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Category: Figure
Categories
Jenny Saville
Jenny Saville’s extremely tactile approach to painting women’s bodies, including her own, as a feminist critique of the way the female nude has been portrayed by the male art establishment has influenced my work in:
Assignment 2: The Human Condition 2: Flesh Here my focus is on the tactility of the body and ways in which different types of paper eg wrinkled blotting paper or tracing paper give different body textures. As well as meanings of different shapes.
Assignment 4: Abstract Self-Portrait (forthcoming)
Assignment 5: Memory? (forthcoming influenced by Aleppo)
“The way to change peoples’ attitudes is just to do it.”
“The struggle is part of making things work”
“Try to create a balance of being unbalanced”
References and resources
Gray, J., L. Nochlin, D. Sylvester and S. Schama (2005?). Jenny Saville. New York, Rizzoli.
Videos below
Key points for my printmaking:
- She works from photos and sketches, not painting from live models
- She plays with colours and composition in Photoshop
- Some of her paintings use text – following the example of feminist photographers like Jo Spence
- Mixing red and cyan on flesh creates tension because we do not know how to read it.
- Body as narrative of traces, a copperplate to be etched on – possibilities for over-printing
- Cut out the shape of a body and draw around and over it, then remove the mask. Keep going till you have something believable.
Videos
Jenny Saville discussing her painting process in 2018 in relation to the All Too Human exhibition at Tate Britain. This is a detailed discussion of her working process and evolution as an artist. She is interested in:
- Relationship between ‘how you are’ and ‘how you are seen’ eg in work on plastic surgery, people saw themselves as ill because they did not have the nose or breasts they wanted. They saw surgery as enabling them to be their ‘real self’.
- Paint as vocabulary and anatomy of paint traces from Pollock and de Kooning and document of the process of making
Earlier interview with Jenny Saville, focussing particularly on her recent work with its interest in time and traces, multiple figures and memory.
Aleppo
in exhibition ‘All Too Human’ pieta of people carrying bodies out from war zones. she used lots of photographs of a woman in burqa and lots of bodies.
“I have been working on Pietas [depictions of the Virgin Mary holding the dead body of Christ] quite a bit, and a series of children being carried.
“Over 20 years I have collecting images of babies being carried out of bombings, war situations, in Pieta poses knowing that one day I will do a piece, so this work has been a long time in the making.
“Aleppo is the first one I have released like it.
“I have done paintings linked to war before, but not linked to a political situation – I have endless images from the internet, or from newspapers, of babies that have been killed in these bombings, and when I finished the piece, I have two children myself, how long will it be before we as humans know not to do this?
“When I was titling it, I thought I would link it – for the first time – to what is going on in Syria.
Interview with Phil Miller for Scottish Sunday Herald
Music Video of more of her paintings
website: http://www.rikaderyckere.com/index.shtml
O’Donoghue was born in England but lived and worked for many years in County Kerry, Ireland. He graduated from Goldsmiths in 1982 and was Artist in Residence at the National Gallery, London from 1984-85.
His work is characterised by an engagement with the past. He uses figuration and abstraction to explore themes of human identity, memory, remembering and experience; and draws on history, mythology and personal records to create works which resonate with emotional intensity.
His printmaking includes very large carborundum plates of figures. He mixes fine grain carborundum, acrylic paste and black acrylic paint. He paints this on the plate with a thick brush, wiping off and reworking the image on the plate before it dries. This makes a complex, multi-layered texture. He often uses aluminium plates. Prints on thick Arches paper.
Hughie O’Donoghue installation at IMMA 2009
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The Measure of All Things Introduction
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‘The Road’
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Lost Histories
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‘Artists never completely control the meaning of their work’
Artist’s Laboratory Royal Academy 2005 review
The Measure of all Things Westminster Abbey 2014
Fauvism and Expressionism influenced:
Project 4.1 Portrait of a Friend
Fauvism is the name applied to the work produced from around 1905 to 1910 by a group of French artists led by Henri Matisse and André Derain, but including Georges Braque, Raoul Dufy, Georges Rouault, and Maurice de Vlaminck ). It was inspired by post-impressionism of Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat, and Paul Cézanne. The name les fauves (‘the wild beasts’) was coined by the critic Louis Vauxcelles when he saw the work of Henri Matisse and André Derain in an exhibition, the salon d’automne in Paris, in 1905.
Fauvism was characterised by:
- use of strong saturated colours as independent elements that projected a mood and established a structure for a painting without having to be true to the natural world. They were interested in scientific colour theories and often juxtaposed complementary colours to increase vibrancy.
- concern with strong and unified compositional balance of colour and shape elements to give an immediate strong and unified visual impression
- fierce dynamic brushwork juxtaposed with areas of flat colour
- all elements aimed to promote the artist’s individual expression, their direct experience of their subjects, emotional response to nature, and intuition were all more important than academic theory or elevated subject matter.
It was an important precursor to Expressionism, Cubism and future modes of abstraction.
Alexej Georgewitsch von Jawlensky (Russian: Алексей Георгиевич Явленский) (13 March 1864 – 15 March 1941) was a Russian expressionist painter active in Germany. He was a key member of the New Munich Artist’s Association (Neue Künstlervereinigung München), Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group and later the Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four).
website: http://www.alexej-von-jawlensky.com/
References
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- Connaissance des arts (2017). Andre Derain: 1904-1914 La Decennie Radicale. Paris: Connaissance des arts.
- Barnett, V. E., Ed. (2017). Alexei Jawlensky. Munich, London, New York: Prestel.
- Derain, A. (2017). Andre Derain. London and Paris: FAGE.
- Muller, J. E. (1967). Fauvism. London: Thames and Hudson.
Tate website: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/f/fauvism