in an illusionistic sense between depth… something very controlled, and then the contradiction of that, something quite irrational.’
An unrefined approach to this process can be seen some of my developmental works.