Jenny Saville

For my second artist influence I wanted to find someone who would help me to take images where I am manipulating the model and setting them up to intentionally make them flawed before taking any photos. I have decided to use Jenny Saville as my second influence as her work really stood out to me, it is very striking to look at and makes you take a few steps back. Im not too sure what to make of her images as they are very intense but they do make you think and are interesting to look at. It looks obscene but in reality all her work is very beautiful, they show women in an overweight disturbed form and hold a gritty realism of the human body showing its perfections and imperfections. She is a 44 year old contemporary British painter who attended a BA course at the Glasgow School of Art, where most of her work is doing using oil. She is best known for her large scale, semi abstract, figurative paintings of nude women and transgender people with blemishes and disfigured faces. She is inspired by Pablo Picasso from the way he makes the figures feel they are actually there and in her paintings she tries to use painting realism creating photo-realistic paintings. Jenny likes to paint flesh as she says "it's only natural and it's beautiful to paint" and she sometimes includes her own boy in her images making sure that in her work the mass and physical bulk of the bodies fill the whole canvas looking barely contained by it. Her work is strongly pigmented and she creates a lot of mark making so your eyes moves around the flesh. In The Telegraph Jenny Saville says "I like the down and dirty side of things. I don't like things to be too polished. We've got fashion magazines for that" which suggests to me she would be a good contrast for my work compared to my other artist who uses tools to polish her images e.g. softening the face as Saville prefers to work naturally not trying to make every detail perfect.

How am I going to use Jenny Saville as an influence?
I am going to use Jenny Saville as an influence in my work to expand on the experimentation in my work but I will be focusing on creating flaws in the model by using props. Some images I looked at that have inspired me were Saville's paintings of larger nude women pushed up against glass. For my third shoot I plan too use members of my glass and getting them to push and mush up their faces against a glass scanner, to create a flaw as their faces aren't typically "perfection".