Jenny Saville is a contemporary British painter. I somewhat recently read an interview with her for my Advanced Figure Drawing class and decided to blog about her because I find her work very inspiring.
She deals a lot with the female nude. I first learned about her in Foundations Drawing II with looking at her drawings of the large women from the focal point of looking up from below. Those are monumental, but I fell in love with the images that Jim showed us in Figure Drawing. They are sketches of figures that are reworked over and over (pentimenti), so that there are ghosts of images showing and certain areas worked more than others.
In my drawings for this past period in that class (Figurative Expressionist), I've been trying to think more of how I handle my drawing and building up certain places more than others. This is something I've struggled with because I tend to want to work the whole composition evenly.
Anyway, I was just reading through the interview with her and found a lot of her quotes to be very inspirational. Here are a few in particular:
"Painting is my natural language. I feel in my own universe when I'm painting."
"I'm not anti conceptual art. I don't think painting must be revived, exactly. Art reflects life, and our lives are full of algorithms, so a lot of people are going to want to make art that's like an algorithm. But my language is painting, and painting is the opposite of that. There's something primal about it. It's innate, the need to make marks. That's why, when you're a child, you scribble."
"When I was about 11, he [her uncle] gave me a section of hedge, and told me to observe it for a whole year. So I did, and I learnt such a lot about how nature shifts, and the necessity to really look."
"In these pieces, I'm trying to get simultaneous realities to exist in the same image," she says. "The contradiction of a drawing on top of a drawing replicates the slippage we have between the real world and the screen world. But it's about the memory of pictures, too. I'm directly referencing other artists: Manet, Titian, Picasso, Giorgione."
Here are some pictures of her work:
Here is the interview.
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