Jenny Saville

I have been a fan of Jenny Saville ever since seeing her work in the Modern Art Oxford in which her awe-inspiring canvas' were on display. While I was doing my scanning I remembered these paintings of large women lying on top of sheets of glass created. I think Saville is truly unique in how she looks at and studies the female form, she does not sexualise or criticise but truly celebrates the power of the female form. The sheer size of her canvas' makes your neck ache looking up at these huge expansive stomachs and thighs. This makes the form portrayed on the canvas extremely intimidating and embues it with a real sense of power. We are bombarded with perfect photoshopped figure which become boring in their unattainability and plasticness. In direct response, Saville's work is heavy, fleshy almost arranged like piles of meat. The directness of the poses and the size of them makes them completely unapologetic, our society shuns these women and Saville sticks her middle finger up at this and spreads their lovely folds in thick bold strokes of paint. I think she is brave, especially as it is herself pressed against the glass, but she is also giving a voice to the hidden women, women who are made to feel less feminine and attractive because they do not conform to our narrow ideals of beauty. Saville states "I'm not painting disgusting, big women. I'm painting women who've been made to think they're big and disgusting, who imagine their thighs go on forever…" She is trying to visualise that self hate that we all deal with, looking at your body and pulling and pinching with disgust. I think she manages to convey this self loathing so well from the sickly colour scheme to the weight of her strokes.

Simon Schama discusses this "Jenny Saville’s monumental paintings wallow in the glory of expansiveness. Jenny Saville is a real painter’s painter. She constructs painting with the weighty heft of sculpture. Her exaggerated nudes point up, with an agonizing frankness, the disparity between the way women are perceived and the way that they feel about their bodies. One of the most striking aspects of Jenny Saville’s work is the sheer physicality of it. Jenny Saville paints skin with all the subtlety of a Swedish massage; violent, painful, bruising, bone crunching." I think this is the best comparison to her style, each stroke seems strong with purpose and meaning, which make the overall effect uncomfortable to look at because every stroke questions your own issues with body image.