Source 3: Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville is a current painter who's work I look at constantly as a source for my own. I am interested in how she uses the human figure as a vehicle to confront tensions surrounding the body as a living mass of meat. Saville's paintings are sumptuous representations of full bodies, often as a commentary as to how the female form is seen and criticized. Her impasto paint and lush qualities of her images draw me in as a viewer like looking at a frosted cake; I can anticipate how delicious it is. Yet a skin crawling feeling comes over me when viewing Saville's paintings.

These portraits are not of individuals, but of meat and mass, cut up, rearranged, and amplified. I am drawn to these images because they are such (gore)geously rendered images of body discomfort. Her work is beautiful to look at a first glance, disturbing in honesty, and yet undeniably hold my attention. Saville uses gore, scaring, fat, wounds in tandem with lushly painted flesh, which has been developed skillfully though layering of paint. The figures and images she chooses to render are often confrontational and put me on edge.

Figure 1: Propped, Jenny Saville, 1992

Saville paints her bodies that are reminiscent of Ruben's overtly lush female figures or of Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox. Her figures are often on display, splayed open across the canvas. The figure is unapologetic in her realness, but there is a great sorrow to be found in the details of the painting. Tension is derived from opposing small and large elements within the compositions. Issues of self-awareness are played with as single, smaller areas impose themselves upon the larger surrounding masses of each image. One example of this is clear in Saville's Hybrid (Figure2,) where the nakedness of a large woman ripples over the canvas, her hands gripping her own flesh. The point at which her left hand forcefully hangs onto and amplifies the fat of her stomach. This gesture is something that people do all the time in the mirror, but it becomes lude seen in the public realm.

Figure 2: Hybrid, Jenny Saville, 1997

Saville’s paintings are much larger than life size, adding to the generous quality of the flesh being depicted. The paint quality is strongly pigmented and gives a highly sensual impression of the surface of the skin as well as the mass of the body. She sometimes adds marks onto the body, such as white "target" rings. Plan (Figure 3) employs contour lines that are reminiscent of topography maps, giving an allusion to land masses. These rings also highlight Saville’s interest in cosmetic or reconstructive surgery. Something hidden or private is always being revealed in this work. While Saville’s bodies seem to be aware of what they are and they challenge the viewer’s gaze by sharing these private moments of reflection.

Figure 3: Plan, Jenny Saville, 1993

I am currently working on a piece that wants to capture similar moments of unease as Saville, but in a more subtly reflective way. Saville uses all kinds of bodies to investigate her interest in discomfort. I am choosing to use my own body because I want to express something specifically personal about myself. I am also using fleshiness as a way of communicating something visceral and something about anxiety. All of my works up until now have been self-portraits in one way or another, but I was always beating around the bush, trying to make my figures universal everymen. With the piece, Pressure (Figures 4-6,) the body is undeniably my own. This piece is still in the early stages of making, but I finally understand my own intent. I want to create tension and empathy by pinpointing a physical reaction to stress as a way of conveying an interior anxiety.

Figure 4: Pressure, photo inspiration, Avery Lucas, 2011

Figure 5: Pressure, drawing, Avery Lucas, 2011

Figure 6: Pressure, in process piece, Avery Lucas, 2011