Beauty in the work of Jenny Saville

1. Beauty in the work of Jenny Saville Alejandro Aldrin, Isabel Gomez, Jonas Manuel, Jeremy Plana, Ryan Titong

2. Jenny Saville • English artist born in Cambridge (1970.) • She studied in the Glasgow School of Art, University of Cincinnati, and the Slade School of Fine Art (London). • During her senior show in 1993, Charles Saatchi purchased her entire collection and commissioned works for the next two years • She paints larger than life-size paintings whose themes revolve around the female body, beauty and sexuality.

3. Working Habits • She likes to work with photographs • She will take photos of herself and her body, and even her friends’ bodies. • When she takes photos, she will take of fragments of the body rather than the whole thing, because she works large scale meaning she works on fragments rather than wholes. • If she has a model, she will do about 10 rolls of close-ups, but never paint while there is actually a model in front of her. “I just kind of try to take the knowledge with me. I don't want to get an illusion of a female body. I'm more interested in painting areas of flesh. It's as if the paint tends to become the body. It's like sculpture or something. When I put the paint on in layers, it's like adding layers of flesh. There are areas of thick flesh,where the paint becomes more dense.” - Jenny Saville

4. Working Habits • She studies subjects before actually painting them • She uses medical textbooks as references. For instance, if she wanted to paint stretch marks, she would look it up in a medical textbook and find what causes them. Her belief was “…If you can understand what makes them, you can understand how to paint them better.” • She has also been known to actually sit in and observe plastic surgery procedures or visit clinics where they do stuff like suction, electric probes, body wraps, or anything that promises to make women thin

5. Working Habits “I like the idea of using yourself because it takes you into the work. I don't like the idea of just being the person looking. I want to be the person. Women have been so involved in being the subject-object, it’s quite important to take that on board and not be just the person looking and examining. You’re the artist but you’re also the model. I want it to be a constant exchange all the time.” - Jenny Saville • She likes to incorporate herself into her works, by either painting herself, or putting her head on someone else’s body • She believes that this way she breaks the convention of females only being the “object,” and she is also questioning the role of power of the female in art.

6. What is beauty? “There is a thing about beauty. Beauty is always associated with the male fantasy of what the female body is. I don’t think there is anything wrong with beauty. It’s just what women think is beautiful can be different. And there can be a beauty in individualism. If there is a wart or a scar, this can be beautiful, in a sense, when you paint it. It’s part of your identity, Individual things are seeping out, leaking out.” - Jenny Saville

7. What is beauty? “I've got a thing in my studio that I found, it was about ‘how you can have great legs, too,’ or something. And it had the perfect leg and ankle measurement. Jerry Hall was fine, but Fiona, who used to do GMTV, her knees were far too big. It went through all these celebrities. "Lulu's Thigh Battle" and all this stuff you could do to make your legs better. You see, if the majority of women have legs in a certain way, then that's the way legs are. But this is like a minority of people telling the majority that they are wrong.” - Jenny Saville

8. Plan (1993) Oil on Canvas 274.5 x 213.5cm • This painting presents Jenny Saville’s unconventional representation of a beauty that does not fit into the “society approved” mould of perfection. • The lines on body are meant to be the lines plastic surgeons trace onto patient’s bodies before liposuction. • The focus here is on how plastic surgery is used to make women more conventionally attractive according to societal ideals and how women are molded to be pleasing to the male gaze.

9. Plan (1993) Oil on Canvas 274.5 x 213.5cm • When you look at this painting, you immediately think of this woman’s huge thighs, her hairy pubic area, and her all around voluminous body, and you think, “How is this beautiful?” • To that, Jenny Saville says that “…women should be able to follow their own perception of beauty, rather than the ideal projected upon them.”

10. Plan (1993) Oil on Canvas 274.5 x 213.5cm • One more thing about this painting is that Jenny Saville uses her own face for the subject and if you actually look at the face and the facial expression, there is also something unconventional about it. • Another interesting thing is the perspective from which we view the painting. It has some sort of dominating perspective especially if you are viewing it in full scale looking up at it.

11. Branded (1992) • Here, Jenny Saville, again uses her own face on top of an obese body. • From this full frontal view, we see the full effect of the obesity and enlargement of the stomach and the breasts. • The woman, again, has an expressive look that doesn’t conform to the usual “passive object” look.

12. Branded (1992) • On the body are the words delicate, supportive, decorative, petite, and irrational. • These words could represent what Jenny Saville might have had in her mind while thinking about the natural beauty of the body, but then comes the word “irrational.” • The woman in the painting is gripping a fistful of fat, which means that she is conscious of the fact that she is indeed fat. • Jenny Saville would consider this an irrational insecurity seeing as she believes in the unconventional beauty of things.

13. Branded (1992) • About this piece, Jenny Saville said, “I wanted that intensity, the way you look at yourself when there’s something wrong. That’s all you see.” • And at first you seem to think that this painting is celebrating proudly the “full glory” of the female form, but then that one part of insecurity of the woman grabbing her own fat shows that she is actually struggling with cultural misconception of fatness.

14. Themes of Sexuality Matrix (1999) Passage (2004)

15. Unconventional Beauty “When I did [Interfacing] I had a wart on my face too, like her. Everybody used to look at it. It became quite an obsession, so the whole painting grew out of this idea: that all everybody ever sees of you is this wart. So there's no background. The whole thing's flesh.” - Jenny Saville Interfacing (1992)

16. Flesh and Body Fulcrum (1999) Strategy (1994) #4 Closed Contact Series (1995-96) Hem (1999) Closed Contact (2002) Hybrid (1997)

17. Impact • To me, it is a way of expressing what an artist feels about the world and herself. This artist gets his inspiration from her love of painting and her strong interest in the feminist theory. She has a view that females have the right to make it big as artist. - Ryan Titong • Her paintings are usually paints of fat naked women. I think they're rather disgusting or weird rather than beauty in any way. – Jonas Manuel

18. Impact When asked if she thought that in some sense she was doing women a disservice by making them look so horrible? She replied “No. Men might well think they look gross, but other people, such as women, will think, that's how we are.” Also some people said that they wouldn’t want it displayed in their homes, and she commented, “Yes, people say they're good but they couldn't live with them. They're not meant for that. I want them hung in public, all together, so they relate to each other, not be tucked away in people's homes.”

19. Impact Despite whatever people’s opinions of her may be, it is undeniable that Jenny Saville has left quite an impact on the art society. She challenges the conventions of what male fantasies and what society considers as beautiful by representing alternate forms and notions of beauty. She also challenges the viewer to review and reflect on our personal perceptions of beauty. She can also serve as a role model for feminists, because she depicts women free from male scrutiny. Although we see nude women, we don’t see the convential atrractive woman in a passive pose, but rather we see ‘‘real women’’ with their emotions and inner struggles.