Jenny Saville: Figurative Painter: b 1970

Jenny Saville: With the transvestite I was searching for a body that was between genders. I had explored that idea a little in Matrix. The idea of floating gender that is not fixed. The transvestite I worked with has a natural penis and false silicone breasts. Thirty or forty years ago this body couldn’t have existed and I was looking for a kind of contemporary architecture of the body. I wanted to paint a visual passage through gender — a sort of gender landscape. To scale from the penis, across a stomach to the breasts, and finally the head. I tried to make the lips and eyes be very seductive and use directional mark-making to move your eye around the flesh.

Simon Schama: So you really do manipulate what’s in front of you through the mark-making. It’s very striking — I’m looking at a photograph of your transvestite painting Passage and that passage that moves from the penis and balls to the belly is really about the anatomy of paint as it constructs the body.

I Love this Artist: Jenny Saville. Born in Cambridge England 1970. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1988 to 1992. Where she won the Craig award and Newberry medal. She won a scholarship to attend Cincinnati University for six months, where her fascination with the human form started to influence her work and Saville became interested in ‘the malls’. Where you saw lots of big women, big white flesh in shorts and tee-shirts. Depicting bodies that live outside the standard boundaries of attractiveness. Jenny moved to New York in 1994, where she was able to sit and observe the work of plastic surgeon Dr. Barry Martin Weintraub, she was allowed to take photos of the cosmetic surgery and liposuctions Dr. Weintraub performed in the theatre and gained a much better understanding of the human body. She is based in Sicily,Italy where she lives and works.

Jenny has established herself at a relatively young age. She is only 39, and her awards are ‘as long as her arm’. What I’m fascinated about this artist is not only is she true to her work, but, her representation of the human form with ‘warts ‘an all’. She has a genuine feel for the emotions on the faces and bodies she depicts, and also she paints with sombre colours in her limited palette. Black is featured in a lot of the works…(probably very dark blues and earth tones though). Jenny’s work  is represented on the new album (cover) of  the  Manic Street Preachers : Journey for plague lovers. Anyone interested in painting/drawing the human body will appreciate this talented woman.