Jenny Saville

I rediscovered artist Jenny Saville’s work recently. There was so much I could pull out of this in terms of quotes but here are a few I transcribed: “watching them drawing… I have quite an open attitude to art… when I had children the shock of that was just so exciting.”

On giving birth “I felt like I had a very insider of something very human, something incredibly human.”

Inspirations: Leonardo and Michangelo’s drawings, Egyptian art, Francis Bacon, Picasso, Cezanne, Velasquith, Rembrant, Titian, De Kooning, Egon Schiele, Cy Twombling.

The Realm of the Mothers II, 2014, charcoal on canvas.

The way she layers multiple images has many parallels with how I was working with layers last year. This is something I’d like to explore further within the one composition also.

Cascade, 2020, oil on linen, 200 x 160cm.

Saville’s monumental portraits explore the human body and its fascinating aesthetic potential. Her bold and sensuous impressions of surface, line, and mass oscillate between rational and irrational forms, capturing a unique kind of realism specific to the twenty-first century.

https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2020/jenny-saville-elpis/

Other artists to explore as featured in the book Figure Drawing by Jake Spicer which I have on loan from the local library:

• Egon Schiele

• Euan Uglow

• Käthe Kollwitz

• Alan McGowan

• Anita Taylor

• Ishbel Myerscough

• Roy Eastland

• Edward Hopper

• Emma Hopkins