Jenny Saville is a 23 year old, English-born painter who focuses on mostly oil painting larger women. At a glance, her work is disturbing and controversial, but it is much deeper than meets-the-eye. Saville admits that large women have a physicality that she is interested in, and this is reflected in her work, the majority of her work being of overweight women, transvestites or transsexuals.
Exploring ‘wherever the body breaks open’, Savilles’ primary influence to her paintings are human faces and genital regions. Using a traditional medium, the fast-developing world of media has not tempted Saville, sticking with strictly oil based paints. Using oils, Saville is able to create highly pigmented work on huge, larger than life-size scales. Savilles ability to intentionally use directional mark making allow the audiences eyes to move around the page as she wishes. Saville aims to show us the human body as it really is, through her confrontational paintings of obese women.
Saville is most often compared to Lucian Freud, with whom she shares a clear-eyed and unromantic view of the average female form
Working with a natural model, Saville painted a controversial transvestite painting. Saville was ‘searching for a body that was between genders’, this painting is where Savilles use of directional mark making is really obvious, Saville wanted to create a ‘visual passage through gender – a gender landscape’ and this flows from the penis, across the stomach, under the breasts and finally to the head.
At a first look Savilles work can be quite intimidating, her disturbing sketches include surgical photographs of liposuction, trauma victims, deformity correction, disease states and transgender patients, with her paintings following the theme. With a more in-depth search into Saville and her techniques and influences, it is easy to see that her paintings are much more than just a transvestite, each painting portrays a message that Saville can easily get across.
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