jenny saville

Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville is an English painter that specializes in oil paintings, I will be writing to evaluate and discuss her work and subject matter e.g. large women and her interest in floating genders (transsexuals). Also; I will be looking into her inspirations and techniques.

            Saville’s preferred technique is traditional figurative oil painting, usually on a canvas and tends to be much larger than life sized, also Saville tends to  create a very “warts and all” approach to her work, in other words, she creates a image that in most cases word be considered ugly and disfigured and yet still manages to make it art. Jenny Saville draws her inspiration from Pablo Picasso and from her time spent at the University of Cincinnati where she saw “Lots of big women. Big white flesh in shorts and T-shirts.” Also Jenny spent a great deal of the time she had in New York observing plastic surgery operations. [1]

            In a lot of Saville’s work she ventures not only from the female form, but also into grotesque and disfigurations on the female body, for example her piece “Torso 2” (right)  to me this piece shows the insecurities of women as it resembles a pigs carcass that has been strung up at a butches, this combined with the aspects of the female anatomy (a vagina) shows how women feel about their bodies and that they can feel just like a piece meat or, they feel that their appearance is grotesque.

            In conclusion Jenny Saville is a talented artist that see’s the world how it is, rather than trying to make something beautiful and stunning, she shows the audience how the subject is beautiful how it already is. I am still undecided by Jenny as I really like some of her work and yet some of it I find hard to understand and see where she was coming from, but overall, I can appreciate her as a talented painted.

References

[1] "Jenny Saville Biography". Artbank.com. February 5, 2008

By Sam Parks