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."
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
-%5Bby-Jonathan-Yeo----from-exhibition-%27You%27re-Only-Young-Twice%27-2011%5D.jpg)
