Skin deep

In contrast to the work I’ve been doing I want to work bigger and looser and as this is not something I have really done before I thought I would re-visit Jenny saville in my research.  I love Jenny saville’s style of painting which has often been likened to Lucian Freud’s.  I’ve been looking again at her work which I really like, yet at the same time it would seem the complete opposite to what I have been trying to capture.  I mean you can’t get a more physical sense of body than Saville’s huge corpulent fleshy paintings, yet they still have appeal to me and I admire her and her work.  I think looking at other artist’s work gives an understanding of myself and my own work and leads towards a self awareness as I question, “why do I like it?”  All of my own work seems to incorporate the human figure and I think Jenny Saville tells it as it is, these are real bodies and if anything, exaggerated to be far from the images of bodies we are constantly bombarded with:  Photoshoped images of bodies or else bodies modified by surgery to conform to an unrealistic male ideal.  Images predominantly of women, that before these means of modification, were painted in an unrealistic idealistic way by male artists.  To me this side of society is the shallow superficial side that is taking humanity further away from what I believe to be more important values and true meanings to life, added to which the male idealised stereotypes have become very boring. I feel Jenny Saville is making quite a point about this.

I had to include this one it always makes me smile

In 1994 Saville returned to the US to observe operations at the clinic of a New York plastic surgeon. She then painted women with the surgeon's black markings on the contours of their bodies, so that they resembled living, breathing dartboards. This led in turn to Closed Contact, a series of photographs by the fashion photographer, Glen Luchford, of Saville's naked body pressed against Perspex and shot from below (Saville fattened herself up for this, the better that her flesh appear squashed and distorted). The subtext of this work is, of course, familiar now. But it wasn't at the time.
"When I made Plan [showing the lines drawn on a woman's body to designate where liposuction would be performed], I was forever explaining what liposuction was. It seemed so violent then. These days, I doubt there's anyone in the western world who doesn't know what liposuction is. Surgery was a minority sport; now that notion of hybridity is everywhere. There's almost a new race: the plastic surgery race."

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2012/jun/09/jenny-saville-painter-modern-bodies

The woman in Plan has target marks on her body, areas mapped out with lines, where she's about to have liposuction to get rid of her fat.
'A lot of women out there look and feel like that, made to fear their own excess, taken in by the cult of exercise, the great quest to be thin. The rhetoric used against obesity makes it sound far worse than alcohol or smoking, yet they can do you far more damage. 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 for ever.
'The history of art has been dominated by men, living in ivory towers, seeing women as sexual objects. I paint women as most women see themselves. I try to catch their identity, their skin, their hair, their heat, their leakiness. I do have this sense with female flesh that things are leaking out. A lot of our flesh is blue, like butcher's meat. In history, pubic hair has always been perfect, painted by men. In real life, it moves around, up your stomach, or down your legs.'

  (http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/interview-this-is-jenny-and-this-is-her-plan-men-paint-female-beauty-in-stereotypes-jenny-saville-paints-it-the-way-it-is-and-charles-saatchi-is-paying-her-to-keep-doing-it-1426296.html)

Incidentally another artist that decided to do some work that focused on cosmetic surgery is Jonathan Yeo who is know for his portraits of well know people.   in an exhibition called 'You're only young twice"he created a series of paintings done before, during and after operations.  He says about the subject of his work:
"It's a bit like doing heroin for the first time, I imagine. It's such a great result: you feel fantastic. This goes on for two years and then you start to look as you should, and people want another hit of it," he says. "For me, I think you lose more than you gain. I guess that's what I'm hinting at with some of this – but I'm trying not to be judgmental."

 "It started off from talking about it with a cosmetic surgeon friend who is a frustrated artist. From talking to more surgeons, I discovered they are all frustrated artists." Watching them work was riveting, he says. "They move like a craftsman making a musical instrument." And there were obvious parallels with his own work. "Three hundred years ago, the portrait painter's job was to take people who looked a bit strange and fit them into a mould. That's why all Gainsborough's portraits look pretty similar. Nowadays you don't have to do that: if anyone wants to look like Jordan, they can.

."http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/dec/05/jonathan-yeo-under-skin

 

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2011/12/are-plastic-surgeons-the-21st-centurys-portrait-artists.html