Jenny Saville

Through the first four sessions of life drawing that we have had so far, and from having not done a great deal of figure drawing before the beginning of this course, I have been discovering a great deal about my own inherent leanings in this particular area. The mode that tends to be the most comfortable and expressive for me is with gestural drawing, making strong and loose marks, often repeatedly for emphasis or also to remove emphasis by making things indistinct (there is a balance with this that I am still trying to perfect, as I can often overwork my drawings at this stage). Of the drawings that I have been making, those that I am most interested in after the fact tend to be raw, perhaps aggressive. With hindsight this makes sense to me as this is reflected in a lot of my tastes in other media, notably film and music, be it the bio-mechanical ultra-violence of Shinya Tsukamoto's Tetsuo or the oppressive, claustrophobic sound-scape's of Neurosis' Times of Grace album. There is a link between all these elements for me that goes some way to interpreting how I view the world on a subconscious level.

Jenny Saville's paintings are depictions of the reality of flesh, and more importantly they are direct links to our own complicated feelings about our own bodies, both on a personal level and also as a society. There is distortion through the choices of angles uses to view the figure, distortion through physical contortion in some cases, emphasising the sense of almost fundamental discomfort of existing in the body being portrayed. In the above painting "Strategy (South Face/Front Face/North Face)", the chosen angle is used to highlight and even emphasise the obesity of the figure, further drawn out by the choice of views available, providing the observer with every single detail of that specific facet of the figure. In each segment, the figure is looking directly at the observer, not allowing herself to be dehumanised in the otherwise fairly mechanical manner in which she is being presented.

Although not the most extreme example of Saville's style of painting, this piece does serve well to demonstrate her primary concerns, that of flesh as an agent of life and also death. Her work reeks of mortality in it's various stages, and is strikingly vivid and physical. Interestingly, the 'North' and 'South' segments are comparitively duller in tone compared to the 'Front' segment, which almost glows.

"Continuum" shows more clearly the aggressive nature of flesh that she more commonly presents, her palette emphasises the blood under the skin, particularly in the lips, with the gestural nature of her markings leaving some of the finer details of the figure to the imagination - does the child have a birthmark, or is he merely flushed? There is a suggestion perhaps of physical trauma, or at least a heightened state of emotion.

Jenny Saville's own self-portraits are particularly revealing as to her rationale for her work in general. Again her usual motifs of the significance of flesh, of curves and weight, are prevalent, this time with additional neuroses regarding her own issues with her body. She has drawn lines on her own body, reminiscent of contours of a landscape as you would find on a topographic map, and also similar to the lines used by plastic surgeons when marking out their incisions. Saville spent some time early in her career observing plastic surgeons at work, and this again only highlights the significance of body dysmorphia as a central theme. There are complicated feelings being demonstrated regarding her own body, and she is confronting that in all of her work by examining the bodies of others, alive and dead, human and animal, and in her most interesting work, managing to create a sense of a juxtaposition of all four states at once.